This is not a current events blog, so this particular column is NOT about the AI writing controversy. The magazines which regularly send me rejection slips (sneaking up on the magic number 7,500) are divided on the issue, some refusing stories which have been written using AI and others saying it’s okay as long as you admit it upfront. Personally, after all the time I have spent screaming and the Spelling and Grammar Check programs of the last thirty years, I have grave suspicion of the world to come. But that would be true even without AI.
The thing is, writers spend some time picking the proper word for the proper feel in a sentence. I have a small collection of vocabulary tricks of my own, the success of which can be judged by something I said in the last paragraph. In any case, whenever I wish to remind people of the choice of the right word, my mind dashes back to a young lady (she would have turned 77 last month, but her BRAIN was always somewhere around ten years old) whose ability to tell a story often hung on her choice of words.
Some of my tidy-minded acquaintances regarded her with suspicion. No one, they figured, could be that, um, unique in her word choices. They thought she rehearsed. My take is that she cannot have been that great an actress because such excellent delivery takes brai…I forget what I was going to say.
But let us take her story of one of Illinois’s great blizzards. She lived in a house she had bought from her parents, on which some genius had added a one-story section with a flat roof, This roof leaked (the Midwest is not kind to flat roofs) but she would walk her dog there on snowy days (the main leak was above the dining room table, by the way) and she kept a serape hung by the upstairs window so she could just call to the dog and step out on the roof when nature called.
Well, nature called big time in the form of a massive overnight blizzard, and she decided the only hope for that roof was if she went out and shoveled the snow off before it reached a critical weight. So in the teeth of a snowstorm, she donned her serape and went out onto a roof, and just kept pushing snow over the edge until the sky brightened and she knew that perhaps now her yard guy would show up to finish the job. It was an achievement of tenacity and dumb luck (she didn’t go through or off the roof) and she liked to point this out.
“You just think about that scene,” she told me, “A woman in her sixties on the roof in the middle of the night, getting it off all by herself!”
See, her word choices…but there’s another story.
As I have mentioned before, she was afflicted by poverty: both her cars were secondhand and her cook and yard guy were part-time. After the Crash of 2008, she had to cut her trips to England back from three times to twice a year. She was extremely frugal during these trips abroad, and booked the cheapest available hotel rooms. On one occasion, she found herself the only guest at a small village hotel during the off-season. On a dark country night, she would be the only person in the hotel except for the night manager.
During the night, she heard strange sounds. She tossed a robe over her flannel nightgown and rushed to peek through the old-fashioned lock. Through the keyhole, she saw the night manager. “He was in his pajamas, on his knees, whispering for me to let him in!”
She was rightly terrified, and hauled a heavy piece of furniture across the door. This being the days before cell phones, with the only phone in the place out in the hallway, she stayed awake all night, keeping watch, and checked out the next morning to move to a much more expensive motel chain.
It was a truly terrifying traveler’s tale, and I congratulated her on her escape. But a few days later, I heard her tell the story again, with a slightly altered text.
There she was, on a dark country night, sleeping in a hotel where only one other person was staying. In the night she heard strange sounds, “And there was the hotel manager on his knees, whispering into my keyhole!”
Word choice. It makes a difference.
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