The lightning-bug and the lightning

A recent episode of 372 Pages in which Mike and Conor continue their read through the interminable Tek Kill, the eighth book in a sci-fi detective noir series by William Shatner and ghostwriter Ron Goulart, spotlighted this odd passage:

A tiny needle came jabbing out. It dug into his flesh and delivered a shot of mood-altering drug into his system.

One could point out a number of awkward things in these two sentences, but one of the hosts—I think it was Mike—noted what I did when I heard this: hypodermic needles don’t really dig, do they? At least, one really hopes not.

There’s something off about this description. The verb doesn’t align with what the reader is invited to imagine. Which brought to mind Black Hawk Down.

I last read Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down in high school, before the movie came out. I’ve been meaning to reread it for decades now. It’s a brilliant piece of journalism and vividly written, so I don’t want the following to be construed as criticism, but read these short excerpts and see if you notice something that bothered me even as a high school senior when I read it in 2001:

Two of the three men blown out the back were severely injured. One, Delta Master Sergeant Tim “Griz” Martin, had absorbed the brunt of the blast. The [rocket propelled] grenade had poked a football-sized hole right through the skin of the Humvee, blew on through the sandbags, through Martin, and penetrated the ammo can. (p. 115)

Specialist Spalding was still behind the passenger door in the first truck with his rifle out the window, turned in the seat so he could line up his shots, when he was startled by a flash of light down by his legs. It looked like a laser beam shot through the door and up into his right leg. A bullet had pierced the steel of the door and the window, which was rolled down, and had poked itself and fragments of glass and steel straight up his leg from just above his knee all the way up to his hip. He had been stabbed by the shaft of light that poked through the door. He squealed. (p. 125)

Yurek ran across the road to the car to link up with DiTomasso. He passed the alley and saw the downed helicopter to his right. Just as he arrived, the Volkswagen began rocking from the impact of heavy rounds, thunk thunk thunk thunk. Whatever this weapon was, its bullets were poking right through the car. Yurek and the others all hit the ground. He couldn't tell where the shooting was coming from. (p. 168)

The verb poke doesn’t belong in any of these descriptions.

First, poke is just a funny word. You don’t have to subscribe to the whole cellar door theory of sound to realize that. In these intense descriptions of combat, maiming, and death, poke jars on the ear.

Further, poke suggests a small, relatively gentle action. It doesn’t fit what Bowden describes here. An RPG powerful enough to punch “a football-sized hole” through a Humvee shouldn’t be described as poking, nor should bullet fragments and shrapnel poke themselves—an odd reflexive construction—into a soldier’s body. The misalignment in words and meaning is especially clear in the final example, in which a heavy automatic weapon, loud enough to be heard distinctly over the rest of the fighting, is firing through a vehicle at soldiers taking cover behind it.

Finally, the use of poke sticks out—pokes out?—because the rest of the writing is so good. Notice the other verbs Bowden uses to suggest the violence and danger of combat: blow, penetrate, pierce, stab, rock, etc. These are active and vivid verbs and suited to the gravity of the story. Compare the first example above, which is describing the effects of an RPG hitting a Humvee and the men inside, with his initial description of what happened a page before:

The grenade had cut straight through the steel skin of the vehicle in front of the gas cap and gone off inside, blowing the three men in back right out to the street. (p. 114)

Cut is simple, direct, precise, and appropriately violent. Poke is not.

I’ve always figured this was just a case of the writer seeking variety in the thesaurus. One can only describe projectiles destroying targets so many ways. Whatever the case, it was a miscalculation—and a pervasive one. A word search in the Amazon text returned 27 uses of poke in the book. There’s a reason I remember it over twenty years after reading it.

If good writing happens in the verbs, precisely choosing the verbs is paramount, even—or perhaps especially—for good writers. Per Mark Twain:

“[T]he difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

Ready to spew

Trigger warning: This post contains untranslated French words and phrases. Appropriately, as you may be able to infer.

After some internationally public tableaux generated predictable—and, I think, entirely intentional—online outrage, I saw some equally predictable condemnations of the outraged for doing the thing all the kindhearted internet bien pensants love to condemn: “spewing hate.”

If a cliché is a “dead metaphor,” spewing hate must be the deadest of them all. But where most clichés are merely overused word pictures or verbal shortcuts, this one is also dangerous. J’accuse!

Spew is a very old word, almost unchanged in pronunciation from Old English spíwan and having retained both literal and figurative senses for its entire history. But what’s striking to me about spew is that as vomit or throw up or even puke have become far more commonly used for its literal meaning, its metaphorical use has been whittled down to almost the single expression spew hate. It’s rare now to see spew without hate tagging along behind it.

This is a relatively recent development. Here’s Google’s Ngram viewer for various versions of the phrase:

This particular combination of words originated in the 20th century but has taken off since 2000, especially in its most common form, spewing hate.

This jibes with my observations. I first noticed this phrase during college, when it became the de rigeur description of Mel Gibson’s drunken rant following his 2006 DUI arrest. (The unbroken climb in frequency for spewing hate in the chart above begins in 2005.) Given Gibson’s state of intoxication and what he had to say during his arrest, this was an almost accurate description.

But then I noticed that the phrase wouldn’t go away. To my increasing annoyance, within a few years the advocate of every bad opinion and every person caught saying something mildly rude on camera would inevitably be described as “spewing hate”—regardless of whether they could be described as “spewing” or whether what they had said was hateful. As Orwell and CS Lewis observed, words that get stuck within easy reach of popular use soon become yet more synonyms for something one either does or doesn’t like. They become clichés.

And this cliché isn’t just lazy, unimaginative, or gauche. Given the political and cultural valence it usually has, spewing hate also functions as a thought killer. This is where the metaphorical image does its nastiest work. Someone spewing hate is not communicating, they’re just vomiting, and what they have to say is vomit. It needs no consideration or engagement, just a mop and a man to hustle the sick person out the door.

This makes spewing hate a handy phrase for shutting down debate and preventing argument. And a cliché being a cliché, it is, of course, overused.

Its overuse makes it especially dangerous, for two reasons. First, it prevents legitimate argument. With regard to the events that prompted this post, lots of people have legitimate concerns and complaints, and describing them simply as “spewing hate” is an imperious culture war dismissal. Leave us, hateful paysan. Second—and more insidious—any openminded person who sees through this cliché, who investigates someone accused of “spewing hate” and finds them a reasonable person offering measured argument over legitimate concerns, will be more open to people who actually are in the hate business. It’s not only annoying and thought-killing, it’s self-defeating.

As always with clichés, avoid this one. Don’t use it. Don’t share material that does. Make yourself think about your words. And, in this case, just maybe, you’ll be able to consider someone else’s opinion, too.

An annoyance of collective nouns

Last week First Things posted an article by George Weigel on “terms of venery,” that is, collective nouns, especially those used of groups of animals. There are a lot of them. Weigel cites “a pomp of Pekinese,” “a tower of giraffes,” “an ostentation of peacocks,” and “a murmuration of starlings”—among many others—as favorites, and writes that “an exaltation of larks,” which is also the name of a book on these words by the late James Lipton, “may be as good as the venereal game gets.” Veneral being an approximate adjective form of venery, just so we’re clear.

I’ve actually mulled writing about terms of venery for a long time, since the very early days of this blog. But I’ve avoided doing so for a long time because I try to keep this blog relatively positive and these words just plain bug me. So permit me a half-serious rant.

These collective nouns bug me in the way lots of twee, intentionally precious things do, even where they’re meant as jokes—as many of these terms clearly are. (So much so that joke collective nouns have persistently been mistaken for “real” ones, “a congress of baboons” being the best example. This raises the question of who actually gets to decide which of these things is official.)

Which is not to say that some animals don’t have odd collective nouns. Some are quite ancient. Fish move in a school, for instance, because in Old English such a group was called a scolu. The modern alternative shoal is likely the direct descendent of that word and is pronounced almost the same. It’s a strange linguistic accident that it came to resemble the Latinate school. A few others go a ways back as hunting jargon, the professional shop vocabulary of gamekeepers on the estates of the landed aristocracy. But there’s no earthly reason anyone should called a flock of starlings a murmuration.

I didn’t have strong feelings about this until I read an otherwise good novel by a contemporary Southern novelist who used three of the outlandish bird-related ones—I remember a murmuration and a murder—within a few pages of each other during a dramatically and thematically important funeral scene. I was so distracted and irritated that I swore off such terms altogether.

So as far as I’m concerned, and regardless of species, birds gather in flocks, larger mammals in herds, predators in packs, fish in schools. I may not get the lip-pursing amusement of writing about obstinacies and ostentations when some buffalo or peacocks blunder into a scene, but at least I won’t distract the reader.

Weigel ends his article by proposing some new terms of venery to go along with the better established ones. I’d like to end this post by proposing one of my own—a collective noun for groups of collective nouns: an annoyance.

On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.

On the term “assault rifle”

German troops in the Battle of the Bulge carrying (inset) The Sturmgewehr-44, the original assault rifle

Years ago* I wrote an Amazon review for a book on the militarization of American police forces, and among the biggest surprises that came my way when lots of people chose to comment on that review was the accusation that I was “liberal” or otherwise anti-gun because, in the course of describing the military equipment increasingly adopted by even small local police forces, I had used the term assault rifle.

This struck me as an odd reaction. Assault rifle, I thought, may be an awkward politics-adjacent term with probably too-broad connotations but it still denotes a specific thing as precisely as possible. I found it entirely appropriate to use, not least since the author of the book I was reviewing used it, but I still found myself avoiding it over the next few years. Eventually, I became annoyed enough by online arguments about guns—all of which, on both sides, shared a highly emotive imprecision in how they talked about the subject—that I started a blog post with the same title as this one, only to abandon it in incomplete draft form a year or two ago. Why bother?

Well, over the weekend Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons** posted an excellent “mild rant” on precisely this topic: “What is an ‘assault rifle?’” Like me, he was surprised to find himself getting flamed for using the term; like me, he discerned that this had a lot to do with political rather than technical, definitional factors; but unlike me, he took a firm line and expressed it well.

McCollum starts with an assault rifle’s three basic characteristics:

• It has select-fire capability, i.e., it can fire in more than one mode, e.g. fully automatic, semi-automatic, and/or burst

• It feeds ammunition from detachable magazines, as opposed to a belt or internal magazine

• It fires an intermediate rifle cartridge, i.e. a cartridge larger than a pistol cartridge but smaller than full-sized rifle cartridges

This is succinct and technically precise. Stray from these parameters, he notes, and what you have is not an assault rifle. Civilian AR-15s, for instance, that fire an intermediate rifle cartridge and use detachable magazines but can only fire in semi-automatic are not assault rifles—they are simply semi-automatic rifles. An automatic weapon fed from a belt is not an assault rifle, but a machine gun—even if it fires an intermediate cartridge, like the M249 SAW.

Because that third factor—the intermediate cartridge—is decisive. For example, a select-fire weapon with detachable magazines that fires a full-sized rifle cartridge is a light machine gun (like the BAR or Bren); a select-fire weapon with detachable magazines that fires pistol cartridges is a submachine gun (like the Thompson, the MP40, or the UMP). In fact, the term submachine gun was coined to distinguish the smaller, one-man “trench brooms” developed near the end of and immediately following the First World War from the big crew-served belt-fed machine guns—the Maxim, the Vickers, the Spandau—that had already become horribly familiar. Take a look at when the term submachine gun originates and becomes more common. Firearms terminology can be messy, but as in so many other things, a little understanding of history helps.

This is especially true of the term assault rifle. As McCollum points out, assault rifle is a translation of the German Sturmgewehr, a term coined—according to some stories by Hitler himself—to distinguish a newly developed service rifle from its predecessors. The rifle was the Sturmgewehr-44 or StG-44. It was select-fire, fed from a detachable magazine, and it fired an intermediate cartridge, a shortened version of the 7.92mm Mauser rifle round. This proved its key innovation, both for practical reasons (modern infantry combat typically occurs within a few hundred yards, making a rifle that can hit a target 2,000 yards away a waste for all but snipers) and economic ones (reducing the amount of raw materials per round, giving Hitler’s war machine literally more bang for its buck).

Whoever coined the term, it was a helpful designation for a new thing—no previous weapon did precisely what the StG-44 did in the way the StG-44 was designed to do it, and it set the standard for a whole new variety of firearms. Whatever their design, military rifles ever since have been defined according to the StG-44’s characteristics.

And yet there’s that pesky Sturm.***

The word had appealing propaganda value to the Germans and retains it in English, assault being “scary military language” to a large class of politically active people. This has laden a useful and specific term with political connotations. As McCollum notes, assault rifle is often mentally bundled up with assault weapon, virtually meaningless verbiage used for legislation intended to create a “blanket prohibition on firearms that had a military appearance” (emphasis mine), usually related to accessories that don’t materially alter the lethality of the weapons in question.

The result is two political camps: one that, operating either in ignorance or bad faith, makes sweeping statements about vaguely defined “assault weapons” in pursuit of even more sweeping legislation, and another camp that has reacted to this rhetoric by avoiding the term assault rifle in the belief that it using it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. As McCollum puts it, they think calling an assault rifle an assault rifle is “surrendering to the people who want to ban guns.”

But the opposite is actually true. McCollum:

We should use the term assault rifle in its technically proper context because to do otherwise would be to essentially surrender the use of language to people who are deliberately misusing it in an attempt to pass legislative agendas.

McCollum is right. If our language is to have any set meaning, it depends on knowledgeable people of good faith to insist on precise definitions and careful usage. Changing our vocabulary to avoid words tainted by political debate is to play an Orwellian game that those of good faith can’t win. And, as should be clear anywhere you care to look, there is far more at stake in this than a single firearms term of art.

More if you’re interested

CJ Chivers’s The Gun is a deeply researched and authoritative history of automatic weapons from the Gatling gun through the first truly automatic weapon, the Maxim gun, through the submachine gun and light machine gun eras until settling into the dueling developments of the AK-47 and AR-15/M-16. Along the way he gives brief space to the StG-44 and notes its crucial role in the rise of the assault rifle. I highly recommend it.

Speaking of the StG-44, Forgotten Weapons has done several great videos on the rifle over the years. You can check out two good ones, including a range demonstration, here and here, and a comparison with a more famous early assault rifle, the AK-47, here.

Notes

* By a weird coincidence, I posted that review ten years ago today.

** I think I discovered Forgotten Weapons while researching the Griswold and Gunnison revolver for Griswoldville. I had seen demonstrations of reproduction pistols but McCollum offered a solid history and technical breakdown that proved very helpful. You can watch that here. Subsequently, when casting about for names for minor characters in my most recent book, The Snipers, I settled on “McCollum” for a member of the team that makes the climactic assault.

*** Apparently some people want to translate Sturmgewehr using the most literal cognate available in English: storm. But as several native German speakers point out in the comments on McCollum’s video, assault is a standard, unremarkable, accurate translation for Sturm. The “storm” the German word is related to is not the kind predicted by the local weatherman, but the kind undertaken by medieval infantry scrambling up siege ladders or Washington’s Continental regulars at Yorktown—storming the ramparts. This obviously means “assault.”