BookLust

What's in a Name? Apparently, a Lot.

Ever heard of the TeachingBooks Author Name Pronunciation Guide? No? Well, now ya have. It's this cool site where you can look up the names of well-known and not-so-well-known kids' authors and illustrators, and you get to hear a recording of the author and/or illustrator explaining how to pronounce their surname, and sometimes where their name originated. It's really fun! You can listen to people like Judy Blume, Meg Cabot, Robert Munsch, Ruth Ohi, and Mo Willems.

Oh, and yeah, I'm in there, too, talking about my last name Storms.

I really love that I have the opportunity to talk a little bit about how much I love my last name. Because you see, the name 'Storms' really does mean a lot to me. I wasn't born with that name. In my previous life, my name was Patricia Kew. And if that surname confuses you, I'll save you the trouble – you just pronounce it like the letter 'Q'. Ahhh, yes – can you just imagine all the wonderful comments and nicknames I've heard over the years with that last name? Q-Tip. Hi-Q. Q-T-Pie. On the Q-T. Suzie Q. Q-Ball. Q-Cumber. Trust me, I've heard them all. And when that annoying character 'Q' from Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared, Oy, what a pain. Oh, and how could I forget the Chinese owner of the Italian restaurant where I was a chef, who was apparently a James Bond freak, and upon hearing my last name declared to me, "I call you 'Q' from now on, just like 'Q' from Bond!" Being young, and well, being that person Patricia Kew who rarely spoke up for herself, I allowed myself to be called 'Q' by everyone who worked in that restaurant for over a year and a half. And I also allowed myself to be called 'Pat' back then, a name I loathe. Pat Kew. It sounds so silly to me now, so diminutive. (Mind you, I did get a kick out of my one high school friend's mother, who's first language was Estonian, and who got my name mixed up in a phone message, and said that someone named 'Kat Pew' had phoned. Kat Pew was one nickname that I actually enjoyed for a while).

Of course, I do feel guilty because I don't really like my maiden name. Sorry, Mom & Dad – I know it's the name I grew up with, but, when given the choice between Storms and Kew, well – it was a no-brainer. And really, names do matter, especially to writers. Writers agonize over the right names for all of their fictional characters, so why shouldn't a real person be affected by their own name? I have often told other people the story that when I married my husband Guy, and took his last name, it was as if I walked into a phone booth as Clark Kent and came out as Superman. Can a person really change, just by changing their name? Perhaps not overnight, but trust me, leaving Pat Kew and becoming Patricia Storms was monumental for me.

And do you think I get silly comments and silly nicknames now? Not on your life. What I hear these days is, "Wow. What an amazing name!" or, "What a great name for a writer!" And when my friends call me 'Storms'– I love it. Every time I hear that name, it's like the opposite of Kryptonite – I feed off of its strength. I love signing cheques and cards  and cartoons, and most especially, I love signing books with that way-cool name. Pat Kew was a nice girl, and I'll never forget her, but she never had the nerve to speak her mind. In fact, there were plenty of times when she just didn't have a clue of what to say. Patricia Storms really should filter herself more often, that's true, but at least she's never at a loss for words. What a difference a name makes.

And Sometimes Y

I must confess that I'm not always such a big fan of Russell Smith. I've given up reading his style column in the Globe and Mail because my eyes hurt so much from the excessive rolling that tends to occur whenever he says something ridiculous or pretentious. And I still can't get over that time he confessed in print that he pays $35 a pair for his underwear, which he has specially ordered from Europe. And the fact that his mother used to dress him in sailor suits as a kid, and that he loved it. I have to really control my urges to wanna just beat the crap outta him. But the pompous little aesthete is a very talented writer, who truly has a passionate love of words and language (though I do wish he would use his talent to write about something other than the rich trendy people living in Toronto, but that's another post).

And now Mr. Smith has harnessed his love of words and language into a delightful and eclectic radio program on CBC Radio One called And Sometimes Y. The program runs from June 27th to August 26th, and I've only managed to listen to one of his shows, but thankfully some of the conversations have been archived online, so you can listen to them at your leisure. The show that I managed to listen to was Episode 5, The Edge of Language. Here's an intro to that episode:

What is language for, and how does it work? Most of the time, we use it as a tool for communication, of course. Sometimes, we enjoy it for its poetry, its rhythms and rhymes etc. Most of us stop there, but a few daring explorers and experimenters try to break new ground beyond the conventional limits. Can these people offer us new and useful ideas about how we talk to each other? (Or not? Perhaps what they do is just weird...)

Russell interviewed Christian Bök, author of Eunoia, a unique book of poetry in which each chapter of the five-chapter book is focused on a specific vowel. Russell also talks to Darren Wershler-Henry, co-creator of The Apostrophe Engine, which is basically a computer-generated poetry-maker. Other interesting subjects include Christian Bök discussing his plans to translate a poem into a genetic sequence, and with the help of scientists actually create a living embodiment of a poem which would actually grow in a petrie dish. Fascinating!!

On each program Russell plays a game called Word Nerd with his guests, which is great fun to listen to. An example of this is The Robertson Davies Challenge: It’s based on a kind of lexicographical in-joke, which is that books written by Robertson Davies cannot be used as evidence that a word is still in fashion, because Davies made a habit of incorporating archaic words into his writing. The game is to find difficult words in a Robertson Davies novel, read the sentence, and get your opponent to guess what the author was on about. It's sort of reminiscent of the old BBC radio word quiz shows I used to listen to on CJRT when I was a teenager. Does anyone remember the show Just A Minute? It's still going on!

I'm going to try and listen to this Saturday's show, Men versus Women, which will be a study of the differences (or not) between the language of women and men. Here's Russell's take on the subject:

So novelists can easily pretend that they're someone else; that's what novelists do. But what if people are speaking in their own voices? Can we prove scientifically that they use the language differently? Well, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel published a study on male and female writing in hundreds of texts and found that there were measurable differences in style: women tend to use more pronouns and men use more noun-modifiers. But when the professors tried to turn this data in to a formula and made a computer program which attempted to read a text and determine whether its author was male or female, the computer turned out to be accurate about fifty per cent of the time - about as accurate as flipping a coin.

Oy! The Joys of a Yiddish Zinger!

On Mother's Day I bought my mom The New Joys of Yiddish. After getting over the disappointment of not receiving Eats, Shoots & Leaves, she cracked open the book and we both had a grand old time throwing yiddish insults at each other. Why is it that a Yiddish zinger is so much more effective than saying "you jerk"? Putz just has more chutzpa, I guess. Not to mention shmo, shmuck, shmendrik or shlemiel. But after you've used up all the insults, do check out the rest of the book, and discover the many other wonderful Yiddish words that have crept into the everyday North American lexicon. If something is corny or sentimental, haven't you ever used the word shmaltz? Or if you want to put an end to something, did you put the kibosh on it? Haven't you ever experienced a glitch in your computer? Who among us has not done a little shmoozing to get ahead in our career? So pick up the book already. Don't be a shlimazl.

Clockwork Obsession

When I was 17 I saw the movie "A Clockwork Orange". Perhaps it's because I first saw it as an impressionable teenager, but no other story has motivated me to think and explore the way Kubrick's film and Burgess' novel did. At first it was just teenage lust; Malcolm McDowell's arrogant blue eyes had me transfixed in the movie theatre. I did drawings of Alex in art class (that's one of them above); I was so intrigued by the character Alex that I even compared him to Richard III in a highschool English essay. In college I did a presentation in my Film Studies class about Kubrick's use of music, specifically the delicious synthesized music of Beethoven, made possible through the talents of Walter who eventually became Wendy Carlos. But over time I began to think more about the ideas in the film, which led me to read Burgess' novel of the same title, and that's when the true fixation began. "A Clockwork Orange" is about many things: violence, music, socialism, man's freedome to choose; but what I think ties a lot of these elements together is language, specifically Alex's slang speech called "Nadsat". Burgess was a linguist as well as a writer, and he was fascinated with language and it's relationship with society. The Nadsat language is a form of bastardized Russian, with smatterings of cockney slang. For example, the Russian word "horosho" which means good, becomes "horrowshow" in the Nadsat tongue. My understanding is that Burgess was trying to portray the influence of Socialism in British society at that time. This language so intrigued me that I did a paper on it in a University Linguistics class I was taking in my 20's. It was while in university that I learned more about the Whorfian Hypothesis, which states that language influences thought. Was Alex violent because his language was so violent, what with all those consonant clusters, plosives and fricatives? Just a thought. And how about the language of today: all those snappy-without-subtext soundbytes in the news and that strange shorthand form of communication called "Text messaging"? Will that mean that eventually the next generation will think only in short garbled soundbytes? That would be all horror without the show.