Enrich Your Word Power

Isn’t Harry Potter going to fix all this in subsequent generations?

In much of Yoorp, I am assured, (and in Sweden I can attest) Donald Duck (Kalle Anka) comics are still ginormously popular – every newsstand has the most recent few 296 page Pockets. This is by far and away my main source of conversational Swedish, as well as an excellent way of learning coping strategies for parallel dimensions and extreme time-travel. (I also have French, Italian, German and Danish equivalents, but except for French I find them much harder going. They all seemed to be strong sellers in their local markets, though.)

(And if I ever do know Italian, Dylan Dog and his many zombie friends will have more than something to do with it.)

But I grew up originally on a diet of now-defunct British comics – my sister read the Dandy and I read the Beano, and we swapped. Bizarre universes, for sure. (Which comic had Deathwish and The Leopard of Lime Street? The latter was the closest Britain offered to a canonical superhero strip.)

Oh, and Asterix. (In English.) And I used to scour second-hand bookshops (yes, as a child) for collections of Mad magazine’s peerless Don Martin, (and settle sometimes for just Mad magazine collections).

Marvel (not DC) came somewhat later, and I didn’t have the pocket-money for the cross-universe spectaculars, so I settled for Daredevil and (some of) Spidey. These days I don’t read superhero comics, beyond the occasional splurge on Essentials phonebooks, because they’re not sold outside of comics shops, and who wants to spend their time inside comics shops?

I liked comics too, especially the work of Jack Kirby, but my first serious introduction into the world of immagination was reader’s digest condensed books. I loved faking illness and spending the day at home in bed (instead of school) reading Robin Hood or Call of the Wild or Treasure Island or robinson caruso.

I actually don’t think the medium is that important. The novel is obviously (to me) the superior imaginative medium, but kids brains are hardwired for stories and they’ll suck them up wherever they find them. I think stories are vitally important in some way I can’t explain to how we use our minds. Maybe they emulate dreams or maybe dreams emulate the stories we hear or maybe it’s something else, but if you rasie a child you will see first hand the power of story, how important they find them.

Ok, this demands my single most embarrasing vocabulary-acquisition story, the existence of which permanently confirms me as one of those teeming millions whose geekiness thrust me into a world of knowledge that my native environment and personal hang-ups somehow prevented me from making full sense or use of. In other words, I knew all sorts of stuff, but knew it in mostly the wrong way.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, there was in the Spider-Man universe a police captain by the name of Jean DeWolff. She was presented as a smart, cosmopolitan type, not at all your typical blue-collar cop that, as the Spider-Man universe had up until that time generally held, was suspicious of the webslinger. (In think, in the actual chronology of events back then, it wasn’t until around Spider-Man’s 20th anniversary that the lame subplot of the police constantly trying to bring Spidey in for questioning about the death of Captain Stacey or Miles Warren or whomever was finally dropped. I think there was actually one issue of Spectacular Spider-Man where there was a parade in his honor, and J. Jonah Jameson said he was moving to Europe. But I digress.)

Anyway, Peter David eventually killed Jean DeWolff off (in a story arc that started off with a tremendous bang, but then promptly fell apart), but not before we got to see a lot of Jean, sometimes in slinky dresses (she was always off doing something fabulous and then being abruptly called to the scene of the crime), sometimes in a beret. I loved her. I especially loved how she’d casually, like I imagined all sophisticated New Yorkers at the time did, drop non-English words into her everyday speech; like how she’d shout “Ciao!” to Spider-Man when he slung off. So I started saying “Ciao!” to people instead of “good-bye.”

Problem: I had no idea what language she was speaking, had no idea how to pronounce what she was saying, had never heard anyone identify the word “ciao” with any spoken salutation. I’d figured out in meant “see ya!” so what more was needed. Thus, for years thereafter, in the hallways of grade school and junior high, I would wave to people as I passed them by and shout “Kai-yo!” I don’t think I learned it was pronounced “Chow” until after I graduated from high school; indeed, I think for a while I thought “Kai-yo” and “Chow” were synonyms. (Also along these same lines: for several years in the mid-80s, I thought there were a couple of hot new bands from Australia, one named “In Excess,” the other named “Inks” (oddly spelled “INXS”).)

I think these sort of problems of mine pretty much explain every single social problem I’ve ever had, ever.

Alas, I am one of those people who cannot process pictures and words simultaneously. I go for the words and miss the pictures every single time. So comics never did much for me. The reading bug bit me through the kind offices of Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer. Our 3rd grade teacher was reading it aloud to us during nap-time…

I see someone above has mentioned the Harry Potter books. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tor Books’ senior editor for SF maintains that the reason those books are so popular is that Rowling is extremely good at pacing the flow of information you need to understand what is happening. Those of us who read lots of fantasy and science fiction are so practiced at it, we forget how difficut it can be. Reading those sorts of things requires different skills, apparently than reading mainstream fiction.

MKK

Russell- LOL! I also spent at least a year mispronoucing “Ciao,” although in my case the mispronunciation was “see-ow.) I encountered the word in a different storyline also, pretty sure it was a mid-70s MJ.

“See-ow.” Yeah Aeon, I could have easily gone in that direction to.

“So I learned the correct meaning from the letters page.”

You know, I really think the letter pages were valuable. Honestly, in an era before the internet or BBSes (or at least before I’d ever heard of such things), comics book letter pages were the closest I ever got to fandom, and thus the sort of learning which comes from fandom. I can remember long, extensive, issue-to-issue arguments being carried out on those letter pages. They seemed to die out in the late 80s–which, probably not entirely coincidentally, is when I stopped reading comic books. Did they ever make a comeback?

There’s really good autobiographical book about how children are shaped by what they read called ‘The child that books made’ (or something like that). I would heartily recomend it to anyone. The author didn’t read comics though, so far as I can remember.

Hmm. I started in on fantasy and sci-fi at an early age. I’m not talking the sci-fi and fantasy stuff in the school library (I got through that by the time I was in third grade). By the time I was 9 or 10 I was routintely raiding my mother’s library and the town library, although what I was looking for varied. (I had the usual “Greek myth” phase and the “Dinosaur phase” and the rest).

I can trace my sci-fi/fantasy leanings to a handful of really good books (Susan Coopers “The Dark is Rising” and Lloyd Alexander’s Pyrdain Chronicles to name two) I read sometime between 8 and 12.

As for pacing in sci-fi…I’ve never really noticed. It’s all just books to me, whether it’s Vernor Vinge or Victor Hugo (although God save us all from authors who were being paid by the word. Hugo is one of the few authors that I prefer in the “abridged” version).

I do recall that — my junior or senior year in High School — that the English classes were reading Ender’s Game. I’m not sure how people felt about it in general…

Damn, now I want to be an English teacher to find out. :)

I started reading very early. I read quite a few comic books (7 boxes in the garage) but I’m not sure which words I learned from comics… with the exception of ‘continuity’. I learned that one while trying to figure out how the Pre-Crisis and Crisis DC universe worked. I think I picked it up from the “Who’s Who in the DC Universe” guides.

I can’t remember how I first pronounced the word, but I think it mixed in ‘continuum’.

Rowling is extremely good at pacing the flow of information you need to understand what is happening. Those of us who read lots of fantasy and science fiction are so practiced at it, we forget how difficut it can be. Reading those sorts of things requires different skills, apparently than reading mainstream fiction.

So much “fantasy and science fiction” is written with the expectation that there is all kinds of backstory that the reader will acquire some other way than just reading the book. Examples range from the appendices in Lord of the Rings to the more usual provision of seventeen previous books in the series, a convention where people dress up as the characters, tabletop strategy games, etc. etc. This is one of the defining limitations of the genre. Fantasy and science fiction writers are in large part back-story devisors, not storytellers. The better storytellers distinguish themselves against an artificially low bar as a result.

So the reading strategies necessary for reading most science fiction and fantasy have to do knowing the conventions of the ways backstory is integrated with plot. If you know these then you can make your way through a new book without knowing the backstory at all, instead just keeping a list of mental placeholders and following along the character relationships and dialogue until you get far enough into the book that the whole thing becomes clear. On the other hand, if you don’t know this is what you’re supposed to do, it’s easy to give up.

(No knock on Gaiman, btw. He treats general mythology as the backstory, and furthermore exploits the conventions in a very sophisticated way. But, that said, it’s easy to see why “normal” high school students would be at a loss. They are reading something that subverts several layers of expectations, none of which are familiar to them in the first place. Apart from the pedagogical utility of the titillation factor, American Gods is an utterly bizarre choice for them.)

The more I think about what I was reading when, the more I suspect that I learned a *lot* of even basic vocabulary from comics– not just the funky standout words like “eldritch.” I was starting JLA, LSH, Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man at about the time I was starting to read lots of dinosaur and insect and kiddie-science books, and before we were veen getting vocabulary words at school. The science books taught a specialized vocabulary. But the fiction I remember reading at the same time was still very kiddie-storybookish, written at a much simpler level than comics. I’m sure I picked up at least the following:

“chauvinist” (Supergirl said it a lot)

“tabloid” and “journalist” and “shutterbug” and “editor” and “publisher” (Kent’s and Parker’s day jobs)

“lad” and “lass” (obvious)

“superstitious” and “mugger”(Batman)

“skyscraper” (all the Marvel NYC stuff; I’d certainly never seen one at that point)

“vulnerable” and “invulnerable”

“velocity” (Flash)

“(Which comic had Deathwish and The Leopard of Lime Street?)”

Quick google reveals the otherwise piss-poor Buster was the home of the Leopard of Lime Street.

Anybody remember Adam Eterno?

I learned many of my favourite words from comic books, and i make a point of inserting them whenever they fit…well whenever i can fit them in. I can even remember the comic books that introduced me to such fun words as:

distaff: Spiderman
loquacious: X-men
conundrum: Thor
rime: Sandman
ablution, inimical, sartorial: Howard the Duck
tatterdemalion: Crooked Timber

I also thoroughly enjoyed “American Gods” & made a point of visiting ‘The House on the Rock’ on my last trip to Plattville – alas I lacked Odin’s abilities, so the staff did not allow me to ride the carousel. Believe my other favourite tidbit was learning Easter’s identity as Anglo-Saxon Goddess of the Dawn & her current employement in a coffee shop on the Haight.

Two words I learned from comics but mispronounced: macabre (I said MACK-uh-ber) and demise (I said duh-MEESE). I made one less French and the other one more French than it should be. (So on average I was just right, no?)

I never really got into superhero comics, but when I was very young (6-8), my big sister had a secret stash of pre-Comics Code EC horror comics that made a big impression on me. I don’t recall any specific words, although macabre (I alternated between “macabra” and “macaber” for years) and gruesome are safe bets. I also learned that virtually any word can be turned into morbid pun if you torture it long enough. (Oh, excuse me, that should be: “if you TORTURE it long enough! Eeeee-he-he-he-he!”)

Most importantly, though, I learned that if you have an affair with a beautiful married woman in order to get your hands on her husband’s money, do not kill her husband and bury his body in the back yard, no matter how dead he looks. It’s probably best just to leave town.

Kc in Dc, I think what you’ve said is pretty close to what I’ve been saying — rather than “3 syllables” I guess I meant 2-1/2. Anyway, if you’re more accurate than Keith, then I was too, and can thus sleep soundly tonight.
Verily.

Awry. Which throughout my childhood I pronounced AWE-ree. Until my fifth grade teacher heard me do it and burst out laughing. Oddly, I was aware of the correctly pronounced synonym awry, though it never occurred to me that they were one in the same.

Well before Marvel and Dr. Strange, in Bugs Bunny comics I encountered Yosemite Sam during an Oklahoma childhood. I was shocked to find years later that Yosemite, which I pronounced Yose-Might, not only had four syllables instead of my economical two but also referred to a somewhat real place.

What about the miscellaneous tomatoes? (sundried).

We just had a woman called Siobhan move next door. I was the first neighbour in our gang she introduced herslef to. My wife, and all the neighbours I have spoken to thought it was some fancy posh name; none had a clue how to spell it, and all of them, when I told them how to spell it, said ‘Oh, I thought that was pronounced Sy-Oh-bahn’. Even my neighbour of Irish extraction.

On second thought, I do recall a couple of words I learned from comic books: “Zap!” and “Pow!” For sme reason they’ve slipped out of my vocabulary recently.

I wonder if the difficulty in following certain novel forms comes from a reading speed issue. I have found that some books I find hard to follow are much easier if I complete the story in a shorter period of time. Large pieces of the story must be hung on to for some time, logged into memory, for later explaination or use. A good novel may be a heavy data stream with a lot going on in it, but it is not the same as processing multiple data streams. The gamer mentality and the movie mentality process a lot at once but only for a short period of time. Reading english is one thing, being able to read enough of a novel to get the complete thought before forgetting much of it requires some decent reading speed or very good retention and memory. I would coach the kids having trouble on their reading speed and retention, rather than trying to explain the format.

I know I learnt ’tilth’ from LoTR’s description of the fields around Gondor. I was very annoyed when Jackson had armies charging across half-bare scrubland instead.

Oho … Asterix.

There were all the Gaulish names ending in “ix” — but don’t forget the Romans (Marcus Ginantonicus, for one) and Egyptians (Ptenisnet and Nastiupset), who also had parts to play.

I learned druid, potion, obelisk, menhir, some Roman army terminology which stuck with me for the following 25 years (legion, OK, everyone knows legion, but also cohort, maniple, and century, from which centurion), and I believe also the word gruel. Which makes the sound “flotch” when it is poured into your bowl. I think.

Someone upthread mentioned Sherlock Holmes. I remember learning from his adventures the word “revenge” at about age seven, also its German translation, “rache” — along with Afghanistan, perceive, hansom, carbuncle, sahib, and the expression “to stay true to one’s salt.” And for oddity’s sake, though probably a couple of years later, the word “dolichocephalic” — which describes Watson’s skull, long, and narrower side-to-side than front-to-back.

I learned about anarchosyndicalism from Ursula LeGuin too, and for quite a while thought “propertarian” was an English word. Is it?

Great post & thread!

I had a few word pairings – probably from comics – where I thought there were two different words, one I’d seen spoken and one I’d read. Two positions in the army, for instance, kernel and “coll-o-nell”.

To this day, since I read more geek than I speak, I get confused about how to pronounce Linux. Does the “i” say it’s own name (as my five year old would say)?

I’ve seen Mjolnir pronounciations in both the 3 and 4 sylable versions, in different authoratative texts (alas, I can’t recall which ones). I think Old Norse is really quite a bit more fluid than Modern English, so both are valid, along with half a dozen other variations. But I think the fact that we here in the 21st century know what Mjolnir is (and nottice, no one here has asked, we all know it’s Thor’s Hammer) is notable.

The F/SF genres are so alien at first encounter that I am not surprised the uninitiated could not get to grips with Gaiman. I think children who began with fairytales (read to them at first) found it a lot easier. The transition book in my case, at about 11, was T H White’s The Sword in the Stone, which is an imagining of the boyhood of King Arthur (“Wart”) during which Merlin guides him into the occult mysteries. A beautiful book.
Nevertheless, when I first discovered pulp science fiction — Amazing Stories, Weird Tales and other mags — I found it almost terrifyingly strange. Some of the best SF writers of the Golden Age were in those pages: Sturgeon, Pohl, Kornbluth, Van Vogt, and many more. I knew one thing: this was electrifying and my parents were scandalised by it. (The covers tended to feature scantily clad wenches being molested by BEMs (bug-eyed monsters). So my SF reading was Samizdat until my later teens.

As for eldritch: Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch takes cunning advantage of its associations with comic book prose …

The point about Harry Potter is that the books just aren’t F/SF by genre. They are typical stories of British boarding school life spiced up with fantasy elements (see Blyton, Enid). The world of Harry Potter is mundane and yet magical (and renders magic mundane). No eldritch etherealities here.