As
new immigrants, or 'aliens in a strange land' as we used to laughingly call
ourselves...well, actually the tears probably weren’t from laughing as I think
back on it, we staunchly held onto our heritage with knuckles white from the
strain. As our children integrated into their new world and picked up the
lingo, my husband and I would dart horrified looks at each other across the tea
table as one or other of them used some bizarre kiwi reference to something
that the English had named just fine thanks. There was a time when we would
nicely ask them to stand and sing ‘God save our gracious queen’ for such
offences but they got too many and too often. We would have become a singing
troupe instead of a regular family.
I
once used the term ‘dyke’ in reference to a small stream of running water
nearby, at a church ladies group and was met with stunned silence and eyes the
size of tennis balls. I later discovered that it was in fact a ‘gully’ and a
dyke is something else completely. If they had reason to question my sexual
preference over it, that’s fine as I never went back anyway.
‘Speed
bumps’ on the road are called ‘judderbars’ which we thought was silly. But when
questioned as to what we called them in the UK, the man fell off his seat at
our ridiculous answer. ‘Sleeping policemen’. You only realise how daft
something sounds when you repeat it to someone who’s never heard it before,
like an alien, or a New Zealander.
A
professional editor who fortunately is also a friend, took a look at my first
novel, ‘About Hana’. She left me some helpful tracking notes, one of which was,
‘In New Zealand, we don’t hoover, we vacuum.’ I changed every other suggestion
she made, except that one. I probably got away with it, because my character
was an Englishwoman in New Zealand but I recently realised how ingrained my
stubborn attitude had become when I had a debate about it with someone else. I
“I
need to go and hoover.”
“You
what?”
“Hoover.
You know, polish and hoover.”
“Do
you mean vacuum?”
“Nope,
I definitely mean hoover.”
Unfortunately
the conversation wasn’t that short. It was much more protracted and brought up for
discussion with everyone else who appeared at our lunch table for the rest of
that week. It’s a bit like those poor kids whose parents decided to give them a
name using all the consonants in the alphabet but took a dislike to vowels.
They have to spell their name out every single place they go, from school to
job interviews and finally, sit up in the coffin in exasperation to help the
stonemason engrave it on the headstone and the vicar to pronounce it at the
service. It just never ends. There are heated discussions about whether or not
their parents actually liked them, while they sit there isolated in the knowledge
that they are unlikely to ever see it spelled or pronounced right. And then I
go and do it to myself deliberately. I eat sweets, drive over sleeping
policemen and then complain that nobody understands me.
But
the real issue is in my writing. I go to great lengths to explain the Maori
words I use and the cultural sayings that weave throughout my work. And then I
make my character ‘hoover’. I recently read a novel which was based in America
and the author let the main character rave over a plate of ‘grits’. Now to me,
grit is something you get in your shoe. It’s a sharp grey stone, usually
included in road works and definitely not something you would like to eat,
unless of course you wanted to enter a competition for strange people, where the audience says ‘Wow’ and laughs at the crazy behind their hands. Word traps don’t
just happen when you open your mouth, they happen when you put pen to paper and
the trouble with them appearing in your writing, is that you’re not around to
explain how they got there or why.
In
my humble opinion, English and American writers are the worst and I am
including myself under the former. We are so sure of ourselves and our own
dominance of the earth-ball that we expect the rest of the world to catch up
with us, never thinking that if we want them to buy and read our novels, it
should be us who does the bending. I still occasionally wake up sweating after
eight years here, with my fingers working at the keys of an imaginary mobile
phone. I know that in an emergency, I will invariably attempt to dial ‘999’
when in fact here, it is ‘111’. In the US I believe it is ‘911’ and there must
be numerous different options elsewhere. So why can’t we say in an action
filled chapter, ‘He dialled emergency.’ Smaller cultures seem to go to much
more effort to explain themselves and it makes for a more integrated
relationship with the reader.
Don’t
get me wrong, we should be proud to display our various cultural nuances in our
work, there’s nothing bad about that. But occasionally, it would be good to hear
them explained to readers instead of the poor things sitting there scratching their
heads and thinking, ‘she what?’ because at the end of the day all we do is
alienate and isolate instead of include and who is going to go back for more of
that? Not me. Ultimately it’s none of my business if other people want to eat
little grey stones, take Tylenol, Nurofen or Paracetamol for their headache and
sleep in cots, which out of interest is what English people put babies in. No,
it doesn’t bother me at all, because if I’m bothered, I’m way past the point
where I would have bought their books again anyway.
It
is truly something of a wake-up call for me. I may personally hoover my carpets
until the great white chariot arrives to carry me home with or without my Dyson,
but perhaps I need to give my characters a break and let them vacuum. When
writing, I need to think more about the word traps which induce frustration in
a reader who thinks to themselves, like I did, ‘What the heck’s a grit?’
Anything that makes the reader stop in their tracks and wonder what on earth I
mean, is a bad thing. It allows life to creep back in, for them to remember
they promised to make dinner, do the shopping, mow the grass, fetch the kids,
go for a run and get the Christmas calories off. It interrupts the flow as fatally
as a misspelled word or a jarring grammatical error.
Beware
the word traps. Because they’re everywhere; in your head, on your tongue, in
the ink of your pen and definitely on your keyboard.
#wordtraps #indie #amwriting #editing #bookreviewdepot #author #reader
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