I wrote the other night about the glories of the English language, from the perspective of the creative writer. English offers lots of word choice options. Which can be overwhelming. I remember reading somewhere, long ago, about the odd psychological fact that if you’re looking for something to read – in an airport bookshop, for instance – it’s easier to select a book from a single revolving wire rack of paperbacks than from a wide array of shelves-full of books. In the second instance, the very quantity of your options paralyzes. You find something that might be interesting, but you can’t be sure there isn’t something better further along. You dawdle, paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of your options. With the small wire rack, you can quickly grasp the range of your choices, and grab up the best of what might be a mediocre lot.
New speakers of English face a similar problem, I imagine. They often have several choices (counting various word combinations) when looking for what the French call “le mot juste,” the precise, correct word.
In a Norwegian-related Facebook group the other day, a poster from Norway posted a picture of a chest they’d inherited. They described it, in all innocence, as a “coffin.” I don’t think anyone actually made fun of them for the word choice – in Norwegian, the word “kiste” serves for both ordinary storage chests and coffins. I suppose there are conceptual consequences – in Norway you put things away in chests, and you yourself are put away in a chest when you die. There’s a sense that they pack you up and put you in storage, like an artifact.
Not that Norwegian doesn’t have some challenging word options of its own. Long ago, I was corrected about the word for physical exercise. As I recall, I used “eksersis,” a natural guess for an English speaker. But “eksersis” refers to a drill, as in the military. What we call exercise they call “trening,” which is probably, I assume, a borrowing from English, but with the meaning slightly altered for local requirements.
The Norwegian who called a chest a coffin probably translated with artificial intelligence (I imagine). We hates AI around here, we does, for just such reasons. AI, though, is adequate for quick and dirty jobs (sadly, my lamented late side gig translating film scripts qualified as quick and dirty – not that I did it that way. But the quality I was able to offer in my work couldn’t compete, because quick and dirty is also cheap).
Ah well, the world of translation had its chance at my services, and they cast me out. Instead, I will soon release The Baldur Game to inevitable universal acclaim, becoming rich and famous in my declining years.
After which I’ll be packed away in a kiste.
That’s kind of morbid, isn’t it? Sorry. I had to tie the thread up somehow. Tying up plot threads with a death is one of the cheapest go-to tricks in the fiction writer’s bag. Or chest.
