{"id":922,"date":"2014-02-09T10:40:35","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T21:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=922"},"modified":"2014-03-11T20:24:04","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T07:24:04","slug":"use-words-i-recognise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=922","title":{"rendered":"Use words I recognise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?attachment_id=921\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-921\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-921\" alt=\"SOD\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/SOD-277x300.jpg\" width=\"277\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/SOD-277x300.jpg 277w, http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/SOD.jpg 499w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 277px) 100vw, 277px\" \/><\/a>Kurt Vonnegut Jr used to tell his Creative Writing students:\u00a0 Use words that I will recognise.\u00a0 (Actually, as an American, he probably spelled it \u2018recognize\u2019; but you know what I mean.)<\/p>\n<p>There was a professor on the radio this morning talking about sleep.\u00a0 She said that people catastrophize about not getting enough.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t hear what she said after that.\u00a0 I was distracted, thinking about all of the poor people who were catastrophizing about not getting enough sleep. \u00a0It sounded awful.<\/p>\n<p>And, the more I thought about all of these poor people catastrophizing, the more I worried that I might not even be spelling this unfamiliar word correctly.\u00a0 So I tried to look up catastrophizing in a couple of dictionaries.\u00a0 In both cases, catastrophe was there.\u00a0 And so too was catastrophic.\u00a0 But there was no mention of catastrophize.\u00a0 So I searched on the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>If the Internet is to be believed (and that\u2019s not always the case), it seems that catastrophize is a term that psychologists use.\u00a0 I guess the professor forgot that she was talking to a bunch of non-psychologists.<\/p>\n<p>It reminded me of one of the late Elmore Leonard\u2019s \u2018rules\u2019 of writing: Never use a verb other than \u2018said\u2019 to carry dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>As Mr Leonard pointed out: \u2018The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. \u00a0But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied.\u2019\u00a0 Mr Leonard said that he \u2018once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with &#8220;she asseverated,&#8221; and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Mr Leonard didn\u2019t say whether or not he got back to Ms McCarthy.\u00a0 But, by the time I had looked up catastrophize and got back to the radio, the professor had gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kurt Vonnegut Jr used to tell his Creative Writing students:\u00a0 Use words that I will recognise.\u00a0 (Actually, as an American, he probably spelled it \u2018recognize\u2019; but you know what I mean.) There was a professor on the radio this morning &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=922\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}