Troping in the dark

 

In other words, your trope may smell funny, but if it's not past its due date, it's probably okay. I guess.

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.