i barely remember last week

In honor of astolat and cesperanza's challenge to post once a day for a month....

Things I Resent Like a Lot:

English not stealing accent marks along with the actual word itself.

This is just because I found a fun app to practice my Spanish, and it keeps beeping up with a friendly reminder that I'm missing my accents, and I blame English for this, because really, what the hell.

Though to be fair here, we could have had them before the Conquest, or centuries having to listen to Norman French before English brutally fought it's way into the common parlance and ate and killed all language nearby (if you look at it as English having a massive, massive overeaction to being almost smushed by the Normans, a lot of its rules make sense) we rejected all things with accent marks, thus creating Fun With Phonics, where any given letter in the English alphabet can and will unexpectedly decide to change how it sounds just because when we stole it from someone else, those fancy accent marks, what are they for again?

This was really brought home to me at work a few weeks ago, where one of the testers said something--I don't even know what--and I stared at him blankly for a while, then asked what he just said, then had him write it. Reading it from a purely non-native speaker view, there was no possible way to connect the written word with it's correct (English) pronunciation even by accident. It's one of the few--very few--benefits of being ages five through now living life text based; half the words I use I couldn't pronounce correctly, but luckily, my online social group is of the same type and they can't either, so it evens out.

When I pronounced it for him (to give some context, it's a word that shows up specifically in testing jargon, so I wouldn't have remembered it past my SATs if I wasn't a tester), we looked at each other and that piece of paper with probably the same familiar expression anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal with English gets probably once a day: English, why are you like this? To cheer us both up, he introduced me to Ram Bahadur Bomjon, who he swears up and down he totally saw meditating once and interpreted bits of youtube for me, which I assume was to console me for having to be a native speaker of a language that's clinically insane. He's nice like that.

But I digress. This is what makes it hard; I know why they are there, but for the life of me I can't remember them. They're painfully useful, they tell me how to pronounce the word correctly, but it's like I don't even see them until the program reminds me cheerily Careful of your accent marks and I think of English and hate a little inside.

About Why I'm Interested in Trying This Challenge:

Habit is powerful, and one of the things I did first when I started at diaryland was make a deliberate effort to make an entry every day to force the habit, and for the last eighteen months, I spend at least three out of four days writing fic, because for a long time I stopped hearing the things I would later write. I've talked about this before, and last year, before my father died, I started to write again, and it was a nightmare, not to start, but the effort it took not to stop when I thought the story did.

Here's the stupidest thing I never considered; the problem might not be in lack of inspiration but the loss of the habit of expression. To write what I think is to express a thought, and that tends to lead to more of them, not less. Thoughts breed in captivity poorly, but they thrive when given form and sent into the world to be fruitful and multiply. It might help, I thought, staring at MSDoc's mocking blank screen, to consider this an exercise in free range breeding. Which is not a sentence I ever thought I would not only write, but rather kind of like. Seven hundred thousand and chnage words later (including cut sections), I can state with some certainty that this seems to have worked pretty well, and sometimes I sit down and all at once, from nowhere, there's an entirely new idea, newborn and very loud, waiting impatiently for my immediate attention, and then I notice it's not one, it's an entire litter of them, all brand new and loud and demanding my attention until the words I write give them their very own form.

That's what you can do with the power of a habit.

In a lot of ways, for a lot of people in fandom, including me, to write in public, be it fiction or not, is something we've been doing for so long that we don't think, don't remember, don't entirely comprehend the memory of the first time we did it, on a messageboard, a mailing list, a journal, newsgroup; it was so hard, even to write a sentence, a single word and send it into the nameless, faceless vastness of the internet, because a lifetime of training had told us if we had nothing to say, be quiet, what makes you think what you have to say is important, no one cares what you think. To presume to write and post on the web where it felt as if the entire world was watching and judging your words to see if they were important enough for attention wasn't easy, but easy stopped applying altogether, since the world's judgement of what qualified as important had nothing to do with writing a single word.

Cat macros, what you had for breakfast, and that weird growth on your toenail are important; the macros were cute, breakfast meant you were less grouchy at work, and hey, that doctor you saw was kind of hot, it's the life you live and by definition that makes it the most important thing you will ever do, being the medium by which you do anything at all. Human memory is volatile, we lose so much of our lives to background beyond recall and our lifespan is approaching the century mark, and in that time, we will be many different people, dozens, sometimes a couple of different ones every day, but I won't remember it the same, memory is volatile, but when I read my journal, I get to meet every woman I've ever been again. She was important, all of them were; they made me. And years from now, when I read this, I'll read this entry, by the woman I am now and I won't be then, and I'll be able to remember her. My mind is a container for all the people I've been, the people I am, and the people I could one day be; its a world entire in there, and that's the world who judges what is important enough to write.

Survey says; everything's important, habit is good, and the idea for the latter half of this entry began newborn and squalling with these words as I wrote them: Habit is powerful. Three words by the clock one hour ago, when I thought of astolat's challenge after answering a comment she made in my journal, when I started this entry and had no idea what to write except that app I just downloaded, and God, those accent marks, that thing at work, hey, about that challenge, I should mention it, Habit is powerful and just think, an hour ago, an hour ago, I stared at a blank entry page and had no idea what to write.

The experiment in free range breeding is going very, very well, thanks for asking.

Comments

[inoru_no_hoshi]

On the subject of English being rather free with other languages, I've had this quote saved for years: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -James D. Nicoll

It's hilarious both because of the phrasing, and because it's so very true. I know so many words I can spell (generally correctly) but can't pronounce correctly for the life of me. xD It's a good thing that I, too, am 95% text-based communication! xDD

The only long-lasting habits I have are ones I more or less started accidentally - i.e., reading all the fic - so deliberately starting one is... hard. I accidentally-on-purpose started a habit of always doing NaNoWriMo, win or fail (mostly fail), so... I guess that counts? xD But my point is, I'm glad you're able to train yourself into a habit! :D

[jesse_the_k]

Lovely & inspiring.

[cesperanza]

+1000000000 to this post. Habit is everything! And our voices are everything - getting used to expressing ourselves in writing routinely.

[grammarwoman]

I'm trying to write down my account of last weekend, attending both Vividcon and the Chicago Stargate con. Evidently I broke some sort of dam loose, as it took 1000 words just to get down the events of Thursday, and another 1200 to detail the making of my TARDIS dress for Club Vivid.

So yes, I full appreciate and sympathize with breeding ideas; they're acting like hydras in my posts. :)

[forestgreen]

I've been reading astolat and cesperanza's daily posts and it's been great. It got me thinking about the time when I used to post daily, too. And then thinking, well, I'm no there yet.

What you said about habit being powerful is so true. I might need to reconquer the long forgotten habit of journaling.

P.S. As a Spanish native speaker, I can guarantee you that whatever pain you feel about the accents, it doesn't compare to the ultimate craziness that is trying to pronounce English right without the help of all that early years of childhood indoctrination. Spanish feels like such a straightforward language in comparison: write it like this -- pronounce it like this. Period. No backstabbing or surprise letters that get ignored or changed all of a sudden. And yet, I still like English's insanity.

[seperis]

It's very straightforward. I'm zipping through the basic levels literally to clean up my grammar, and I haven't lost much, but JESUS THE ACCENTS I KEEP FORGETTING. I know where they go and they're wonderful, but every time, I forget them entirely.

[truelove]

This is honestly really weird to me, I mean -- accents boggle me in English becuase I have no idea what to do with them. But in Spanish, I nail them instinctively. If I let myself think about? Ahaha, no effing clue, I will stare at you blankly if you ask me to explain what the accent mark tells you about pronouncing the word. But if I just look at it and say the word? I nail it.

Which, I didn't start learning Spanish pronunciation until an adult so I honestly have no explanation for this.

[nagasvoice]

I like this essay on encouraging more writing, of whatever sort. I get out of the habit and run silent sometimes, and I start feeling frustrated with it after awhile because I stop communicating in real life in the longer phases too. I used to think it was just swinging through different pursuits--when I'm working on a fishtank or a garden I tend not to be resting in that section of my brain where words pop up, but sometimes I'm burned out or discouraged on writing, and doing other things will start provoking new images and connections, or interests in different stories or fandoms. I'll come back and find great new stories have been posted, for example.

[norah]

Cat macros, what you had for breakfast, and that weird growth on your toenail are important; the macros were cute, breakfast meant you were less grouchy at work, and hey, that doctor you saw was kind of hot, it's the life you live and by definition that makes it the most important thing you will ever do, being the medium by which you do anything at all. Human memory is volatile, we lose so much of our lives to background beyond recall and our lifespan is approaching the century mark, and in that time, we will be many different people, dozens, sometimes a couple of different ones every day, but I won't remember it the same, memory is volatile, but when I read my journal, I get to meet every woman I've ever been again. She was important, all of them were; they made me. And years from now, when I read this, I'll read this entry, by the woman I am now and I won't be then, and I'll be able to remember her. My mind is a container for all the people I've been, the people I am, and the people I could one day be; its a world entire in there, and that's the world who judges what is important enough to write.

YES. THIS. <3

[everbright]

I reallly have to pick up French again sometime. Languages expand the mind!

Writing things almost always spawns more words than you think it will, which is sometime a problem when you start late at night. :D