The Naming of Cats--No, Characters!

The Naming Of Cats by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter--
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover--
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Randy gave/loaned me a book of writing exercises called What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.  I read a bunch of them, but one stood out and seems particularly appropriate in my current diatribe about phonetics and sounds.  Page 42 is an exercise about "Naming Your Characters."

This also seems ironic because Mike and I used to ponder the names of characters and places.  A good character--with excellent sounds and evocative words--can go down in history.  In this chapter, Humbert Humbert and Ebenezer Scrooge are two excellent examples.

The exercise from What If? asks to name characters for the following:

• A petty, white-collar thief who robs his boss over several years
• An envious, bitter woman who makes her sister miserable by systematically trying to undercut her pleasure and self-confidence
• A sweet young man too shy to speak to an attractive woman he sees every day at work
• The owner of a fast-food restaurant who comes on to his young female employees
• A grandmother who has just won the lottery

In using some of the tools from phonetics, you can use plosives and nasals to evoke certain feelings.  I like to hyper-pronounce a name or word to see how my face reacts, and if my face makes an appropriate emotive response, then I work with it.  For example, the name "Norman"--like most names with nasals--makes me wrinkle my nose as if in disgust.  Names with two or more nasals generally work well for characters or places that you want to feel repulsive or icky.

Take the third exercise: the sweet, shy man.  I like the idea of using a fricative like an "f" sound.  The "f" forces your face to smile but also makes your teeth push out--a little awkwardly.  "F"s are awkward, wonderful letters, happy but goofy in a way.  Pair an "f" sound with a dental or a plosive, and this can give the name more power, more "plosive" potential.  Take a name like "Phillip" or "Clifford" and this could name an awkwardly shy, sweet office-worker, with just enough edge to make a character potentially "plosive".  Pair this with a last name like "Shurgood" or "Wildwood" and this name may have powerful, latent implications.

The naming of characters, or cats, is a difficult matter.  It is not a game.  But given some patience and some tools, playing with names can be powerful and, perhaps even, efanineffable.  I love that word.

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....