Tag: words

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Dear Diary

Last Monday, our open-mike night for writers moved back to its old venue after a refurbishment. We had an excellent turnout and enough material for more than two hours, not including the two 15-minute breaks. A couple of the staff also said they enjoyed meeting us.

Then on Tuesday, it was our NaNoWriMo meeting where we sometimes write and sometimes chat and always exchange ideas and maybe fill in each other’s plot holes. After that, I spent a little time at a playwriting evening called Scrieve where playwrights get to hear their work performed by volunteer actors.

On Thursday, I was with my poetry group Wyverns where we each presented our poems about Frankenstein on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel. There is a local connection as she acknowledged in an essay that the grim Dundee climate inspired her creation. Our poems have been published in a slimline booklet.

Saturday was when we had our second NaNoWriMo meeting of the week, and despite not starting until the afternoon, it was one of my most productive days so far with 2,500 words written. However, at the end of Sunday, I only had 35,482 when I needed 41,666 to stay on target. If I don’t pull my finger out soon, I’m not going to manage the 50,000 words, but dear diary, you can tell anyone I admitted this.

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In the Vocalzone

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been somewhat laid up with a sore throat, followed by a more general cold. If there’s one good thing to come out of this miserable period, it’s the discovery that Superdrug sells Vocalzone throat pastilles.

Fructus Momordicae, a kind of Chinese herb for...
Fructus Momordicae, a kind of Chinese herb for sore throat and raucousness. 羅漢果，用於咽喉痛、音啞。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’d known about these for some time, particularly that singers over the years have sworn by them. I thought I’d try a box to see whether they helped, as I’ve been performing again. I’ve found they work well.

But my condition hasn’t harmed my National Novel Writing Month word counts too much. As of posting this entry yesternight, I was on par to reach 50,000 words by the end of this month, and my story currently shows no sign of slowing down.

We’re having an incredible November so far. Our members, new and regular, have launched into the contest with much enthusiasm, generating nearly 650,000 words thus far. That’s War & Peace more than 2½ times over, or a quarter of last year’s Chilcot report.

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Just a Moment.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, National Novel Writing Month kicked off. As I’m the organiser for Dundee, I’ve been in the thick of it since then, and I’ve had other work on top. It’s left me little time to compose a full WordPress update.

So far, we’ve held our Kick-Off Event and our first meet-up, and our word count continues to rise. When I checked it at 4:30pm tonight, we’d managed to register 168,000 words. My own words make up about 0.5% of that.

So I’m going to crack on with this, and aim to come back with a fuller entry next week.

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No Thanks, No Translation.

Last week, Scotland’s voters chose to keep the country as part of the United Kingdom. Rather than make a political post, I’ve decided to take advantage of this country’s moment in the world spotlight to present a few uniquely Scottish words to you. So unique, in fact, that there is no direct English equivalent.

I have a strange relationship with the Scots tongue. I don’t naturally speak the dialect, just standard English. Yet if I’m reading a poem written in Scots, I can understand it slowly, and if someone drops a word here or there in a conversation, I’ll be able to recognise it first time.

Of the three words below, the top two are in common usage, but I’ve yet to hear the third in the wild.

  • Dreich, adjective. A one-syllable word to describe damp and drizzly weather. The first four letters are pronounced dree, while the last two take the slightly guttural sound found in the name Bach. The closest single-word English equivalents would be dull or miserable, but these could easily be applied to a person or an event, whereas dreich is exclusively for weather. The word sometimes makes it into local BBC weather reports.
  • Skite, verb. Related to skating but nothing to do with that online phone service. To skite is to skim or slide along a surface, usually by accident. It can be applied to a person or an object. In English, you could say slip, but that implies the person or object has fallen over, whereas someone who skites might remain standing.
  • Tartle, noun. This is where a person hesitates while introducing someone because they’ve forgotten the other party’s name. Most sources have this down as a verb, yet the example sentence usually given is, “Pardon my tartle.” In that context, it appears it be used as a noun, although I welcome any corrections.