"Q" is for Quick

Before it was the trade name of check-balancing software and a loan company, "quicken" was a real word, though one rarely seen.

My first and only encounter with it was in the context of formal, corporate prayers said in church services. "Quicken our hearts, we pray" was a common phrase, one I liked, but it seemed a bit odd. Make our hearts beat faster?

No, make our hearts alive, as in Ezekiel 36:26.  I later learned that before it was another way to say fast, quick meant living.

The Quick and the Dead isn't just a clever title for a western flick.  The phrase originates in three passages in the King James version of the New Testament and is well known from the Apostles Creed.  In all those instances it refers to Jesus judging the living and the dead.  In the movie title then, we, and undoubtedly the film's creators, recognize the double meaning, but the two meanings amount to the same thing; quick means alive - especially for a gunfighter.

Other words begin to make sense when we know the archaic meaning of quick.  The quick is the living tissue under the fingernail, and where we get the phrase "cut to the quick."  Yeah, it hurts. Quicksand seems to trap its victim with purpose, like a living predator.  And to anyone who has ever rolled mercury around in their hand (back before such a reckless act would have the hazmat squad whisking you into quarantine and stretching yellow caution ribbon around your house), it's easy to understand why quicksilver isn't just the name of a totally awesome Kevin Bacon movie.

"P" is for Properties of People and Materials

Yeah, that's a mouthful, so how about we call this one Engineering for Writers?

How many times have you read a story and seen a character described as strong, or tough, or unstable?  That's a little like asking how many times you've seen conjunctions or the definite article.  These are properties that can describe not only people but inanimate objects and materials, and engineers use those words even more than writers.  I thought it might be of some interest for the writer to see what engineers mean when they use those words and to see how well the materials science definition lines up with their usage.  Who knows, it may even provide some insights into your writing.  Or not.  But it won't do any harm.

(For our first two words, it might be useful to define a couple of terms first.  Think of a hacksaw blade clamped vertically by the bottom end in a bench vise.  If you push on the top end a half inch or so, it will bend, but rebound to its original position like a spring when we let go.  We call that elastic deformation.  Push on it more than a few inches and it will yield and stay in its bent position.  That's plastic deformation.)

Rigidity.  With people and with materials science, rigid means unbending.  In engineering, whether this is desirable depends on the application, but with people it's usually seen as a negative, i.e., "overly rigid."  

Strength.  We usually seem to think of human physical strength as power, or the ability to apply force, in an active sense.  On the other hand, we tend to see mental or emotional strength as resistance to yielding under stress, in a passive sense, and the latter is how engineers define it.  In materials, strength is resistance to yielding plastically, i.e., permanently.

We like people who are strong and unyielding, but not rigid, completely unbending.  We don't want our heroes to compromise on core beliefs under duress, but we value their ability to examine their beliefs and modify them if it proves to be the right thing to do.

Toughness.  Strong and tough are often used interchangeably, but they are different.  Toughness in a person is the ability to absorb punishment without breaking.  Similarly, in materials science, it's how much energy a material will absorb before failure (breakage or yielding).  Remember the fight scene in Cool Hand Luke?  Lucas wasn't as strong as Dragline, but he was tough; no matter how many times he got knocked down, he kept getting back up.  He lost the fight, but won the respect of Dragline and their fellow inmates.  But what really comes to mind when I think of toughness are little green plastic army men.  Those suckers could take any punishment my six-year-old mind could conjure up, short of fire. You could bend them, but you couldn't tear them with your bare hands.  The polyethylene they're made of is tough stuff.

Brittleness.  In engineering terms, brittleness is the tendency of a material to break suddenly rather than gradually.  Think of a glass rod.  Brittleness in a person can be physical, as in an older person's bones, but is usually used as an emotional quality.  An emotionally brittle person is weak and may "lose it" without warning.

Hardness.  Can be conflated with strength and toughness (Those Marines on Guadalcanal were hard bastards!), but is also used to denote a lack of emotion, or an impenetrable shell.  Not exactly the same in engineering terms, where hardness is resistance to abrasion; the hardness of diamonds makes them ideally suited for cutting and grinding.

Ductility and Malleability.  Ductility is the ability to deform without breaking under tensile stress, often expressed as the ability to be drawn into wire.  Malleability refers to deformation under compressive stress and is usually thought of as the ability to be hammered into thin sheets.  (They don't necessarily go together; gold is ductile and malleable, while lead is only malleable).  With people, the words could be used interchangeably, but I don't recall ever seeing an easily-yielding person called ductile.  I have, however, often seen malleable used to describe people who are easily shaped and influenced by others, and I think it's a great, descriptive word.  Ductile?  You might want to run it by a trusted editor.

If you've made it through this long-winded post, dear reader, you can now use these dual-purpose words with precision and confidence.  No need to thank me, it's just one of the many services I offer!

"M" is for Motorcycle

Today's post is an excerpt from the book I'm working on.  And by "working on," I mean "mostly shamefully neglecting."

A shaft of amber light filtered through the ancient glazed window of the shed and illuminated a sea of swirling dust motes. Jay sat on a stool at the motorcycle’s flank, leaning into his work as if he were milking one of the dozens of cows his father told him used to populate the farm. But instead of milk from an udder, he emptied ethanol from the float bowl of a carburetor.
  

His mind wandered as he worked, muscle memory aiding nimble fingers.  Motorcycle. It was his favorite word. Like his second-favorite word, rifle, it evoked its object perfectly. Rifle is slender and spare and handy. The rhythm of the word, with its heavy emphasis on the first syllable, is like a rifle's report and echo, or the cycling of a lever action. Motorcycle is even more rhythmic. In a happy accident, its four syllables mimic the rocking, reciprocating cadence of a four-stroke engine: COMBUSTION, exhaust, intake, compression. MO-tor-cy-cle.

Motorcycle. It’s a solid word, substantive. It has mass, but not too much. It conjures a rider's view of treetops passing overhead in the gleaming fuel tank and stubby chrome handlebars with black, ribbed rubber grips that the hands fall to naturally, as naturally as Jay’s feet fit in the old new-in-the-box Frye boots that Jason had dug up and given him. 

Jay felt the overpowering sense of how greater was his machine than the sum of its bits and pieces. What peculiar brand of alchemy did the Italian ingenieri and operai di fabbrica employ all those decades ago that could give such life to an assemblage of inert parts?

Even though Jay had grown up with the motorcycle his grandfather first bought new off the showroom floor after his return from the Vietnam war, he was struck by question of whether there was an odder thing for a twenty-year-old man to possess these days than a fifty-six-year-old Italian motorcycle, even if said possession hadn’t been illegal on at least two counts. 

These days, Jay's life seemed to him like nothing so much as an assemblage of oddities, so the motorcycle fit right in.

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"L" is for Language, the Sanitization of

Like any writer or reader of English, I love the English language.  The arcane, the archaic, the flawed, the illogical and the just plain weird.  The duplication and the inconsistencies.  The, uh, Anglo-Saxonisms.  The quirks.  You know, like how we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway.  Why do we call pineapple that which contains neither pine nor apple?  And if the plural of tooth is teeth, why is not the plural of booth "beeth?"

I love it, warts and all, so I dislike what I consider the sanitizing of it.  And by that, I don't mean removal of naughty words, but the homogenizing of it, the replacing of descriptive, recognizable words with bland substitutes.

I'll give you a couple of examples. 

"Unsung" by James Dietz

What does the word "mechanic" conjure for you? A member of an old and proud profession, someone who understands the language that engines speak, and can get a recalcitrant one to purr again? Or maybe the thousands of sailors and airmen who toiled with warplanes through the night in airfields and hangar bays to make sure their charges would perform the mission and bring their pilots back home?

Now, how about "technician?"  If you're like me, you think of a person in a lab coat holding a clipboard or laptop in a sterile environment, and not much else.

George Washington Young Surveyor by Hy Hinterman

What do you think of when you see or hear the word "surveyor?"  George Washington on a hilltop peering through a compass and helping to establish the boundaries of a new world?  Yes, it's an old and honored profession.  Say you're a surveyor and people get it.

So what comes to mind when you see the term "Geomatics Engineer?"  If you're drawing a blank or thinking of a three-letter acronym that begins with "W" and ends with "F," you're probably not alone.  Yes, that's what they're calling themselves now.

Words like "mechanic" and "surveyor" are evocative, rich in imagery.  They're interwoven with history and literature.  Technicians are certainly professionals worthy of esteem; they're just saddled with a moniker that's generic because it's an umbrella for so many different disciplines.  Words like "technician" and, Lord help us, "Geomatics Engineer" seem bland and noncommittal, of a world where everyone is special, and thus, no one is.

So why the changes?  Somehow, I doubt it's part of a sinister conspiracy to render English more vanilla.  Rather, in the case of "technician," it was probably a desire to change people's perception of mechanics as unskilled grease monkeys, to clean up the image, make it respectable.  Why, I don't know. I for one have always seen the profession of mechanic as highly skilled and eminently respectable and I have a lot of esteem for people that get their hands dirty.  There's probably also a feeling that "mechanic" belongs to the previous century and doesn't accurately reflect a time in which a mechanic spends more time reading diagnostic codes on a computer than turning wrenches, and likely went to a technical school to learn to do it.  I get it, it just leaves me flat.

As for surveying, I'm a Civil engineer, so I have far more than a passing familiarity with it (I've done a fair bit of it myself, and one-fourth of my professional engineering exam was on surveying) so I can tell you that it's like an iceberg; the gal or guy out there with the total station or GPS receiver on a tripod is just the tip that the public sees.  An enormous amount of surveying takes place in the office, researching maps and plats and corner records, writing legal descriptions and performing complex calculations.  And I guess that's the point, the desire for a term that more completely reflects the totality of what a surveyor does.  But it also seems like an attempt to gain more respect for a profession that for me, was never lacking in it in the first place (to me, surveyors are the "casual Fridays" of the engineering world, and who doesn't think engineering can use more of that?).  But if that is the purpose, why such a goofy name?  (The term "Civil" engineer comes from "civilian," meaning non-military.  It was bland from the cradle, but I will resist with all my energy any attempts to rename it Physical and Natural Environment Technician.)

With the well-intentioned but misguided replacement of both words, I think the result is the same.  If we did this for every hoary old less-than-encyclopedic name, what we'd end up with wouldn't be English at all, but a homogenous goo.  At that point, let's just get it over with and start speaking (shudder) Esperanza.

How about you?  Do you have any similar sanitizing pet peeves?  Do you know of a newer term that's an actual improvement over the old?  Or maybe you think I'm full of pre-processed bovine waste product?  Let me know.

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"A" is for Amal

When trying to start on the Challenge, I noted that many bloggers are using an overall theme for the month.  For example, my friend Dana Martin, the one who tricked me into this thing, has the wonderful theme of gratitude.  At first I dismissed the theme idea out of hand; I didn't see myself coming up with twenty six blog entries on one theme.  But then I started on my first post, A is for Amal.  As in carburetor.  As in carburetors found on old Triumphs and other vintage motorcycles. That need to be “tickled” (primed, that is - the British have always had an inimitable way with words.) before operation.  That sometimes leak.  And have to be tuned properly to run their best.  Or, if you prefer, A can be for antique.  Old, imperfect, charming things.
  

Yeah, I like old stuff, for a variety of reasons.  And those reasons involve things like craftsmanship,  materials, engineering and making things.  I’m an engineer by trade, a Civil engineer to be specific, and I just love stuff.  I like materials, like metal and wood and soil, and I like the things that people make them into; machines and tools and gadgets and art and edifices.  And I quickly realized I’m not going to have a problem blogging on a topic for a month. Now, a theme isn’t going to make the challenge more difficult; it’s probably going to make it possible for me to do get through it at all.

I realized that I have thoughts on engineering and materials and machines and mechanics and processes that are not only fascinating to me, but might even be of some interest to the average person who sees these things mentioned here and there but probably doesn’t know much about them.  So, for the next month, if I pull this off, you’ll see everything from educational posts to fevered reveries on the virtues of forging.  And I'm going to learn some things too, maybe even about myself.

So, yeah, the sort-of topic that I'll sort-of stick to is Things.  What about A for Amal?  Yeah, I sort-of cheated there, but it wasn't on purpose.  You can see how one thing leads to another and how sometimes things end up going in a direction other than that intended, and that's okay.

If you're envisioning drying paint at this point, give it a try.  If you’ll stick with me, you might be surprised.  Or not; either way, please comment - I'd love to know what you think, good or bad.

Best Regards,

Jer

 http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

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2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge

Yes, I'm a participant this year.  The President of our writing club (Writers of Kern) asked for participants and I said yes before even figuring out what it all meant.  Typical for me.  I wanted to back out, also typical for me, but I decided to be atypical for once, and I'm going make an actual commitment.  Signing on the dotted line adds the accountability factor needed to ensure I don't punk out on this like I do with most other things.  Honestly I'm a little worried.  At this point I'm hoping simply to rise to the level of mediocrity.  We'll see.  Bear with me as I get going on this on decidedly shaky legs, and good luck to my fellow bloggers!

Now, let's see, A...

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

I think here's the problem with the book I'm writing.  I think I'm trying to control the story instead of just writing the characters and letting them live the story.  It's like I'm in a big parking lot pushing a line of thirty shopping carts.  I'm trying to steer them and they're not cooperating.  I need to quit trying to steer.  After all, I'm not working for Wal Mart where the manager expects to have all his carts in the proper place; I'm writing a book, where I won't get fired if they end up on the other end of the parking lot, and if I run them into a Corvette, it's OK, it's my Corvette because it's in my head.  Maybe I'll end up at the taco truck in front of the Home Depot and get some carne asada, or maybe I'll end up in the middle of Rosedale Highway and get run over.  Whatever; I need to just push the carts and just see where they go.  If I don't like it, I don't have to use it, but I may end up someplace unexpected and better than what I was planning.