Write what you know, know what you write

There is an old adage that good writing must be about what you know. It’s been around so long it’s virtually a cliché.

But it’s also true. I posted last week about the methods Ernest Hemingway used to convey authenticity through writing style.  But that wasn’t the only way he gave his work the ‘real feel’. He also wrote about what he knew.

“It’s only a model”. “Shhh!”‘ Photo copyright (c) Matthew Wright 2004, 2012

That’s not to say that authors have to write of exact experiences. Some do – I’m thinking Jack Kerouac. But more usually, experience informs the writing – it becomes abstracted, part of the tapestry. And because that underlying experience is real, it gives the writing a sense of authenticity.

Hemingway was an adventurer, and his inspiration was the hard edge of the human condition. One of his key shaping experiences was the collision between his First World War and his personality – a moment of frisson. He served with the ambulance corps in Italy in 1918, and from that emerged Farewell To Arms. His drive to find ‘real’, to nail the harshness of the human condition, was pushed by that war. Life in post-war Paris lent depth. So did time in Spain.

Hemingway was not alone. A lot of my professional historical work has gone into showing how the First World War changed people – one of my books on the New Zealand experience is being used as a university text, I believe. The war gave the twentieth century its social and political direction – threw a lot of trends into fast-forward. An awful lot of literature came out of the same cauldron.

Ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles on the Somme, probably 1 July 1916. Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

One of the best examples was  J. R.R. Tolkien. Middle Earth – and The Lord Of The Rings – was written from life experience on many levels. His life as a scholar and philologist shows. And he also wrote from his First World War and his experience with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers.

I’ve posted before about how the descriptions Tolkien gave of places such as Mordor, of orc talk and battles, were riffs on the Western Front. The Dead Marshes were an exact description of the Ypres trench evironment, where men fought in stinking swamps amidst corpses.

Tolkien also used that experience conceptually. It emerged, for instance, in his repeated motif of extended life – those without long life were jealous of those whose lives flowed into the future. This was a reflection of front-line soldier attitudes, whose own lives might be measured in seconds, minutes or hours. To them, normal lifespan was an endless future. Tolkien, in short, infused his experiences into his ideas. Even readers who had not lived through the First World War could sense the authenticity. That is one of many reasons why Tolkien’s work struck such a chord.

Experience, then, can become a powerful way of creating depth and reality. Sometimes it can even happen without authors doing it consciously.

Do you find your experiences working their way into your writing?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Remembering a century of wars

It’s Anzac Day in New Zealand – memorial day, A day when – with Australia – we remember the dead of all our wars. In a way it is a peculiar choice. Britain remembers their dead on 11 November – the anniversary of the Armistice in 1918. We remember ours on the day our forces stormed ashore on the coasts of Gallipoli, opening a disastrous eight-month campaign.

The reasons are entwined in the mythology of New Zealand’s nationalism. After the campaign ended in December 1915, grieving New Zealanders turned it into a triumph of national identity – a moment when we fought for our beloved Empire. It was an astonishing turn-around. The first celebrations of 1916 turned into tradition; afterwards, the day became more rallying point for military remembrance than Armistice Day. And so Anzac Day was born.

It has evolved since, shaped by the wars New Zealand got involved with through the twentieth century. As part of the British Empire, New Zealanders fought alongside others from Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and allies such as the United States, from the Arctic ocean to the deserts of Africa, from the Pacific islands to the jungles of Borneo. Later, Kiwi forces were sent on peace-keeping duties to Ethiopia, the Balkans, Sinai and Timor among others. Today, there are Kiwi soldiers in Afghanistan.

More than half of New Zealand’s military casualties of all time occurred on the Western Front of 1916-18 – the soul-destroying conflict that defined the First World War. I wrote about that in my book Shattered Glory: The New Zealand Experience at Gallipoli and the Western Front (Penguin 2010).

New Zealanders today would not be here were it not for the sacrifices of these brave men in 1914-18, and particularly 1939-45, a war that, for all its tragedy, had to be fought as the only way of saving the world from a new dark age. We will remember them.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

OMG – it’s not new at all. OMG!

Last Saturday I posted an entry on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. With a puzzler of my own at the end. Who first used the abbreviation “OMG”?

The answer is this man: Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher (1840-1920), the volcanic, megalomaniac, temperamental naval officer who – as First Sea Lord – reformed the Royal Navy between 1904 and 1910. They didn’t call it ‘the fleet that Jack built’ for nothing.

Fisher’s role as inventor of the term was recently revealed in the third edition Oxford English Dictionary. Not too astonishing for anyone familiar with Fisher. And in any case, the OED is not to be dissed; it is the English gold standard for, with long-standing and thoroughly deserved repute for the calibre and quality of its scholarship. J. R. R. Tolkien was one of their writers, back in 1919-20.

So while in the linguistic sense I suspect it’s likely that “OMG” has been invented and re-invented many times in recent colloquial usage, there can be little doubt about Fisher’s role as original creator. The OED traced it to a letter he wrote to Winston Churchill in 1917, which he finished with a typical Fisherian explosion: ”O.M.G. (‘Oh! My God!) – Shower it on the Admiralty!!”

As it happens – partly thanks to interest fired up by an honours dissertation I wrote on this man (in another century, sigh) – I own the book where that letter was first published in 1919, Fisher’s autobiography Memories. The text is also available online.

First use of OMG! Part of p78 from Fisher’s ‘Memories’ (Hodder & Stoughton, 1919).

Fisher’s writing was littered with abbreviations, multiple underlinings, Biblical references, multiple exclamation marks and red ink. He was a career navy man, deeply religious, ambitious, unforgiving, ruthless, prone to pursue vendettas beyond any point of reason. He was addicted to waltzing. He even believed he was a second Nelson, to the point of pursuing an affair with his own ‘Lady Hamilton’. But he was also a megalomaniac, and in April 1915, finally managed to bring the British government down over the Gallipoli crisis.

That also destroyed his own career, but that did not stop him being appointed, in 1916-17, to lead the committee that invented sonar, then known by its British acronym ASDIC.

His main legacy, however, remains his 1904-05 naval reform programme which set the Royal Navy up for the twentieth century – and allowed it to help Britain win the First World War. This included introducing the all-big-gun battleship and battlecruiser in 1905, committee projects Fisher led which extended existing naval trends. Much of the repute of the type flowed from the way Fisher sold the new vessels to the media – particularly HMS Dreadnought which, he insisted, had been built in just 366 days. This was typical Fisherian theatrics. Her actual construction time was fifteen months, still an astonishing achievement.

So – whenever you use ‘OMG’ or its modern form ‘ZOMG’, don’t forget Jack Fisher – the man who gave it to us.

And the link to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? In 2006, Holy Blood – Holy Grail authors Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln (whose names became that of Brown’s villain “Leigh Teabing”) sued Random House and Brown for copyright infringement. Not from copied words, but because the ‘central theme’ had been allegedly lifted from them. They lost. Justice Peter Smith ruled that there had been no breach – for reasons summarised here. Amidst the judgement document he embedded a code of his own, apparently for amusement. It did not take long for a Guardian journalist to decode. Here’s an enthusiast analysis of the mechanism. And it read: ‘Smithy Code. Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought.” A very explicit reference to the Admiral, of whom Smith was apparently a fan.

As, indeed, am I. ZOMG!

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

31 May is Jutland Day!

Does anybody remember the Battle of Jutland? The one and only clash of dreadnoughts in the First World War, 31 May 1916. And the last major sea battle controlled via flag signals.

Today is the 95th anniversary. I covered the drama in my book Blue Water Kiwis, a decade ago, but it deserves fresh mention. It seems to me, as a writer and historian, that certain historical truths have been lost amidst endless arguments about the tactics.

The strategic reality is clear enough. Admiral Sir John Jellicoe did not have to destroy the German High Seas Fleet. All he had to do was remain in command of the North Sea – and on 1 June, the only fleet at sea was his one. That strategic victory flowed from Jellicoe’s tactical decisions; he twice decisively out-manoeuvered the Germans, forcing Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer to turn away in confusion before his leading ships were destroyed, then put his dreadnoughts between the Germans and their base. The fact that the Germans still scuttled home, via a different route, was a consequence of British intelligence failures – the Admiralty’s ‘Room 40′ picked up where the Germans were going from wireless intercepts, but they didn’t tell Jellicoe.

Afterwards, the fact that Jutland was a crushing strategic defeat for Germany was lost amidst a good deal of British soul-searching. The problem was that although the Germans had not affected British sea superiority, the tally of ships lost was in the German favour. There was also a huge popular expectation in Britain that the clash of fleets should be a ‘second Trafalgar’ in which the losing side was annihilated. Jellicoe was castigated for his apparent caution in not pursuing the German fleet as it fled into the misty darkness. Indeed, the argument blighted his subsequent career and was still being fought out, by proxy, into the 1920s. Jellicoe himself was too gentlemanly to be closely involved; I’ve got his autobiography in my collection, along with Scheer’s – and some of the key books by Reginald Bacon and others, arguing the to-and-fro polemic. It all makes for interesting historical reading.

Yet – to run a counterfactual – had he turned towards the desperate German torpedo attack at dusk on 31 May, and lost half a dozen dreadnoughts, what then?

One other point stands out. The four largest British ships that went down – three battlecruisers and an armoured cruiser – were not battered into submission; they disappeared in cataclysmic explosions after just a few hits. That wasn’t expected – as Vice-Admiral David Beatty put it, ‘there’s something wrong with our bloody ships today’. From an engineering perspective the reasons were different – complex machinery always breaks in complex ways, and analysis has shown that thin armour was only one factor in a human mix that included faulty munitions-handling procedures, faulty anti-flash precautions - and, perhaps worst of all, munitions storage outside the magazines. That last was a consequence of early war experience in which the British ‘hail of fire’ approach to engagements quickly depleted the designed 80-round-per-gun capacity of the magazines.

It is here that we see the real historical impact of Jutland. Ships riven by magazine explosion sank in two or three minutes;and the crews of 800-1200 had no chance to escape, going down to a terrible death as the compartments around them filled. We know their names. Here are the casualty lists of HMS Invincible, HMS Indefatigable, HMS Queen Mary and HMS Defence. A handful only survived – often those in the spotting tops. It was an appalling casualty rate, comparable with that of a ‘push’ on the Western Front. And it is for that reason that we need to remember the battle. The lethality of the First World War was not just restricted to land battles.

Tomorrow, of course, it’s the Glorious First of June. But that, as they say, is another story.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

Really, it’s one giant book

A while back someone I knew from the UK visited a bookstore in Wellington and – as a stranger – asked the book-store owner what they thought of me. He was told I was ‘controversial’ because I wrote on so many ‘different’ topics.

I disagree, of course, and with good reason. But I can see how the impression emerges. A lot stems from the fact that the total skill-set of authors is often confused with their subject matter of their last book. I wrote a book on aircraft; that made me an ‘aircraft historian’. I wrote another on the battle for Crete. That made me a ‘military historian’. I wrote a fair number on Hawke’s Bay, which variously made me a ‘local’, ‘Napier’ or ‘Havelock North’ historian.

The supposition, apparently, is that it is only possible to be ‘expert’ on one topic, and that expertise is defined by the ability to accumulate data.

Such opinion, of course, misses the point of my work. In fact I am only doing the one thing, and it is the topic I have been focussing on my whole working life. History-as-analysis – meaning, ultimately, finding ways of understanding the human condition - is a skill of its own. So is writing, which is the mechanism for expressing it. Although I tailor books to specific commissions and markets, the techniques required for each – including the research and writing skills - are identical. As is the interpretation I present; in every book this has been an aspect of the wider historical interpretation I’ve developed to explain New Zealand’s past – and hence, its present. I laid the whole of it out a few years back in my general history of New Zealand.

Each book explores aspects of my general theme, expanding, developing – even, at times, re-thinking. Consider Old South, which explored the collision between idealism and reality that shaped the settler period.  Shattered Glory picked up that theme where Old South left off – where New Zealand society was wallowing amid the wreckage of those settler-age dreams, and explored how they were then revived into social militarism. Which was then then broken in the First World War. It was a stand-alone book – but it could also be read straight after Old South and was a conceptual sequel.

Not, I suspect, that anybody particularly ‘got’ it.  Never mind. I further explored New Zealand’s First World War mind set in a couple of other books, Western Front and New Zealand’s Military Heroism.  The human place New Zealand was in at the end of the First World War is covered in my book Quake – Hawke’s Bay 1931. And in my various histories of our part in the Second World War, I also looked at how that struggle further transformed New Zealand’s culture. 

I’ve argued that what came afterwards, into the 1950s and 1960s, was something of a golden age for New Zealand in terms of the expectations people had at that time, although the gold was coloured rather dull brown. An age of boring certitude and safety after two generations of upheaval, a desire for the good life without too much effort – reflected in our mania for consumer goods – which I explored in my transport and several of my regional histories.

 Along the way I’ve detailed elite settler society, which I covered in Hawke’s Bay – The History of a Province; bohemianism, which featured in Havelock North – The History of a Village; and race-relations, which I covered in Two Peoples, One Land.

And I’ve looked at how these social developments have interacted with our physical world, via my engineering histories. All these tie closely in to the main settler-age interpretation presented in my general history and in Old South.

So that, in a nutshell, is how I see my books; different aspects of a single approach, pursued now over more than 25 years, exploring the deeper  human condition.  To this extent everything might be looked on as another instalment in a single over-arching interpretation that, so far, approaches two million words.

Literary criticism as aphorism

‘The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers,’ W. H. Auden once declared with excruciating period tones, ‘are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident’.

I quite often find myself reading a letter from a reader – or a public review – from someone who manifestly hasn’t twigged as to what I was doing in a particular book.

Just the other day I discovered a review of Shattered Glory on a British enthusiasts website – the Great War Forum. The reviewer admitted he had started the book not expecting to like it. As author I have to wonder what chance that pre-bias actually gives me. Anyhow, he was pleasantly surprised, but felt that really the book was directed for a general audience.

Well quite, that’s what I said the book was for in the introduction – it was explicitly commissioned as such by the publishers. It wasn’t an academic techno-military text intended to satisfy enthusiasts. I’d like to write one, but the New Zealand market is too small. In any case, as I explained in my introduction, I’d already written a technical tome on the Western Front – which is, I believe, being used as a university text. I didn’t want to write another one.

For me it’s an archetypal problem. History is all about theme and argument. In the case of that book, the theme (as the title subtly hints) was about the shattering of New Zealand’s pre-war ideals of glory, and to tell that tale I had to lay out the social world of New Zealand pre-war, then show what happened to it during the two main campaigns, then show what happened afterwards. An integrated argument, 120,000 words of it, for which the war story was simply the backdrop to the human and psychological issues I was tackling. It was not a military narrative, and not to be mistaken for one. I laid it all out explicitly in the introduction so there could be no mistake.

But it seems there is no way of second-guessing the interests of readers. And I certainly understand that; reading is an exercise in emotional and intellectual satisfaction. 

So why not just write narratives? Peter Munz, a former student of Karl Popper, taught me at post-graduate level and told me that hardly anybody knew how to sustain an argument over the length of a book. Munz never explained his technique. But the idea appealed to me - and I worked out how it was done. I’ll blog about that another time. And I’ve applied that to the underlying mechanisms of my books. That includes books intended for general audiences and pitched accordingly. But that doesn’t reduce the analysis or concepts behind them – including my developments of Munz’s notions of reason as a way to handle Popper’s ideas about falsifiability and relativism in analysis.

Why? It’s a lot of work, maybe a lot of extra work. But what interests me is the nature of the human condition, in its various forms and concepts. War brings that out in sharp relief, but there are other aspects to the human experience too. All my books have been geared around that idea, one way or another.

Shattered Glory is merely the latest. Years ago, I consciously structured Italian Odyssey, in the literary sense, as a Shakespearean drama.  The New Zealand experience there fitted (boy, did it fit!). My war biography of Sir Bernard Freyberg was an exploration of the dissonance between perceptions of a character and their reality - of the way that people who think in over-arching concepts or images, as Freyberg very obviously did, are often misconstrued or underestimated by those who lack such gifts. 

My book on the 1931 quake. The quake seismograph trace was used as a varnish overlay - not visible on this scan, alas.

Themes. Consistent arguments across books. Concepts. They’re all there. Hey, that’s what these books are about. An effort to understand, to explore the human condition, states of mind, as revealed by the paths of history.

It works outside war too; my book Quake Hawke’s Bay 1931 was a conscious effort to explore the human response to a 7.8 magnitude quake that killed 258 and injured maybe 3000 more.  I found behaviour that encapsulated an inter-war society shaped by the First World War – a generation who had already suffered the privations of the damned. And when they saw death and disaster again, they knew what to do. They rose to the moment. Incredibly. Fantastically. Lives were saved, suffering reduced, because of these people.

My feedback? I got a letter ‘correcting’ me personally for being in error, because my correspondent’s father hadn’t suffered a leg injury as my quote-from-documentary-source stated. It was his knee.

Sigh. People just don’t get it. Do they.

Germany’s last war penance, and it’s not Nazi

Today Germany made its last reparation payment for the First World War – the hit-you-in-the-pocket punishment for the destruction caused across France and Belgium by the armies of Von Falkenhayn, von Moltke and all the others from August 1914 until the armistice four and a half years later.

It’s taken a while. The guns fell silent on a cold November morning 92 years ago – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. Hostilities, officially, finished seven months later when Germany signed the peace treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Here's the picture I took standing outside the Hall of Mirrors (and along a bit).

I would post a photo of that hall, but when I was there they were ripping up the parquet flooring. Essential maintenance under the feet of 3 million visitors a year.

All of which lends intensity to the point – well known by historians but, alas, usually squashed out of most people at school – that history is alive. It’s exciting. And it tells us, usually, why the world is the way it is today. As a writer, I find that fascinating.

That last payment also seems somehow out of its time. Despite the idiot performances of various neo-Nazis,  there can be no question that in general Germany has thoroughly expiated for the crimes of its administration in 1914-18, certainly in 1933-45. The Germans alive today – certainly the ones I’ve met – are decent people who have had nothing to do with any of it, certainly no link in terms of ideology or politics. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Yet we cannot deny the effects that German leaders had on the western world during the last years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. I’ve argued in several books that the First World War shaped that century – certainly for New Zealand, undoubtedly for the rest of the world.

My photo of soldiers' graves at Tyne Cot, 2004.

It threw nascent social change into fast-forward and catalysed long-standing trends, a pivot between the ‘old order’ of the nineteenth century and the democracies of the twentieth, though it took several generations for the point to shake down.

The reparations helped focus Germany’s sense of injustice in the 1920s, given spice by rampant hyper-inflation and economy collapse. The problem was that their army had not been thoroughly defeated in the field – and most veterans felt put-upon, including a particularly angry ideological zealot from Braunau.

And so the world had to go through the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and all the other crimes against humanity – the ‘dark lights of perverted science’ - that Hitler orchestrated, initiated and otherwise brought about. His particular talent was his ability to bring out the dark side of human nature – the ‘banality of evil’ that allows normally ordinary and decent folks to unleash their inner monsters.

But did the final collapse of Nazi Germany – and with it, the end of Bismarckian ideals of Reich - end the First World War-generated cycle of change? Of course not. After that the twentieth century was dominated by the Cold War – an opposition that also came out of the First World War with its creation of the world’s first major communist state. 

As Eric Hobsbawm tells us, all these things were integral with that great cycle of change that began with that conflict of 1914-18, making the twentieth century a ‘short century’ – 1914-1992 – from the viewpoint of historical theme and trend.

History-as-theme, of course, does not conform to convenient dates -  witness the nineteenth century which, as a political-economic trend, Hobsbawm considers began dramatically in 1789 and ended with equal drama in 1914.

Which is reasonable, though we might also argue that the true end of the twentieth century happens today, with Germany’s final reparations payment.

Of course the true cost of any war is human. And the First World War, more than any other to that date, brought that lesson home. You have but to stand in one of the war cemeteries of Flanders or Picardy – quiet, solemn, tended – to understand. Here lie the men ‘known unto God’ who vanished before the awful power of the world’s first large-scale industrialised war.

They did so fighting for their countries, fighting for what they believed – and fighting for their lives. I’ve written more about it in Shattered Glory among other places.

Check it out.

Impacted by the First World War

Someone I knew congratulated me today on Shattered Glory and said he intended to buy a copy. ‘I don’t always buy your books,’ he explained. ‘But I want this one.’

Which set me thinking. Why Shattered Glory and not, for instance, my engineering picture book, Big Ideas - which was on the local best-seller lists for some weeks in 2009 and continues to shift quite respectably. Or my general history The Reed Illustrated History of New Zealand, which was flying out the publishers’ door in its thousands in 2004-05.

A lot of it is personal taste. But I’m inclined to think there are other reasons why the First World War still carries power, even ninety years on.

The point was brought home to me on Armistice Day 2004 when I joined nearly 100,000 fellow New Zealanders on the streets of Wellington to watch the funeral procession of the Unknown Soldier.

Three generations after the armistice, one of our own was coming home, an anonymous Kiwi ‘known unto God’, who had lain in the Caterpillar Valley cemetery in northern France for nearly 90 years. The mood was a curious mix of large-crowd joy and celebration, overlain with a sombre perspective on the personal tragedies that had befallen two generations of New Zealanders in the first half of the twentieth century.

The public turnout underscored a change of popular mood from the anti-war protest sentiment of the 1970s and 1980s and, in its turn, from the British-framed nationalism of the mid-twentieth century. By the early twenty-first century, New Zealand was exploring new concepts of national identity in new ways.

Yet it was also something personal. Virtually everybody in the crowd had family ties to that war, simply because of its staggering scale. The First World War was a personal war, one that hammered its truths into every Kiwi household, one way or another. And it was an emotional journey, a four-and-a-half year struggle that destroyed popular ideas of glory on the battlefield and left the hope of nations decaying in the mud alongside the blood of their young men.

The experience was shared by every nation that joined it. That war ran to the heart of all that defined humanity; and the experience defined the societies and nations of the age. A human cataclysm, driven by the scale of enterprise made possible by the nineteenth century age of steam, steel, science and reason.

H. G. Wells called it the ‘war to end all wars’, but of course it wasn’t. It was merely the first act of a second and even greater conflict twenty years later. Charles a’Court Repington had it right when he selected the more cynical ‘First World War’ in 1919. It was a riposte to Wells but, in a wider sense – alas - all too true an assessment of the dismal realities of human nature.

‘Impacted’ is a verb. So is ‘tweet’.

Former New Zealand Listener editor Paul Little  recently gave me “one point off” in the October 2010 issue of North and South magazine for using “impacted” as a verb in my book Shattered Glory. A curious scoring system; the delivery manuscript was 126,008 words long – and this usage appeared once, making it just under 0.0008 percent of the whole. It was accepted as correct by the publishers’ proof-editors. Little didn’t say how many points I’d started with, though if he’s being fair - as opposed to making an undefined dig - I hope he began with one point per word published.

The funny thing is that William Brohaugh’s rather insightful discussions into English make clear that in modern usage ‘impacted’ is perfectly acceptable as a verb.

That’s worth pondering, especially today. English evolves. That’s why we don’t talk like Shakespeare, or for that matter Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser. The patterns are generational, and the biggest shifts happen in bursts, often associated with a shift in society or technology. Punctuated equilibrium. It’s particularly obvious if we look at the ‘great vowel shift’ of the fifteenth century that separated Chaucer from Spenser.

That switch was followed, around the time of Henry VIII, by bureaucratic push to bring spelling and usages into some sort of conformity. That itself was a product of the shift from the medieval to the early modern world – less feudalism, but more paperwork and centralised government.

William Tyndale’s bible – on which much of the King James version was based – helped complete the transition. Middle English became, effectively, modern English. It’s possible to read and understand Spenser or Shakespeare today without specialist scholarship – not something we can say of Chaucer.

What has changed are the pronounciations and grammar usages. Take ‘war’, for instance. I’m not going to get into the phonetic character set here. Suffice to say, we pronounce it ‘wor’, unless we’re Winston Churchill. Shakespeare’s actors called it ‘waarrr’. But that’s fairly typical of the way English evolves.

It’s still happening today. I was always taught that the verb ‘ invite’ was not a synonym for its noun form, ‘invitation’, the latter meaning the ‘written or spoken form of the act of inviting’. Technically, this means that  ‘You have an invite to lunch’ is bad grammar. It’s used, of course, and has been since the seventeenth century.  But lately it’s become good grammar. I’ve seen that usage, lately, even on formal and official letters.

That translation of noun into verb form is symptomatic of change over time – something that’s going on constantly in written and spoken English as it knocks along through that hard school of everyday usage. And it seems to me that the advent of email, twitter and text-speak – or should I say, txtspk - is driving an even sharper change now. One, perhaps, that will be as revolutionary for later twenty-first century English as the ‘great vowel shift’ was in Chaucer’s day.  It’s that punctuated equilibrium again. The blogosphere is playing its part too.

It’s being driven, in part, by the speed and ease of communication on the back of technology. And that is also framing, structuring and shaping it. When we’re restricted to 140 or 160 characters, we’re going to find common shorthands and share them. The speed with which that feeds back into common usage is astonishing.

It’s happening. And the grammar nazis need to get used to it.

All of which, I think, rather puts my critic’s undefined mark-down into perspective. I give him 126,007 points off.

Synchronicity or what?

The phrase synchronicity was, I believe, first coined by Karl Jung. Some guy called Sting wrote songs about it. To me it describes the fact that humans like seeing patterns even when there aren’t any.

There’s certainly a lot of synchronicity in the publishing world. I’ve had several books appear on top of similar titles by other authors. And now my book Shattered Glory has friends – two other major books on New Zealand’s First World War have come out in the weeks since. All three are different – utterly contrasting topics, aims, intents and angles. Every author has something valid of their own to add.

Together that’s a pretty major contribution to New Zealand’s literature on that period. They all need to be read.

Do readers see things that way? I hope so. Just in case, though – well, I’m the guy at the back, waving…