Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Words matter

Someone in the biz who works with words (i.e. someone who should know better) recently missed out a word from the title of my third novel when she was writing to me. She missed out the But from But I Told You Last Year That I Loved You, and it pissed me off. The But is important. I put the But there on purpose. The But implies so much background meaning.

In writing that last paragraph, I typed “pissed off”, and then thought – Oh dear, some of my readers will find that vulgar, I had better change it to “I was annoyed,” and I changed it and changed it back several times until I thought – Dammit! Pissed off expresses my feelings perfectly. I am using pissed off.

Moving on...

You know how in the past some people used the word “cripple” and “spastic” as terms of abuse, until more thinking people pointed out that it’s not acceptable to use a disability as an insult? Well, I’ve noticed that “autistic” is now the insult du jour. That’s not acceptable either. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder.

That’s all.

Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about this:

goodbye

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh Sue, I'm so glad you were pissed ... lol! It shows passion. And I've decided that personally, I'm going to tell it like it is too!

And you're right about the name calling, totally wrong and says more about the caller, I think.

But most of all I'm really looking forward to tomorrow...