Is that right?

[Lester Curtis]

I just finished a rather tedious and time-consuming process of modifying my novel manuscript.

I was searching for every occurrence of the word "right" -- and sometimes deleting, but usually modifying most of them.

You see, my main character is an alien, from a species that is predominantly left-handed.

Think about it: we right-handers have suffused our languages -- most of them, I'm guessing -- with references to "right" being good, correct, proper -- the list goes on; check your thesaurus. But what would that mean for a left-dominant species? Would the term "all right" be taken to mean "all wrong"?

Think of it this way: how many ways do we use the word "left"? I count only four: a direction; a political leaning; a missed opportunity, or a remainder; and, a left-handed compliment. At least two of those have negative connotations. Our uses for "right" are all over the place.

Good vs evil . . . right vs wrong . . . we aren't even conscious of these things, but we're full of them. Dexter and sinister . . . go look at heraldry for that one (if the word "sinister" doesn't tell you enough).

Psychological studies have found that a person's hand dominance influences their way of thinking about the world around them -- an object that is closer to their dominant side is automatically preferred as better than an identical object closer to their non-dominant side.

The changes didn't make me happy in a lot of cases: I had to substitute words like "correct" and "proper" a lot, and it made the characters' speech seem a little stilted in places. One of the hardest to fix was "Are you all right?" Perfectly innocent, isn't it? I had to replace that with, "How do you feel?"

"All right" -- as in, "All right, we'll do that," became "Well enough" in most cases, and required a minor change in punctuation: "Well enough; we'll do that."

" . . . all right?" -- as in, "We'll do that, all right?" sometimes became "well enough," but not always -- sometimes it became "understood?" or a variation of it.

For the same reason, none of my aliens uses the term "okay". I also changed another little quote: "What do you make of her? Is she for real?" Ask yourself what those questions mean. And, the best I could do to replace it was, "She seemed a little rude . . . is she genuine?"

One of the things that got me going on this was my experience reading C. J. Cherryh's Chanur series. The main-character aliens (hani) all speak as though they were raised in post-1960's Kansas, and it partly ruined an otherwise marvelous experience for me. I want my readers to know they aren't listening to some modern-day North American human. Hell, I already feel bad enough about using everyday contractions: "can't", "didn't", etc., but the alternative is all but grotesque, and would likely cause a lot of readers to throw the manuscript against the nearest wall, yelling, "Nobody talks like that!" I'm pretty sure I would.

You can start to see the problems, I'm sure. The point I'm making here is that authenticity counts. And it's not as easy as you might think.

[Lester Curtis]

I've also had to be careful with terms of endearment with these aliens. Their tastes in food are different from ours, largely in the matter of sweetness, which they find repulsive, and their preference for a little more salt than we like (their seawater, and thus their blood, is a little more saline).

So, calling someone "Sugar", "Sweetie", Sweetheart", and possibly "Honey" would be insulting.

Thanks for the links, Hero.

[Lester Curtis]

(One of the worst examples that upset me was Martian Chronicles ... one of the most tightly existentialism-replaces-science stories... and a few years ago some school chose it as the honorary SF story... Sorry, but out of some EIGHTY YEARS of SF , they picked ... THAT? Not even Asmov's Robots??)

They obviously got overtaken by the emotional aspect of the work . . . Bradbury had good aim, and his target was never the intellect -- he hit about midway between the brain and the groin (no offense meant to anyone). I certainly understand your aggravation, though; there is an enormous wealth of sci-fi that actually deals with plausible science, and still entertains.

I agree with you about "Darmok," too . . . a real standout; almost entirely out of its realm. I do have a problem with that one, though; I have a hard time believing that effective language can be built entirely on metaphor. It's not hard to see the problem if you think about it for a little while . . . just take any emergency requiring quick response, and add the need for a long monolog to convey something like 'Run!'

[Lester Curtis]

Pretty fancy intellect you've got going there. This is some deep and insightful commentary!

Thank you, Mark -- I get hours of practice each day, searching my own work for plot holes and inconsistencies.