Having slacked off the blog last week whilst getting book 2 ready for CreateSpace, I’m back on track this week with a look at the English language and its use in my writings. At first glance it doesn’t appear to be too much of an issue I suppose, but believe me, it’s caused some headaches. To put the problem in perspective, let’s have a quick recap of my background. After being born in England and living there for nearly forty-five years, I moved to the US and have been living here for the last five years and despite speaking the same language, my accent and word usage still defeats some of the locals; trying to get them to understand my order at a drive-through can be tricky at best. I’m also surprised how many Americans think I’m from Australia ~scratches head~. Funny accents aside, however, I ran into three problems when writing these books. The first is the meaning of some words the second is spelling and the third is general usage. Now word meaning isn’t a new problem for me. I’ve been playing online games for over a decade and thus learning US English through all of that time talking with people in the US. In England we call a pavement what the US calls a sidewalk, UK crisps are chips in the US and UK chips are fries. Some of the alternate meanings do produce some funny moments though, such as when one of my US friends emoted in game that she was ‘patting my fanny’. I tried to explain to her that i didn’t have one. Suffice it to say that the word ‘fanny’ means something completely different in the UK to what it means in the US. Another good example is when I was telling my US friends that I was having faggots and peas for dinner. For those who don’t know, a faggot is a pork offal and onion meatball in a rich gravy. My US friends were utterly confounded by my apparent menu choice. The examples of these duplicate meaning words are seemingly endless. Secondly is spelling. there are a number of words that are spelled differently, colour – color, armour – armor, aluminium – aluminum; there are more than a few. And lastly some things that I consider ‘proper’ English that seem to be overly formal and not used in the US. An example here is ‘whilst’; it seems to have fallen out of usage in the US and been replaced by while.

So given all of these problems, how do they affect my writing? Surely it’s easy? Pick a language version and stick with it, right? Well, not so much. It was easy to see that my largest target audience would be american and so it seems obvious to write the books in that style. Which is what i did. So when referring to parts of a car or flyer, i use words like ‘trunk’ and ‘fender’ instead of ‘boot’ and ‘bumper’. and I used the US spelling of words. To be honest it’s easier that way because Microsoft doesn’t seem to have discovered the Oxford English Dictionary for its spell checker yet. There is, of course, a ‘but’. My two lead characters are English. Now it frustrates the heck out of me when i see Hollywood have supposedly English characters speak in US vernacular and there was no way I wanted to do that with Crineal, Cyndora and the other English based characters in my books. And so i have to be very conscious of correct word usage whenever they speak. I have to mentally swap back to UK English. As an additional problem, I was surprised how many swear words are religious based. In these stories, my galactic civilization doesn’t have religion and so cursing had to be completely devoid of religious connections, so things like ‘oh hell’ became a no-no for my galactic citizens. Of course my Earthers could use them, but that still entailed a lot of mental gymnastics as I wrote, swapping back and forth between UK, US and Galactic English. I swear writers need to be slightly schizophrenic. Thank heavens for Kay, my trusty proofer/editor who was able to haul me up short when she became confused by some words or phrases that aren’t used or used differently in the US. I’m sure that these books have been a learning experience for both of us. I like to joke to people here that i’m bi-lingual; I speak both English and American. As George Bernard Shaw said: England and America are two countries separated by a common language. There’s certainly a fair amount of truth in that.