Words are cheap

 

So I stumbled across this number yesterday:

The GLM [Global Language Monitor] estimates that in the modern world a new word is created every 98 minutes (approximately 14.7 new words per day). Each year, an estimated 800 to 1,000 neologisms are added to English language dictionaries.

That’s a lot of words, and English is already admitted have the largest vocabulary by far of any language. Maybe because languages like French, German and Spanish only average 200 neologisms a year. So what effect does this have?

Well, according to the law of supply and demand, words inevitably lose their value. The invention of new words, pressed out like license plates in the prison shop, floods, cheapens language as a whole. It’s been said words are cheap. They’re getting cheaper.

It’s been estimated that there are a million words in English, though the American Heritage Dictionary lists only 350,000. Which makes for a huge chunk of words that are floating around in the ether and could blink out like phosgenes any second, never even recorded or cast away like old ichthyosaurs. Moreover, the number of words one needs to know to be fluent in English is estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000, so English can be thought of as the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. We’re only seeing the tip on our cruise.

And all those obsolete and unused words? They can be thought of as lost or undiscovered species in the Amazon rain forests, species which may hold miracle cures if we can only catalogue them before clear-cutting wipes them out.

So many words lost in the shuffle. And more, the weight of so many words must inevitably over-run the silences, which like rests in music, impart the language its form and power. Light a candle for St. Harold Pinter.

Now I know that English’s Latin-Saxon agglutination is considered one of its glories, the source of its agility. And its thievery of words from other languages like a mad mynah bird is looked on fondly. And a living language must grow or die, just like a cancer or any capitalist economy. I don’t want to take away English’s rizz,

Just…search the garden before you plant a new flower. And take a favorite word to dejeuner today, huh?

Cover Reveal: The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart

 

     Okay…here it is, the cover reveal for The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart. 

Sherlock Holmes travels to Egypt to take on the curse of Tutankhamun, along with the indefatigable Dr. Watson and the mysterious medium Estelle Roberts. 

Releasing March 19th from Seventh Street Books. Available for pre-order Amazon and a host of other places now.

Cover by the inimitable Jennifer Do.

Oh, and that’s an Egyptian scarab on the cover, not a flying cockroach.

That’s my story anyway. 

Review: The Law of Falling Bodies

 The Law of Falling Bodies is like cooking a souffle while doing a high wire act.
There’s no way it’s going to work. But what if it does? I’m almost tempted to leave my review it at that, but I’ll go further, at the risk of a few mini-spoilers. It does something I normally despise: it turns a murder story into an espionage story. With Nazis.

But: the author pulls it off, largely through the agency of his main character, a thoroughly grounded, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, modest graduate student in physics who is the only person who could ever solve the many mysteries presented to him, in part because he and his antagonist go together like yin and yang.

It’s a spy novel which may also qualify as a cozy mystery. It includes an alluring local cop and an asshole FBI agent who may be allies or enemies. Through it all, it’s strangely believable. This is an overlooked gem. Pick it up now.

Review: Go Find Daddy

Modern society is a minefield, and was even before Covid-19. But there was a lot of discussion at the height of the pandemic as to how writers should handle such an event. Ignore it?—or plunge into it? Steve Goble elects to skip it, but in doing so he (intentionally) shines a light on the aftermath, and what it means to us going forward. The waning of trust—in institutions, in each other seems to have accelerated to dangerous new levels. A lot of readers were waiting to see how writers would handle Covid and the post-Covid arena. If Go Find Daddy, Steve Goble’s third in his Ed Runyon series is any example, I would say—honestly, straightforwardly, levelly. Which happens to describe his hero, Ed.

Ed has left the force, gotten over (largely) his anger issues, and is trying to make it work as a private detective in small-town Ohio. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. As he says, “accountants get head-aches from staring at a screen store clerks get head-aches from dealing with assholes all day, I get shot at. No big deal.”

     But he’s about to go down the rabbit hole. A cop’s been killed. The main suspect—the only suspect as far as the police are concerned—is a right-wing podcaster who’s made his hatred for cops his brand (thus helping to diminish further our faith in authority), and who’s vanished without leaving a clue, even to his wife and child.  Every cop in three states is out for his blood. And now a pro-cop entity online has offered a million dollars for him—dead. No one knows whether the offer is real, whether the organization is real, or a hoax—but it’s drawn every bounty-hunter to the chase.

     All of which would have nothing to do with Ed—until he takes on a mission for the fugitive’s wife—to get a vital message to him. If you know Ed, you’ll know why it’s a job he can’t refuse (involving the fugitive’s little daughter) even though he’s going up against the fugitive’s friends and enemies both, all of whom are trigger-happy, none of whom trust each other or can be trusted. Yes. Ed Runyon gets shot at—a lot.

      But Ed is a person who can be trusted, a person who holds his integrity dear, a person who can be believed, a doggedly decent man—and that’s the key to the job he’s taken on, and it’s what makes him a hero for this post-Covid age. 

      This is the third book in the Ed Runyon series. Jump on the bandwagon.