Before the Internet Search by Saralyn Richard

/in , , , , /by

When I was a junior in college, as an English major, I was required to take a course in John Milton. Taught by a professor who had made Milton  his life’s work and who strove to model himself after the legendary poet, the course had the reputation for being the hardest one on campus. I believed it at the end of the first session of class, when Professor Boyette gave us more than fifty topics to research at the library for homework.

The topics were as pedestrian as the Elizabethan world order, the cycle of sin and redemption, Christian  allegory, Dante’s circles of hell, and many others I can’t recall. If the assignment were made today, the homework could be done in an hour or so, courtesy of the Internet, but then we had to trek to the library and find reference books, drag them to the carrels, read about the topic, take notes….you may remember those days, not so fondly.

Image by alison updyke at Pixabay

            The research paid off, back then, and the Milton course became my most intellectually challenging and charming—a favorite. In fact, I chose to write and defend an honors thesis on Milton as a capstone course my senior year.

Not surprisingly, then, when I had an opportunity to visit England the summer after graduation, I became fixated on finding things that related to Milton. I saw his bust, but no grave, at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. I saw his famous mulberry tree on campus at Cambridge University. I asked around and nobody seemed to know where Milton was buried.

That shocked me. One of the most famous Renaissance poets in the world, and I couldn’t find out where he’d been interred. The British are essentially friendly to tourists, and almost everyone I asked had a theory. And every theory sent me on a wild goose chase all over London.

In the end, I had to leave England before finding out the truth. A few years later, my in-laws went to England. They asked me what I would like them to bring back for me, and I replied, “The location of John Milton’s grave.”

Sure enough, when they returned, they had brochures and pictures of themselves next to Milton’s grave, which is in the churchyard of St. Giles without the Cripplegate, Milton’s father had been the pastor of that church. Thus, a three-year treasure hunt came to a successful end, and I had my destination. (I was able to visit, myself, a few years after that.)

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

            Today, just for kicks, I consulted findagrave.com and asked for John Milton’s gravesite. This is what it gave me in a matter of seconds:

John Milton Famous memorial

Birth

9 Dec 1608

Bread Street, City of London, Greater London, England

Death

8 Nov 1674 (aged 65)

London, City of London, Greater London, England

Burial

St. Giles Cripplegate Churchyard

London, City of London, Greater London, EnglandShow MapGPS-Latitude: 51.5187642, Longitude: -0.0938894

            Oh, the power of the Internet, and how it’s changed our lives! One last example—I’m writing the historical mystery I started researching at the library when I was fifteen years old. The aftermath of the Great Storm of 1900 is a big part of the setting, and I had extensive notes taken from primary sources over a ten-year period. For various reasons, I was unable to complete that novel until now, and ta-da! The Internet is such a boon to the story-telling. For example, I can find out how many kopecks to a ruble or what a person could buy with five dollars in 1903 in a New York Galveston minute!

The experience makes me wonder—all the time—what we would do if we lost the Internet, the ability to ask Siri or Alexa, or even the ability to photograph objects for later use.

How about you? Do you have a favorite pre-Internet search to share? I’d love to hear about it.

 

 

Saralyn Richard is the author of The Detective Parrott mystery series, The Quinn McFarland mystery series, A Murder of Principal, and the children’s book, Naughty Nana. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter for contests, prizes, surveys, and other fun content at https://saralynrichard.com.

IYKYK (If You Know You Know)

/in , , /by

As authors, the written word is our trade. We strive for authenticity in the way characters talk, the language they use, and the methods used to communicate. Dialog differentiates the speakers, but how to make a teenager sound like, well, a teenager rather than their grandparents? A judicious use of slang can establish a character’s identity, often revealing their social status and education.

What is slang anyway and why does it work? The dictionary defines slang as: “a language peculiar to a particular group, an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed words, and extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech.”

Consider these two dialog snippets from Ready Player One, a 2011 science fiction novel by Ernest Cline:

Example 1:

“Great outfit, slick,” he said. “Where did you snag the sweet threads?”

Example 2:

“…what do you have to do to get your hands on all this moolah? Well, hold your horses, kids.”

Without much thought, you can tell the first is from a young person (actually an avatar) by the idioms and slang used. Likewise, you know right away the speaker in Example 2 is a much older person by the use of ‘moolah’ and ‘hold your horses’ — expressions common in past decades.

Historically, spoken language evolves faster than its formal written counterpart. The rise of the internet, social media, and texting has birthed a new language that is written, full of a multitude of unpronounceable expressions.

Which brings me to my conundrum. My characters are often on cellphones, texting each other. How should I use slang to individualize their texts? I’m not even clear on how to represent this dialog. In different fonts? Bolded? Indented? And how do you tag the different speakers in a back-and-forth conversation? My go-to edition of the Chicago Manual of Style has deserted me on this topic, making no formal recommendation. And, shudder, what slang do my characters use when texting?

Internet slang is a non-standard language used to communicate using symbols (emojis) and shorthand acronyms on gaming platforms, phones, chat groups, and social media. Examples most of us know are IYKYK (if you know you know), LOL (laughing out loud), and LMK (let me know). Others are more specialized to particular groups. Try GG (good game) for gamers, API (application programming interface) for software developers, or DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) for fitness groups.

Others are more arcane. How about the sarcastic GPOY (gratuitous pictures of yourself) or 403 (deny access to). My favorite example is PWNED (owned). This linguistic abomination apocryphally arose from a game developer’s misspelling of ‘owned’. I leave the pronunciation to your imagination.

Faster than the spoken language, internet slang is evolving and changing almost daily. Herein lies one of the dangers. The shorthand slang idioms used on one social media platform, say Reddit, differ from those in common usage on X or BlueSky.

That’s not to say that some of these acronyms haven’t wormed their way into everyday English, such as FOMO (fear of missing out). English, the opportunistic and omnivorous language it is, has adopted SNAFU, AWOL, and MIA among others. However, there is no predicting which acronyms will appear in the next edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language or be relegated to the dustbin of archaic cliches. Using what is in favor today may, at best, only sound dated or most likely be cringe-worthy tomorrow.

You might ask why have my characters text at all. A phone call or F2F (face to face) would avoid these problems. First, today everyone is glued to their phones, even conversing over texts while at the same dinner table. Second, I use texting as a technique to create anticipation or suspense. Unlike a phone call or a conversation, a response to a text can be delayed, maybe not even seen for a conveniently inconvenient period of time. Finally, a character can carry on a text conversation while witnessing or participating in exciting action.

So, where does that leave my characters? For now, their texts will be pronounceable. They will contain punctuation. I will treat internet slang as a foreign language, using an expression only if the meaning is clear from the context. What do you think?

IIGHT (alright, okay?)