Welcome back to this burble through the tulgey wood of Dan Brown's grammar. Today's installment will focus in on a particular area of English usage that Dan seems to have a particular problem with: prepositions.

As before, we'll be plumbing the depths of these two tomes:

* Angels & Demons, paperback, Pocket Star Books, 2001 (hereafter "A&D").

* The Da Vinci Code, hardcover, Doubleday, 2003 (hereafter "DVC").

What Not to End a Sentence With

Sometimes it's the little things that can really trip you up. I'm referring to prepositions, those simplest parts of speech whose job it is to signal how the noun phrase they precede relates to the rest of the sentence. In a language like English, which has no inflections or other case markers, these little function words can be all that hold a sentence together.

And they can be remarkably easy to get wrong. Using the right preposition seems to be one of the last things that non-native speakers of English master, and one that Dan Brown evidently hasn't mastered to this day. Case in point:

"The sun helped dissolve the image of the empty eye socket
emblazoned into his mind." [A&D, 48]

But to "emblazon" means to decorate or depict, and its root verb "blazon" means to display, adorn, or embellish. In other words, it's something you do to the surface of something, not to its insides. This makes "emblazoned" a dubious choice in any case for what Dan is struggling to convey ("branded" or "seared" would have worked better). But given that this is what he decided to go with, the preposition to use with "emblazoned" should have been, not "into," but "on," or possibly "onto."

And, lest you think this a mere momentary lapse, Dan does it again. Check out:

The dream was emblazoned in his mind. [A&D, 4]

Sometimes, though, there is no single right choice: more than one preposition can work from the standpoint of syntax, it's just the semantics that changes. That semantic shift explains why the following Brownism seems subtly wrong:

... we are grateful for the power that created us. [A&D, 110]

"Grateful" is one of those words that can govern two different prepositions -- you can be "grateful for" or "grateful to" something -- but the sense of the sentence is altered in the process. So, what you're "grateful for" is the benefit that has been or is being conferred on you -- e.g.:

The toddler was grateful for the Chihuahua she received on her birthday.

... whereas what (or whom) you're "grateful to" is the actor that has conferred the benefit:

The toddler was grateful to the Chihuahua that saved him from the rattlesnake.
(Hey, that actually happened!)

When it comes to being grateful, we can even use both prepositions at once, as in:

I'm grateful to you for all your help.

All we have to do is bear in mind the simple rule that we are "grateful for" a gift, but "grateful to" the giver. It's a rule Dan Brown runs afoul of in the above-quoted sentence, worth repeating here:

... we are grateful for the power that created us. [A&D, 110]

The gratitude we feel vis-a-vis "the power that created us" ought to be analogous to that which the toddler feels vis-a-vis "the Chihuahua that saved him" -- that is, gratitude "to" the bestower of a benefit:

... we are grateful to the power that created us.

By using "for" here instead, Dan seems to be saying that "the power that created us" is something we have had bestowed upon us as a gift or other benefit. Which is tantamount to saying we are grateful to have been given the power to create ourselves. This is even more skewed than Dan's usual theology, insofar as it implies an infinite regress!

Here's a more rarified example, involving -- take your choice -- a misuse of the preposition for, an incorrect possessive, or simply another wrong-word-in-the-right-place malapropism:

Despite Sauniere's reputation for being reclusive,
his recognition for dedication to the arts made him an easy man to revere. [DVC, 15]

It's pretty easy to see what happened here: The passage would have worked well enough as:

Despite Sauniere's reputation for being reclusive,
his reputation for dedication to the arts made him an easy man to revere.

... except Dan didn't want to use the word "reputation" twice in the same sentence. (That's a good instinct, incidentally -- repetitions like this make a writer look careless and/or lacking in imagination.)

No, the problem was with what happened next: Dan probably went searching for a synonym for "reputation" in a Thesaurus and plugged in the first one that sounded halfway right. What's really at issue here is that words that are synonymous in one context may not be as synonymous in another. So "his recognition for ..." doesn't quite cut it as a replacement for "his reputation for ..."

Why not? Because, whereas "reputation" is something inherent to a person, "recognition" is something that others confer on him or her. Dan might have gotten away with something like:

Despite Sauniere's reputation for being reclusive,
his international recognition for dedication to the arts made him an easy man to revere.

As it stands, the sentence sounds slightly "off" yet it's hard to put your finger on the reason. This is such a common experience in reading Dan Brown's work that it deserves its own syndrome name -- maybe something like Perplexus Brownensis (the Brown Perplex).

We'll close this tour through the minefield of Dan Brown's grammar with a pair of mirror-image misappropriations of prepositions. Here's the first one:

Langdon thought of Galileo's belief of duality. [A&D, 75]

To grok what's going on here, it helps to know that verbs can govern prepositions even when there isn't a verb in sight. That's because certain nouns (the technical term for them is "nominalizations") are derived from verbs, the way "belief" is derived from "believe." So, when Dan writes about "Galileo's belief of duality" instead of "Galileo's belief in duality," the reason it sounds wrong is that "Galileo believed of duality" would sound just as wrong.

(That makes for a good quick check on whether you've got the right preposition, incidentally: if it doesn't work for the verb, chances are it's not going to work for any nominalization derived from the verb either.)

But I did say a pair of mis-prepositions -- here's the second one:

"We had hoped that you might help us answer that very question,
considering your knowledge in symbology ..." [DVC, 10]

"Knowledge in symbology" certainly sounds just as awkward as "belief of duality." But what really makes these into mirror-image mistakes is that all Dan had to do to make everything copasetic was to swap the two offending prepositions: "belief in duality" and "knowledge of symbology" would've worked fine!

* * *

Well, I started out by saying that, when it comes to the instructive errors in Dan Brown's oeuvre, there's a lot of material to work with. An embarrassment of embarrassments, if you will. So much, in fact, that -- whereas I'd hoped to wrap up this second Stave of the Accidental Author blog with the current installment and move on to other topics -- I couldn't fit everything in this time around.

(And, just to add to something I've said before: in preparation for the upcoming, hopefully final blogisode, I'm re-reading Angels & Demons for what has to be the fifth time and -- enjoying the hell out of it! As a writer, the man is a master! Now, if only he could write ...)

In any case, next time we'll be done with Dan for (almost) sure, and on to greener (or at least less Brown) pastures. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to this vaguely instructive slog through the thins and thickets of Dan Brown's prose. This time we'll be shifting our focus from the mishandling of individual words to the broader phenomena of ungrammaticality. As before, we'll be plumbing the depths of these two tomes:

* Angels & Demons (hereafter "A&D").

* The Da Vinci Code (hereafter "DVC").

Also this time I'm going to start by going back to the very beginning, with the passage from DVC that first alerted me to the possibility there might be something seriously amiss in Dan Brown's understanding of what da Fonseca and Carolino called "English as She is Spoke."

How Much is that Zeugma in the Window?

How many of y'all know what a "zeugma" is? Don't all holler at once.

Actually, it's a fairly obscure term for a not-all-that-rare rhetorical device: the yoking together ("zeugma" means "yoke" in Greek) of two or more parallel constructions, by means of a single shared concept. Here's a classic (in the true sense of the word) example: Cicero's indictment of Sassia, using "conquered" as the yoking term:

She conquered shame with passion, fear with audacity, reason with madness. (Pro Cluentio, VI 15)

But "zeugma" is also the name given to an erroneous such yoking, where the constructions being joined together are not true parallels, but slightly misaligned, requiring the yoking term to be interpreted in mutually inconsistent ways. (Technically, this isn't a zeugma per se, but rather a special subclass called a "syllepsis" -- but try telling that to my Webster's.)

Whatever you choose to call it, the results are the same: a sort of grammatical speed bump disconcerting enough to rattle the reader's teeth. For instance:

Arthur and his driver's license expired on the same afternoon.

Here's another one (probably intentional) from the early Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Angel One":

Riker: You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.

And here, finally, is Dan Brown's (almost certainly unintentional) contribution:

Sophie, after months in the congestion of London, was eager for the smells of nature
and to start her vacation right away. [DVC, 140]

What's the problem here? Simply that Dan thought "eager" could serve as the yoking term all by its lonesome. What he failed to realize is that "eager for" and "eager to" are different constructions, calling for different complements -- "eager for" takes a noun phrase ("the smells of nature"), whereas "eager to" needs a whole dependent clause ("start her vacation right away").

Once I had tripped to the notion that, grammar-wise at least, all was not as it should be in the Brownian oeuvre, I myself became eager for the smells of Dan's solecisms and to start rooting out as many as I could right away.

The results of my quest are offered below, in hopes they will steer you, Dear Reader/Writer, clear of similar shoals and reefs.

Agreeing to Disagree

You can't get much more basic than subject-verb agreement. You really, really don't want to mismatch a singular present-tense verb with a plural subject, or vice versa.

And, hey, that's easy to avoid in English, whose verbs have only one single, solitary person-marker to choose from. I'm referring, of course, to the -s ending that differentiates third-person present-tense singular ("he/she/it walks") from everything else ("I/we/you/they walk"). By comparison, Russian verb conjugations have six separate forms (for first, second, and third persons, singular and plural), and German verbs have seven (they add one for the informal second-person plural, though Lord knows why -- Germans aren't all that informal). English itself used to be more complicated, back when we had a viable second-person singular to contend with ("thou walkest"). So count your blessings, along with your persons.

By now you're probably asking yourself: well, if it's that simple, how could even Dan Brown screw it up? But in so doing you would be reckoning without Dan's breathtaking audacity when it comes to mangling English grammar. Take a look at Exhibit A:

"The group claiming responsibility calls themselves the Illuminati." [A&D, 99]

Now, admittedly, this is not a garden-variety subject-verb misconcordance. In fact, "the group ... calls" is a dead-on correct third-person present singular construction, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough. Because, as used here, "calls" is a reflexive verb, meaning its subject is identical to its object (e.g., "I call myself Bill," "you call yourself Ferd," etc.). And, unfortunately, Dan has chosen a third-person plural pronoun ("themselves") as the object to go with his third-person singular verb ("calls").

Once again, it's possible to reconstruct whence this cometh (yet another English conjugational archaism we no longer have to worry about). As a collective noun, the word "group" can have overtones of plurality. There are even folks (including, as a friend points out, most of the inhabitants of the British Isles) who might countenance such formulations as "the group have utterly failed to agree among themselves" -- but even there, s-v agreement is maintained (by using the third-person plural "have").

Yet, even if we were to stretch a point and allow that "group" might be singular or plural, surely it can't be both at the same time.

Unless, of course, you're Dan Brown.

This Verb Has No

Since we've already broached the subject of objects, albeit reflexively, let's carry on a bit further in that vein.

Verbs, as you'll recall from grade-school grammar, come in two flavors. Most, the so-called "transitive verbs," refer to actions by which an agent produces a change in something other than him- or herself. To put it another way, transitive verbs are those which take a direct object -- e.g., "I kicked the ball" or "Tom Sawyer painted the fence."

OTOH, some few verbs, the "intransitive" ones, denote internal states or experiences that exert no immediate effect on the world external to the subject, and consequently do not take an object -- "I thought," "Rip Van Winkle slept," "Topsy just grew," etc.

Pretty straightforward, right? Anyway, the point is this: leave the object out of a transitive-verb predicate, and you leave the reader hanging (kinda the way the title of this section does).

So how does Dan Brown manage to do precisely that, not once, but twice on the same page? I'm referring to page 408 of Dan's Meisterstueck, where the following two sentences occur within ten lines of each other:

Even when Sophie was grown and away at university,
she had the sense her grandfather was watching over. [DVC, 408]

Watching over ... what exactly?

"Shall the Church be permitted to influence indefinitely
with murder and extortion?" [DVC, 408-9]

Influencing ... whom?

I don't know what was going on in Dan's life when he hit page 408, but it was for sure a bad day for direct objects.

Here's another example a bit less obvious in nature:

Langdon's eyes were transfixed on the pyramids. [A&D, 268]

What Dan doubtless meant to say here was:

Langdon's eyes were fixed on the pyramids.

Equally doubtlessly, he let himself be seduced by the more elevated sound of "transfixed." He should have resisted temptation. Whereas "fixed" can serve as an adjective, "transfixed" works here as a passive verb. So, if we were to recast the sentence in active voice, we'd want to come up with something like:

The pyramids transfixed Langdon's eyes.

Trouble is, the preposition "on" blocks that interpretation. If we'd wanted the pyramids to be the implied agent of the passive-voice original, we'd have had to say:

Langdon's eyes were transfixed by the pyramids.

... so the closest we could come to untangling this snarl into an active voice construction would be:

[Some unnamed thing] transfixed Langdon's eyes on[to?] the pyramids.

Nah, that sounds wrong too. Any way you look at this chimera, it's got something missing.

Even Dan himself seems to realize there's something askew with the above usage, to judge by the fact that he does get it more or less correct, fewer than a hundred pages later:

Langdon stood transfixed as Vittoria disappeared. [A&D, 364]
So the object of our story is: when it comes to your own writing, always be sure to watch over, and don't let the slings and arrows of Dan Brown's outrageous fortune influence.

Back in three days to take up Dan's Herculean struggles with prepositions (and, here, you thought the Augean stables smelled bad!).

Hi again, and welcome back to this extended tour of how not to write English prose, illustrated with literary landmarks (of a sort) from the works of Mr. Dan Brown. Once again, our Baedekers on this trek will be:

* Angels & Demons (hereafter "A&D").

* The Da Vinci Code (hereafter "DVC").

Everyone knows Dan Brown made his name authoring religion-based thrillers. He is less well known (undeservedly so) for his authorship of religion-based bloopers.

To begin our plunge into the faux-theological realms that make up marrow and bone of Dan's oeuvre, here we have Angels & Demons heroine Vittoria Vetra earnestly declaring that --

"Rectifying science with religion has been my father's life dream." [A&D, 68]

Since "rectify" means to correct, to set right, or to purify, we might at first interpret Ms. Vetra to mean that her father dreams of using religion to get science to straighten up and fly right. Well, maybe, but that would make it hard to explain why Vittoria goes on, in her very next breath, to state that her father --

"... hoped to prove that science and religion are two totally compatible fields --
two different approaches to finding the same truth."

No, I suspect it's safer to assume that what Dan did here was to confuse "rectify" with "reconcile." After all, given the context, "reconciling science with religion ..." makes a lot more sense.

Next, we have Commander Olivetti, head of the Vatican's Swiss Guards, staunchly proclaiming,

"I am a sworn defendant of the Catholic Church." [A&D, 133]

The lesson here is, just because you name a character after a typewriter, doesn't mean you don't still have to watch out for the typos. Since, unlike his creator, Commander Olivetti is not at risk of being sued or indicted by the Vatican, we can safely assume that Dan meant to say he is a sworn "defender" (not "defendant") of the Catholic Church.

But Dan's just getting started in his somewhat skewed take on Catholicism. How about this one, also uttered by the theologically inept Olivetti?

"The camerlengo is only a priest here. He is not even canonized." [A&D, 135]

Saints preserve us! I'm not a Catholic, nor do I play one on TV, but last time I checked "canonization" meant elevation to sainthood -- "to place in the canon [i.e., catalog] of saints, to glorify" as Webster's puts it. I can't think that Dan had the glorificational dictionary meaning in mind, or he wouldn't have coupled it with the de-emphasizing, demeaning adverb "even" -- "He is not even canonized" -- implying that, whatever else it is, Brownian canonization is no big deal.

So, what could Dan possibly have in mind here? "Ordained," perhaps? But ordination is the ceremony by which one becomes a priest in the first place. That makes "unordained priest" an oxymoron, so re-reading the passage as --

"The camerlengo is only a priest here. He is not even ordained."

-- would transform it into arrant, Monty-Pythonesque gibberish.

Whatever it is that Dan thinks he means by canonization, though, he must really, really think he means it -- because he does it again! Check out:

"If the faith of a canonized priest did not protect him from the evils of Satan,
what hope was there for the rest of us?" [A&D, 174].

What hope, indeed?

And now the stuff you've all been waiting for: Sex and Malapropism and Catholicism (Oh, my!):

Our ancient heritage and our very physiologies tell us sex is natural ...
and yet modern religion decries it as shameful,
teaching us to fear our sexual desire as the hand of the devil. [DVC, 310]

Well, okay ... But I'm not sure "hand" is the thing you'd want to use here (all depends on what kind of sex Dan is talking about, I guess). Maybe "tool of the devil"?

And speaking of hands:

Aringarosa had entered Gandolfo's Astronomy Library with his head held high,
fully expecting to be lauded by throngs of welcoming hands, ... [DVC, 414-415]

I've got to hand it to Dan. He deserves a hand, because, hands down, he seems to have more trouble with hands than any other part of the human anatomy.

Here, he not only has hands performing the unlikely actions of thronging, and welcoming, he's even got them lauding. I'm guessing he was misled by the superficial similarity between "laud" and "applaud." Regrettably, other than both deriving from the Latin, the two words have nothing in common: "applaud" comes from plaudere ("to strike," by extension "to clap"), whereas "laud" comes from laus, laudis ("praise," "commendation," "glory").

And there's the real problem: as praise, "lauding" is what John Searle calls a "speech act." It's a quintessentially verbal action, in other words, something you do with language, with tongue or pen. Only in sign language, then, might it be possible to laud someone with your hands.

Talk to the hand, indeed!

Winding Down

We're into the home stretch now, folks. And to lead off the final lap of this malapropian marathon, we have our old friend Vittoria Vetra, pounding down the track with unrelenting force:

A single sentient thought began pounding at Vittoria with unrelenting force. [A&D, 104]

It's just that, last time I looked, "sentience" referred to the ability to sense or perceive, to be aware or conscious. Thoughts are things that we may perceive or be conscious of; they are not, so far as we know, perceptive or conscious in their own right.

Then, too:

A career hazard of symbologists was a tendency to extract hidden meaning
from situations that had none. [DVC, 171-2]

I'd make that an "occupational hazard," wouldn't you? A "career hazard" is more like getting caught e-mailing pornography over the corporate intranet.

But the real point here is that you don't need to be egregiously far off the mark to offend the ear of your reader.

Here's another near-miss:

On all sides, towering bookcases burgeoned with volumes.
[DVC, 173]

A neat trick, this, given that "burgeon" means "to grow or develop quickly; to put forth buds, to flourish." The bookcases in question are already "towering," and now they're supposed to grow some more, and sprout books?

An intriguing metaphor, perhaps? Well, maybe -- from the pen of a master. Given that it's good old Dan, though, I suspect he just meant "bulged with volumes."

Idioms, too, offer boundless opportunities for a dedicated Malapropian like our resident Kludgemeister.

Because deposits were protected from police inspection by privacy laws
and were attached to numbered accounts rather than people's names,
thieves could rest easily knowing their stolen goods were safe
and could never be traced to them. [DVC, 196]

"Rest easily"? But how hard could it be to rest?

"Rest easy" is in fact an idiom, one of those fossilized phrases impervious to the ordinary strictures of grammar. The "easy" doesn't modify the verb "rest" (as a normal adverb would); instead the whole phrase "rest easy" operates as a single irreducible unit of meaning. In that respect it's like "rest merry" (not "rest merrily") in "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (and a ha'penny to you if you knew where that comma was supposed to go!). So remember to repress that urge toward excessive grammaticality when confronted by those pesky idioms -- they tend to break, not bend.

And while we're on the subject, here's another semi-idiom gone awry:

Langdon had harbored several fantasies about what they might find inside this box,
but clearly he had been wrong on every account. [DVC, 197]

Um, shouldn't that be "wrong on every count"?

You'd think Dan's malapropiscatorial ingenuity would flag eventually. But, no, with fewer than a dozen pages to go before Da Vinci's finale, he's still going strong (note: that's not "going strongly" -- you can rest easy on that count).

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's Mr. Malaprop's Last Stand:

Andre Vernet was a dear friend of Jacques,
and Jacques trusted him explicitly. [DVC, 443]

This should be "trusted him implicitly," of course, but I think I follow Dan's reasoning: If implicit is good, explicit must be better, right?

Not in this case, unfortunately. "Implicit trust" is trust that goes without saying -- "unquestioning or unreserved, absolute" trust, as Webster's would have it. It's a poor kind of trust that must be made explicit ...

* * *

Well, I hope we can all agree that Dan Brown is far, far better off as a gazillionaire best-selling author than as an English teacher -- where he would have definitely encountered a "career hazard" or two in years to come. And you can trust me on that, explicitly.

But now that we've burbled through the tulgey wood of his winning way with words, are we done with Dan? Hardly. We've merely scratched the surface.

What better place to start this magical mystery tour through the basics of English grammar and usage than with the most basic of basics? I refer, of course, to that old sine qua non of language itself: the word.

In our efforts to comply with DeSmedt's corollary to Heinlein's Rule 1 of Writing ("You must write right," remember?), finding the right word is tantamount. No, it's not -- it's paramount. (Just checking that you're paying attention.)

Finding just the right word can be critical in life as well as literature. Singularity's quasi-hero consultant Jon Knox certainly finds it so: his whole philosophy of consulting boils down to the proposition that the right word, le mot juste, is a lever long enough to overcome the inertia of entrenched attitudes and "shift ... the focus toward a mutually acceptable vision."

It seems to me one of the best ways to illustrate the importance of choosing the right word is to show you what happens when you choose the wrong one. Fortunately, as indicated in the immediately preceding blogisode, we have a veritable cornucopia of horrible examples ready to hand, drawn from the oeuvre of an author whom, for reasons that shall soon become painfully apparent, I call --

The Kludgemeister

Once upon a time, before he turned his hand to world domination (literary division), Dan Brown did a stint as an English teacher at his prep school alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy (see here, if'n you don't believe me). And, while I suspect his former students may be due a rebate, Dan still has many lessons to teach us.

(Parenthetically, one good reason to pick on Dan is that, with sales of the Da Vinci Code topping 70 million worldwide, there's a better than 1-in-100 chance that any random person on the face of the planet will own a copy. So you can't cop out by saying you couldn't find the book to check the references. Six degrees of separation indeed!

(As to those references -- and at the risk of further parenthesizing this already parenthetical remark -- let it be known that I'm drawing my examples from the following editions of Dan's two Robert Langdon thrillers:

* Angels & Demons, paperback, Pocket Star Books, 2001 (hereafter "A&D").

* The Da Vinci Code, hardcover, Doubleday, 2003 (hereafter "DVC").

Wherever I quote from either of these works in the text below, I'll tell you where to find the cited passage in a bracketed annotation consisting of three-letter title abbreviation plus page number.))

Anyway, back to the books.

Yet before I launch into their multitudinous faults, some provisos are in order. To begin with, truth be told (and, let's face it, what else are blogs good for? (just kidding!)) -- I kinda like Dan Brown's stuff, in a guilty-pleasure, potato-chips-and-salted-peanuts sort of way.

Indeed, at times, his prose even achieves a measure of lyricism. Check out, e.g., his description of Castel Gandolfo on [DVC, 149], or the vision that inspires Robert Langdon to solve the riddle of the cryptex [DVC, 420].

Such cherished moments are, alas, all too rare. The overall impression wafting off Dan's work is one of awkwardness, of artlessness raised to the level of art. In the world of systems engineering where I spend most of my waking hours, this kind of inspired clumsiness is called a "kludge."

As I hope you'll agree after reading this, Dan richly deserves his title of "The Kludgemeister."

Asleep at the Switch?

Not that it's all poor Dan's fault. On their way out to the world, his books did, after all, pass through the hands of folks who have some claim to being professional men of letters -- namely, his publishers and editors. Yet not only did none of them address the many stylistic gaffes we'll deal with in this and the next blogisode or so, no one, as far as I can tell, even troubled to have Dan's text copyedited!

Don't believe me? How else would you explain this gem:

The man stood, straightening his jacket. "His master requests that you make yourselves at home." [DVC, 226]

But the man in question is Remy the butler, and it's clear from context that the "master" he's referring to is his own employer, Sir Leigh Teabing. Surely, Remy would have said "My master" (as he did only six pages earlier [DVC, 220]), and not "His master"?

I suspect what happened here is that the offending quote started out as a descriptive passage, or perhaps indirect speech, something like this:

The man stood, straightening his jacket. His master, he explained, had requested his guests to make themselves at home.

Then somebody must have decided it would work better as dialog, but failed to follow through on the pronomial implications. Point is, no copyeditor worth his or her salt would've let this one go undetected and uncorrected.

Sorry, folks, that's all the exculpation we've got time for. Next order of business is to grab your copies of A&D and DVC and prepare to sink your teeth into the mystery meat of Dan Brown's prose.

Master of Malaprop

A malapropism is simply a case of the right word in the wrong place. Born French (mal a propos, literally meaning "ill suited to the purpose"), the term owes its English naturalization to Richard Sheridan's 1775 play "The Rivals" -- more particularly, to Sheridan's character Mrs. Malaprop, who was given to saying things like "He is the very pineapple (= pinnacle) of politeness."

Trust me on this: malapropisms are to be avoided at all costs, being hazardous to your health as a writer. At best they'll render your serious, sober-sided prose unintentionally hilarious. At worst they can reduce it to utter incomprehensibility. We'll see examples of both below, because ...

Move over, Mrs. Malaprop -- here comes Dan Brown!

Let's start with a trivial example of the genre, a warm-up, if you will. Here's a line from the scene in Angels & Demons where Maximilian Kohler, director-general of CERN, helpfully expands the acronym "GUT" for ace Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon:

"General Unified Theory," Kohler quipped. [A&D, 24]

All well and good, except that, if the subject is physics, "GUT" should stand for "Grand Unified Theory." Strictly speaking, this isn't a malapropism, I suppose. I mean, there could be a General Unified Theory of something or other out there somewhere. Maybe even a GUT (or GLUT) of Mrs. Malaprop's pineapples (after all, in a book where the heroine Vittoria Vetra can disprove one of Einstein's fundamental theorems with tunafish [A&D, 49], all bets are off). But taken in context, it's wrong.

A mere bagatelle, you may say. I beg to differ: in a book that intimately involves antimatter and cosmology, I think the author ought to at least try to get the scientific terminology right, particularly when the "quip" in question is ostensibly voiced by the head of Europe's leading particle physics laboratory.

Be that as it may, let's move on to less questionably quibblesome instances. Here's Langdon decrying how the Illuminati infiltrated the Masonic Order and manipulated such Master Masons as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Those worthies are excused, however, on grounds that they were --

...honest, God-fearing men who were unaware of the Illuminati stronghold on the Masons.
[A&D, 39]

Problem is, a "stronghold" is a fortress or citadel. Not exactly the sort of thing you'd likely be unaware of, especially if you were the Mason it was sitting on. No, I suspect Dan meant to say "stranglehold" here.

This is a particularly good example of how insidious malapropisms can be: it's so close to right it's hard to hear what's wrong with it. The lesson here is: keep your guard up -- if a word sounds slightly off, slightly discordant, trust that feeling!

Next up, we've got:

A chopper appeared, arching across the open valley toward them. [A&D, 49].

The trouble here is that "to arch" means to span some space from one side to the other. Remember the first line from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn -- the poem we all learned in high school -- about "The rude bridge that arched the flood." That's what "arching" is all about.

So, we'd have to be talking one very elongated chopper (a "stretch helicopter" -- what a concept!), to arch across an entire valley like that. Or does Dan perhaps mean "arcing"?

Back to the Illuminati again; this time we learn that --

Their roots reach wide. [A&D, 66]

Except it's typically branches that "reach wide." Everywhere outside Dan Brown's little garden of prose, roots tend to "run deep."

So, now that I've finally stopped obsessing over the whys and wherefores of Singularity, where do we go from here?

As I guess you've noticed by now, it's been hard keeping to a plan, any kind of plan, for this blog. All your faithful Inadvertent Author (me) is trying to do is tell the simple tale of how Singularity came to be -- with a smattering of life lessons and handy household hints thrown in for good measure -- but the tale itself seems to elude simplification, preferring instead to spin off into reminiscences of grad-school fiascos and pontifications on the nature of story per se. I don't know about you, but I could sure use a roadmap.

So here goes. No promises, but from where I sit right now, the ensuing weeks (and months (and -- who knows? -- maybe millennia)) of Inadvertent Author blog look sorta like this.

I'm going to chronicle my bass-ackwards journey of rediscovery through the thickets of techniques and tropes -- things every natural-born author comes naturally endowed with, encoded in helical rungs of guanine, adenine, cytosine, and thymine. Including:

* My painstaking reconstruction of the periodic table of (story) elements: character, setting, props -- you name it.

* How I stitched it all together in polymer chains of storybeats, scenes, whole storylines.

* My encounters with the reality beyond the book: the sociology and sociopathology of readers, book doctors, agents, editors, and publishers.

But before getting to any of that, I'm going to back up and start with the basics -- namely: the norms of English vocabulary, grammar, and style. Hey, just because this stuff is simple, doesn't mean it can't trip you up, as I'll try to illustrate in what follows.

This time I'm going to do it, I swear. I'm going to have done with the digressions and just tell you flat out why I wrote Singularity. Not least because, once I've finally dispatched this topic, the stuff that's coming up is much more interesting.

So this is it, the bite-the-bullet blogisode.

But First ...

I do have to cut in here for just a moment to qualify what I was saying in the last installment, about the purpose of stories being to capture and explore human motivation. That's true enough in its way, but perhaps too narrowly construed. What I should have said is that the function of stories is to capture and explore causation in general. Now, it so happens that one of the perennially most interesting and survival-enhancing types of causation to capture and explore is the one that revolves around human behavior/action (=motivation). But stories can be used to investigate other modes of causality as well.

Cases in point: mythologies, just-so stories, and the like. How the elephant got his trunk and how winter turns to spring when Demeter gets her daughter Persephone back from Hades. Note, however, that even these causal explanations of natural phenomena are cast in terms of quasi-human motivation: the Elephant Child's 'satiable curiosity and Ceres' mother-love, respectively. We tend to project our motivations, and our stories, onto the cosmos as a whole.

Don't believe it? Well, John Seely Brown of the Institute for Research on Learning holds that even expert physicists, when confronted with a novel experimental set-up, do not immediately repair to their mathematical models, but instead construct a "causal story" [1]:

This sort of imputation of causality -- constructing a causal story -- involves a great deal of informal reasoning and manipulating of assumptions that standard explications inevitably overlook. Rather than simply pondering abstractions, this essential sort of reasoning involves "seeing through" abstractions, models, and paradigmatic examples to the world they represent, and then penetrating that world to explore the causality that underlies it.

Hey, if we weren't forever imputing human motives to the blind machinations of Nature, "anthropomorphize" wouldn't even be a (barely pronounceable) verb!

Well, that's enough of that. Wouldn't have happened at all, if I hadn't been so focused on motivation, because of what was coming next.

And now on to our story. No, really.

Here, as promised, is not one story of what moved me to write Singularity, but three. Each is the truth, and nothing but -- in its own way. Take your pick.

Story 1: Lost Weekends

If it hadn't rained all that Memorial Day weekend, you wouldn't be reading this now.

As it was, the rain suited my mood.

It was the apogee of the dot-com era, which meant that the cliff edge cum downward plunge was already in sight. Everybody wanted a piece of the new economy. The venture capital funds were sloshing with money, and there's the rub. There aren't all that many knowledgeable VCs out there, certainly not enough for the major funds to add senior staff at the same pace as their investors were shoveling in the dough. In a situation like that, you've got one of two choices: start turning away cash (unthinkable to a robber-baron subculture whose mantra was "never leave money on the table"), or start increasing the value of the deals. That in turn amounted to a lockout on the low end, as inelasticity in the supply of venture capital expertise spiked the value of the average investment far beyond what most startups could hope to justify.

Mine included. Together with a computational linguistics friend from Georgetown University, I'd been trying to put together some conversational agent technology -- software that would enable computers to interact with people in plain English. Don and I figured it would revolutionize customer service, Internet search, even entertainment. It still may do, but Don and I won't be part of it.

All this was becoming achingly, transparently clear in the cold, gray light of that rainy Saturday dawn.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I'm not certifiable. At least not in the dictionary-definition sense, according to which madness consists in continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result. Instead, I decided to do something completely different.

So it was that I set to work on that bleak Memorial Day weekend and, by Thanksgiving weekend, I had a first draft of Singularity.

* * *

Whew, that was pretty depressing! Let me back up and try again.

Story 2: It Was About Time

In fact, it was all about time ... running out.

A friend and fellow writer once told me that the thesis interruptus syndrome I spoke of a while ago was a common enough grad-student malady, a subconscious stratagem for forestalling entry into the world of adult responsibility. That was maybe okay back then, but now I found I hated the prospect of growing old without ever growing up.

Put plainly, I didn't want to leave the second millennium behind with nothing lasting to show for it.

Besides, in between my dissertation meltdown and the point at which I picked up my metaphoric quill again, I'd had some pretty good "completion experiences" -- including the creation of that selfsame conversational agent technology I was talking about a moment ago (the technology worked fine, it was the funding that sputtered to an ignominious halt).

It seemed the time was right to take one more run at writing something big.

* * *

But no, that's not quite it either. One last try, then.

Story 3: The Rush

Would you believe I fell in love?

This is less a story about why I started writing than about why, having started, I kept on writing. But that's an important ingredient in its own right, as we'll see when we touch, albeit briefly, on Heinlein's Rules for Writers.

In a word, I tried to put everything I love into Singularity: Carl Sagan, quantum mechanics, and crazy cosmologies. How it feels to stand on the bridge at midnight as your ship sets out for the open sea. The last line of Our Town (the Thornton-Wilder-correctness police wouldn't let me leave it in -- more about that later, when I talk about the missing scene from "Midnight to Dawn"). Even a brief passage from James Carse's "The Way the Soul Sees."

It got to the point where -- I don't know any other way to put this -- I fell in love. With the characters, with the story, with the pure, unalloyed joy of writing the thing. Because writing, at its core, conveys a sense of life as endless malleability, scary and exhilarating all at once. Those six months from Memorial Day to Thanksgiving became one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

* * *

So, let this be a lesson to you: real life is multi-determinate. Things happen for reasons, but very few things happen for only one reason.

References

[1] John Seely Brown, "Toward a New Epistemology for Learning," in Claude Frasson and Gilles Gauthier (eds.), Intelligent Tutoring Systems: At the Crossroads of Artificial Intelligence and Education (Ablex: Norwood NJ, 1990).

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