Prose Style: Specificity and Proto-Germanic Word Origins

Word choice is everything in fiction, and everything is word choice.

I’ve read No Country for Old Men a few times, and every time I come to this passage, I wonder at its specificity.

Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head. Elbows propped on his knees. The rifle strapped over his shoulder with a harnessleather sling was a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut. It carried a Unertl telescopic sight of the same power as the binoculars. The antelope were a little under a mile away. The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Moss knew his gear and the terrain, and both were important to the character and—in that moment—the story. McCarthy understood what what Moss understood, and used the specific terms Moss would have used so that we could understand both Moss and his world a little better.

McCarthy doesn’t stop to explain what a datilla is. He doesn’t condescend to my ignorance. It’s another name for the yucca plant, but whether it was plant or rock, we knew its shadow was part of that long shadow the ridge cast across the floodplain.

To have that specificity emerge in our own writing, we can note the names of things, beginning perhaps with landforms,¹ but before we become intoxicated with our new words, there are a few things we might consider.

First, understand what terminology is appropriate for the story’s point of view. No Country doesn’t have an omniscient narrator. Certain sections are in first person, from the perspective of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Others are in a limited third person. Not every chapter follows Llewelyn Moss, but whoever it follows, the focus is tight. The names known (and chosen) for the environment will change with your characters.

Second, with a few character-based exceptions, focus on Germanic words. Romance languages are beautiful, but their introduction into our language isn’t great for our prose. It’s about the sound and feel of the words more than their ancestry. Cow is Germanic. Beef in French in origin. You can do this for most of the livestock we eat because the name of the animal they raised on the farm was gentrified with imported French words to name what they served on the Norman Lord’s table. Sheep is Germanic. Mutton is French. It’s a rule that can help tune the ear to the differences.

Note that there are exceptions: fish is fish, and chicken is chicken, even on the plate;² the French pigeon becomes the Germanic squab on the plate, but if you’re hunting dove, that’s just the Germanic name for pigeon.

English comes from the language of barbarians not empire, and our ears reject Romance-language words in our prose as lacking style.

Third, seize upon words that work double-duty. A hogback is a low, narrow ridge. The reader might not know that, but that word creates images in the mind.

Ernest Hemingway in Microsoft Paint, a WIP by the author

On the other hand, let’s return to a counter-example from a passage we’ve visited a couple of times now:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

There’s not a challenging word in that paragraph, which brings us back to the conflict between Hemingway and Faulkner.

Faulkner once said of Hemingway:

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary

To which Hemingway replied:

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

And instantly, we’re back among the Proto-Germanic roots of the English language: but there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

This applies to verbs as well, which is why our characters ask rather than inquire, but we shall leave this discussion, rather than relinquish it, for you can easily find a list of Germanic vs. Latinate equivalents online.³

Keep in mind, even if you treat this concept as a rule,⁴ the idea isn’t that you rid your writing of all non-Germanic words. A dash adds linguistic variety.

The difficulty comes when, in their accumulation, they dilute certain qualities of the language. Germanic words are more direct and visceral, carrying a greater emotional impact. (Of course, none of this applies to the original languages. We’re talking about their impact on the English language.)

Words that come directly from Latin and not a secondary language are the Latinates, the offenders to be most guarded against. Their overuse creates a stilted feel and interrupt the rhythm of the prose. Germanic words also tend to be more clear and concise, aiding in reader comprehension.

But, wait! Aren’t we saying that Hemingway and Faulkner disagreed on the Latinate words? If so, Faulkner is the antithesis of the Latinate rule.

I don’t know. Let’s take a peek at a passage from Absalom, Absalom:

Out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust, they have bolted them out. They have reaped it and garnered it into tall towers and temples. They have bid, they have taunted, and taunting, fed on the taunt as lion-fed, and then having the courses of that spade and that ax and that plow for a generation, two generations, the dust lulled by the same rich lying whisper and paid for and owned by the same man of the same sword of cut-and-thrust but bare at the loins’ of conquest, or the bayonet and the sabre already at the raw family neck—façade only now of iron-glared window and glass and wood and stone, paper façade behind which the spider hung, the virago, talking with the voice of the spinster elder and, then now this: crying, silent with the dead embattled starlight making none but the voice: ‘Even Sutpen could not have done it, I am his last chance, I am who shall marry my sister’s child to my own first cousin: even if I am killed, I can undo his proud shadow in the old ways.’

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

16.3% of the words are Latinate, and by comparison, 9.5% of the Hemingway passage were.

I don’t know the daily recommended allowance of Latinate words in our diet, but I know someone who might: the Latinometer.⁵

The Latinometer website reminds us that Latinates have their proper place, such as the doctor’s office where the words carry fewer visceral feelings of violence and pain. An injection is far less frightening than a shot. This same quality, however, is why we tend to avoid such words in our prose. It also tells us that guilty people use Latinate terms to hide and soften the true nature of their actions—an outcome unwelcome in our prose.

In the end, the Latinometer suggests that all writers keep below 30%, and that novel writers vary the diction of their characters.

Faulkner’s 16.3 and Hemingway’s 9.5 seem a safe range, but then how does my own fiction compare?

For analysis, I chose one of my most recently shared stories, The Carnival:⁶

Sometimes, even an android’s back is turned, and among the dead there lies a child, half devoured. A flesh-picked hand holds a stuffed bear, and though the sight of the child frightens her, she’s never owned a toy. She glances at the android. It’s busy shepherding the lines, marching children across grass-busted asphalt and away from crumbled buildings. She scoops up the bear and names him Dietrich. The name speaks to her of home and love, even if she can’t remember why.

The Carnival by Thaddeus Thomas

The story scored 18%, a bit higher than I hoped for, but acceptable. Of course, carnival is, itself, a Latinate. When we are in our rewrites, remember that the purpose is rhythm, clarity, and emotion. The reader reads the prose not the score. Go with what works.

To end our session, I’d like to go back to the beginning and move the issue of specificity to verbs. Some of the rules we come across, like cutting adjectives and adverbs, become easier when we have specificity in our nouns and verbs. With the right verb, most adverbs become redundant, but some work even better, like when they’re contradictory to the verb they modify.

From Tome Improvement:

He strangled softly on an uncertain cough.

Softly works for me here because it’s unexpected and non-intuitive. Obvious adverbs are the enemy. He ran quickly tells me nothing, but if your character stumbled purposefully to the door, the reader’s mind perks up.⁷

Use the right tool for the job, and in closing…

We’ve already initiated our closing.

Yes, but what about second closing?

I don’t think he knows about second closing, Pip.

When you visit Paris, the tour guides tell you the county has a ministry that protects the purity of the language. The locals have adopted the English term weekend, but the ministry makes sure all official references use the less snappy French equivalent. For English, we’re a thousand-years too late, but through prose, authors reinforce the power of our language’s Proto-Germanic roots.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Don’t miss this:

1. A wiki-page of landform terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_landforms

2. Where the names of meat on the plate remain Germanic, it seems these even the peasants could afford to eat them. Those close to water could fish, and according to Philip Slavin, chicken was affordable. This will seem natural to anyone looking at their grocery shelves, but student, of American history will be scratching their heads. In the new world, chicken was expensive and lobster was the poor man’s food.

If you’d argue that chicken on the plate has a French form, well, I would have agreed with you and quickly had to return to my essay to correct that mistake. Now, if you’ll excuse me, DoorDash is here with my Kentucky Fried Poultry.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English

4. I should be clear that most writing guides will treat this as a rule, but I’m not here to tell you what you must or should do.

5. http://www.latinometer.com/home

6. https://www.thaddeusthomas.com/p/carousel

7. Taken from an early essay of mine, https://www.thaddeusthomas.com/p/tome-improvement