The write stuff

As a writer, I love language. When I think back to my university days, I shake my head at the many and varied forms of the English language with which I struggled to become familiar. First, there was Old English, which was closer to Norse than anything recognizable today. A typical pair of words in Old English looked something like this, “Pæs oferéode,” meaning “That was overcome.”
Old English was used until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Those invaders carried out an inventory called the Domesday Book of all the captured buildings. Included was the church in Earsham, Norfolk, where my grandfather, Andrew McQueen, and his wife, Alice Maud Hall, were married in 1895. I visited that church in 1983. Talk about your touchstones with the past!
The 14th Century featured Geoffrey Chaucer writing in what’s called Middle English. I loved this line from The Miller’s Tale: “Nicholas anon leet fle a fart, as greet as it had been a thonder-dent.” The next great wordsmith, of course, was William Shakespeare. “All the world’s a stage.” “If music be the food of love, play on.” He was followed by favourites like Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
My so-called writing career has included newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, blog posts like this, a bi-weekly column currently running in the Saturday Toronto Star, and eighteen books published since 1982. Researching and writing a book can require anywhere between 50 and 100 interviews plus a daily output of 500 words that are revised downward to an eventual manuscript of 70,000 words.
In the end, all that’s required is just putting one word after another. In that regard, there’s no end of supply. One thousand new words are added annually to the Oxford English Dictionary. Recent additions include cromulent, meaning acceptable, and nepo baby, a person who gains success through family connections.
Some days, I weep at what’s happening to language. Some of it is minor nonsense. All too often I read in my morning newspaper the phrase, “a couple things.” Whatever happened to the “of”? And sportscasters are forever saying, “He’s 34 years of age.” Why not just say “34 years old”?
But the worst manglers are popular hip-hop singers like Drake in Charged Up. “Cops are killin’ people with they arms up/And your main focus is tryna harm us?/And you think you ‘bout to starve us.”
But there is one new phrase I very much admire: Elbows up!