Is that right?
Posted: July 01, 2011, 12:24:56 AM
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.
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.