No Answers: A Slight Tangent From Phonics

I have always liked the phrase, "blank page," with the plosive bilabials.  Something in the way my mouth forms to shape the sounds feels as powerful as the potential that an empty Word document--or a cleanly-lined journal--feels.

But tonight I find myself tired and browsing through unpublished posts.  I came across this one from over two years ago.  Enjoy.

Oh, and forgive the aphorisms, too.

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I find myself sitting before a blank screen tonight.  I used to revel in the idea of a blank page--the alliteration of the "blank page" punctuates some of the plosive emotions I feel sitting in front of a blank page.

Some writers may feel the paralyzing fears of writers' block. 

Tonight, however, I am not suffering from writers' block.  I am suffering from the mundane and exhaustion of this winter.  Like the rest of the MidWest, I am trudging through this winter, getting up early to teach classes and going to a second job.  During one of my classes this past Saturday, we were talking about managing time and classwork and stress.

"What can we do to deal with stress?" I asked.  The class talked about some of the regular answers--exercise, taking breaks, talking to people, eating right, and all the rest--and we started talking about how stress can get to be too much.

"And then what?"  

One gal with bright red hair has a soft-spoken spunk I have grown to love.  "I'm going to smoke a cigarette after class."

Another gal talked about withdrawing for weeks.  Another young man talked depression.  "What do we do when we can't do what we should do?"  I was asking them more than that.  Sure, we were talking about dealing with stress at school and balancing life, but I was asking for my own answers.  What do I do when I don't have time to write?  What can I do when I can't balance my own life?  I want to write.  Students expect me to have these answers.

The class turned to me.  Someone asked what I did to deal with stress.  "I run.  I get up early."  Then I took a breath and said something like, "I don't have any answers."

And that's the thing about writing about writing.  You have to find your own answers.  No one can give the answers to you.

Who would've thought I could come up with more PHONICS? And for HALLOWEEN?

Let's look at a few characters' names and why their names are so effective phonetically.  An important note with phonetics is that fictional names play on words--well-known words--that evoke sounds and emotions that can work incredibly well with phonics.

If done well, the names fall into history.

1) Frankenstein.  Aside from the debates about the monster not actually bearing this name, Doctor Frankenstein (exaggerated with a German accent, of course) bears significant nasal sounds (N) alternated with other powerful sounds like the Fr, k, and st.

2) The House of Slytherin.  This is an ingenious name.  Of course, this name plays on "slithering," as in a snake, and brings to mind creeping and maneuvering that is close to the ground.  But say it out loud.  When you say this word slowly and carefully, it is, quite frankly, something that forces your teeth to bear and your nose to wrinkle.  Quite effectively.

3) Cruella DeVille.  This name plays well on "cruel," of course, but the repeated Ls and Rs (liquids, which I may touch on next time) give a slightly smooth and creepy feel to the name.  "DeVille" is a name associated with tradition and history from cars to science, and the character name evokes a cruel, liquid, smooth tradition.

Not bad.  Rather evocative.

That song helps a bunch.

Enjoy some powerful, poignant sounds this Halloween!

Post III: Just When You Thought Phonics Couldn't Be Any More Enjoyable

Funny thing about writing is that we writers take great joy in crafting amazing work.  We usually focus our efforts in the crafting of the plot and the characters, less of our strengths in the shaping of sentences, and even less of our focus in the letters and sounds.

“Do I dare 
Disturb the universe? 
In a minute there is time 
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” 
― T.S. Eliot

I remember hearing a story about T.S. Eliot.  He said something about how he wrote all day.  His friend asked him how much he wrote, and Eliot responded he wrote 5 words.  "They are good words," he said, or something like that as I remember how the story went.

We focus so much on the overall story, and so little of our attention is on the sound of the individual words.

I have written about bilabials and nasals in brief.  Here is one more marvelous pair.

Glottals--H and G.  These are two great letters, showing two cool aspects of phonetic sounds.
1) this sound is made in the back of the throat near the larynx
2) most pairings of sounds demonstrate a "voiced" and "unvoiced" version of the sound.  H and G demonstrate this well.  H is aspirated air, and G requires the "voiced" sound.

And since I'm on a T.S.Eliot trip this post, here are two more cool T.S. Eliot quotes to end:

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. ” 

― T.S. Eliot

More Fun with Phonics! Part II

Last look, labials (I couldn't resist).

In my last post, I talked about how sounds come in pairs.  The two plosive labials that I talked about last time are B and P--plosive because of the interrupted air flow, and bilabial because the sound involves both your lips.

Two more paired sounds are M and N.

When you make these two similar sounds, you mouth actually should be very different in shape: the N moves your tongue to the top of your mouth, but the M forces your lips together.

Both letters are classified as nasal sounds, resonating through your nose.  This causes a reverberation through the nasal cavity.  Typically, in Western Culture, overly nasal sounds are associated with congestion--and as an extrapolation, either ill health or nerdiness.  Take the name Marvin Martin.  Or Newman.  These names can be difficult to say without some sort of implication of a skinny, wimpy child with over-sized glasses and a book about entomology.  Or a character from Seinfeld.

An extra, weird thing: because M and B and P use both lips, all three of these letters are classified as bilabials.  B and P are very different because of the interruption of flow (making the sound more violent, more plosive), and the M is more, well, nasally.

One more weird point: we write words and say sentences.  How aware are you of how these sounds have subtle uses and power?

Fun with Phonics (Not What You Think), Part I

Alliteration and sounds are powerful.  Study the phonetic alphabet and find the fun in phonics.

This is not the fun that they lied to us about in the educational renewal programs that tried to teach us sounds.

This stuff is really fun.

Break down the sounds in the alphabet, and we can find amazing sounds and patterns.

Now linguists study and categorize sounds based on where consonants form in your mouth, or where your tongue and teeth position and the way you make a sound--from the back of your mouth, the front of your mouth, your teeth, and so on.

Let's look at bilabials briefly.  We form bilabial consonants when we put our lips together.  "B," "p," and "m" and bilabials, but I'm going to focus on b and p.

B and p are similar to each other.  The English language, and many other languages, have similar pairings that share commonalities in how we form the sounds.  B and p are not only bilabials, they are also classified as plosives because of the interruption of air flow.

What does this mean?  Say the word "plosive" carefully and out loud, and you'll get a sense of this.

B and p both carry startling and explosive sounds with their sounds and with our pronunciation.  When you say a name like "Bob Robertson" or a phrase like "a blank page" the phonetic power carries some subtle power that we may not consciously realize.

Bottom line: certainly, names have meaning, but the sounds we use to make words carry meaning, too.

More consonants next time....

A Writer of Another Alliteration

My last post, "A Writer of Another Name" brought up some interesting discussion about pen names and changing names.  Mike sent me this link for Kristen Lamb's blog about names:

Kristen Lamb, "The Problem with Pen Names"

The funny things about pen names is that women have the tremendous opportunity to create names when they get married.  We get the opportunity to embrace a new clan and recreate our identity with our names.

In the 1980s and 1990s, lots of women hyphenated their names.  Unfortunately, this solution has become a symbol of overly feministic women who refuse to accept traditional norms and accept their husbands' name.  And, for the children of parents with hyphenated names, this has created the double hyphenation conundrum.

This leaves the group of women with developed professional names and ready to be married different options.

Inigo Montoya comes to mind.  But this option causes far too much explanation.

But then the door is open for other lovely options.

And here I come to another lovely topic to be explored more fully: Alliteration, including assonance and consonance, of course.  Let's not forget phonetics.

Briefly, because I intend to expand on this more fully in the next posts, alliteration is the repetition of sounds.  Beyond this, in the study of sounds, certain letters contain powerful feelings.

Example?  The phrase "cellar door" is a smooth phrase, enjoyable to say because of the liquid letters ("l" and "r") repeated in the words and the way the words move your tongue.  Try to say "synesthesia," and it's a little like reading "Llama, Llama Red Pajama" to an energetic three-year old.

More discussion about next time....