Have to see the movie to find out

Around the Willow Springs office, author Robert Lopez is often incorrectly referred to as Rob, an error we inherited from our boss, Sam Ligon, who knew him before he was Robert. The name is going to appear on the cover of Willow Springs 69, which is set to include an interview with Lopez, and, during a recent edit of the front cover, Sam caught the name listed as Rob, which we hastily corrected. The difference is simple, but distinct. Rob is Sam’s friend and colleague. Robert Lopez isn’t a person.

As soon as a text is written, its author becomes a brand—a way of describing a style, worldview, or type of prose. This is the moment where writer becomes author, transferring power from himself to the consumer. For instance, while Rob is a private name, for friends and family, Robert Lopez yields control to public interpretation. When this interpretation becomes collective, authors’ names morph into adjectives like Homeric, Dickensian, and Kafkaesque, all of which can be used to describe more than just books. These authors become part of the lexicon, shifting from the signified to the signifier.

Shakespearian is an adjective that has come to mean many things to many different people. In fact, most people recognize Shakespeare as an adjective or signifier before they ever pick up one of his plays. Some might say that this is what constitutes a classic—a book that is a signifier prior to being read. If so, Shakespeare is the ultimate example—becoming so much of an abstract noun that even his contemporaries forgot to gather evidence of his existence.

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Did you know that the word “vampire” has been used quite frequently in literature since the 1800s, but “zombie” didn’t really get its start until the late 1920s? How about how often authors forgot the last letter of Shakespeare’s name?

Well, now you (and I and everybody with internet access) can experiment with how often a word occurred in literature through history thanks to Google’s new Ngram site.  (Yes, you get TWO Google posts for the price of one today! )

I’ve spent lots of time playing around with…erh, researching interesting things such as how often the phrase “little did I know” occurs in books. I’m not quite sure how it will fit into any academic research (or how I would fund that research), but it’s still fascinating to note that the phrase was used very frequently in the early 1800s, hit an all time low around 1830, only to peak again around 1850, then decline for a while before holding steady until 2000, after which it took off at an alarming rate.

 I’m not the only one who’s spending way too much time on this site. The blog Jezebel tried it out on different sexual terminology. They noted that there was a decline in writing about “penis” and “vagina” around the Great Depression but then a huge peak in the usage of “vagina” around 1883.

This tool is supposedly developed for academics and Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and adjunct full professor in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, reviewed it for that purpose for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Linguistic research is of course very important, but isn’t it much more fun to find out how much more often “tits” are used than “boobs?”

Try out the site and let us know what astonishing facts (academic or titillating or other) you found in your quest for word and phrase usage through the ages.

Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. Read more »