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JWTroemner.com

Tag: Writing and Editing

  • On Names: A take on taxonomy

    jwtroemner

    So here’s a question: why are animals called what they are?

    I’m not talking about the big categorical names– things like ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ and ‘horse’ go back for hundreds of years, according to etymology. But when you want to get more specific than that, things get a little wonky. 

    Let’s talk fossils and dinosaurs: if you’re thinking about the long-necked behemoth, LittleFoot from Don Bluth fame, you’re probably thinking about a brontosaurus– except, as pedants in any natural history museum used to be quick to tell you, brontosaurus didn’t actually exist.

    Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com

    According to an article by Emily Osterloff on the Natural History Museum website,

    “The first recorded evidence of Brontosaurus was discovered in the 1870s in the USA. But by the early 1900s, scientists had started to question whether the fossils used to name Brontosaurus actually came from another dinosaur, the remarkably similar Apatosaurus. 

    Due to the rules of scientific naming – the first name published gets priority – Brontosaurus was relegated to scientific history and the fossils reassigned to Apatosaurus.”

    But remember that I said pedants used to be big on this subject? Turns out, even fossilized facts are subject to change. Osterloff continues:

    “That was until a study in 2015 unexpectedly found evidence that Brontosaurus was distinct from Apatosaurus all along, signaling the reinstated status of this iconic dinosaur.”

    This plays on an established rule in the paleontological world: the earliest name for the fossil is what gets to stay. And that’s all well and good for creatures whose existence predates humans by eons. 

    What about the ones that are living side-by-side with humans?

    Here’s where things get political again, particularly when we talk about species native to colonized places.

    The thing about colonizers is that they tend to suddenly come into contact with a lot of unfamiliar things. Sometimes they’ll ask the indigenous peoples of the area what the heck those weird-looking animals are called (where we get words like condor, kangaroo, and koala, from  Quechua, Guugu Yimidhirr, and Dharug, respectively). Other times, they’ll either neglect to ask the name or ignore it altogether, and instead refer to it as something similar they remember from home, as is the case with robins. According to Kenn Kaufman at Audobon.org:

    “When English-speaking explorers and colonists began traveling the world, they applied the name Robin to anything that reminded them of the familiar bird from home. Our American Robin really isn’t similar, aside from having orange on the chest; it’s twice the size and four times the bulk of the European bird, and these days it isn’t even classified in the same family. Neither are the Australasian robins (family Petroicidae), more than 50 species of small, sharply patterned birds found from New Guinea to Australia and New Zealand. Various robin-chats in Africa and robins in Asia are at least placed in the same family as the European Robin, but they’re not all closely related. But none of that really matters; it’s a good name, and we can sort out any possible confusion by looking at the scientific names.”

    And other times entirely, the species they come across are named to honor someone and something. And as with place names, the choice of who gets honored by that kind of name can be fraught.

    Take for example the ʻaoʻū, previously called the Christmas shearwater, a bird native to the shores of Hawai’i– the defunct name seems rather bizarre, considering that Christmas was a tradition that was completely nonexistent in Hawaii before the late 1700s. Meanwhile the current name ties into the language and traditions of the Hawaiian people, and is itself descriptive: According to a press release from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, “The name ʻaoʻū was chosen for the Christmas shearwater based its call, where the sound ʻao is repeated six times followed by a long ʻū sound. “ʻAo” means a new shoot, leaf, or bud, especially of taro, and “ao” also refers to clouds, the light of day or daylight as well as enlightened; to regain consciousness. ʻŪ means to growl, grunt, groan, moan, sigh, hum, coo; to hold the breath. Naming birds from their sound is a common practice for many sea and shorebirds in Hawaiʻi.”

    Another push toward decolonizing birds in particular has come in the wake of a highly publicized 2020 incident involving birdwatcher Christian Cooper, which sparked conversations about racial bias and its intersection with the (stereotypically very white) field of birdwatching– and in this case, how discouraging it can be for birdwatchers of color such as Cooper to realize just how many of the birds they love are named for slaveholders and white supremacists. 

    The Ad Hoc Committee on English Bird Names for the American Ornithologists’ Union is opting to move on from person-based naming conventions entirely and move toward more intuitive and descriptive names. “They imply possession of a species,” explained committee co-chair Erica Nol, who went on to point out the intrinsic bias within those names that are given: “They are overwhelmingly from a particular time and social fabric, they are almost all White men, few women, and women were almost all first names.” 

    There’s some pushback, of course– like with places, there are a lot of people pointing to history, and to habit, and to the inconvenience of renaming these creatures. 

    But in the end, what we call a thing is a choice, and what choice we make speaks volumes about what we value.

    This is the third installment of a four-part series on choosing names and why they matter.
    Part 1: A Person by Any Other Name
    Part 2: Politics of Place
    Part 3: A Take on Taxonomy
    Part 4: Imaginary Worlds

  • On Names: Politics of Place

    jwtroemner

    How do you refer to the island nation in the Pacific Ocean, roughly around 41* S, 175* E?

    In 1642 it was named Staten Land by Dutch Explorer Abel Tasman, in 1645 Dutch Cartographers renamed it Nova Zeelandia in reference to a Dutch province, and “British explorer James Cook subsequently anglicized the name to New Zealand.” (NewZealandVacations.com)

    But if you ask a whole lot of people– particularly the people whose ancestors lived there before the Dutch came around– they might instead refer to it as Aotearoa, which is a name being pushed for with greater momentum in the last several years thanks to the efforts of Māori activists, with many around the world starting to adopt Aotearoa New Zealand to refer to the land. Though even that name doesn’t tell the whole story.

    Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Pexels.com
    (more…)

  • On Names: a person by any other name

    jwtroemner

    I’ve been doing a lot of pondering about names. How they change, how they represent us, where they come from and why.

    Cyanide and Happiness has a great comic titled The Life Stages of Roberts, about how a single name carries completely different associations and how that can change throughout a person’s life. 

    People in the LGBT+ community are well acquainted with the way people can be uplifted or protected or harmed by the names others choose to use for us. For a well-known literary example, I like to point at the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, a man of many names: 

    • he was born Jean Valjean, a family name shared by a really delightful number of his relatives

    • Upon being imprisoned in the bagne, he was designated Prisoner 24601, meant to rob him of his personhood 

    • But the other prisoners called him Jean le Cric, or Jean the Jackscrew, because his impressive strength

    • In Montreuil-sur-Mer, he constructed a new name and identity as Father Madeline (itself a reference to Mary Magdalene, and all the Biblical allusions that entails), in an attempt to escape the crushing stigma of being an ex-convict

    • Then when he was re-arrested and given a new designation: Prisoner 9430 (which, alas, doesn’t go to music nearly as well as his more famous number)

    • Upon his escape he takes shelter with a friend from his past and assumes the identity of the friend’s brother: Ultime Fauchelevant, which provides him safety

    • Except when he’s held hostage and made to send a note under duress by villains who only know the initials of his assumed name, so he signs it Urbain Fabre 

    • While at Paris he’s also sneaking around anonymously giving out gobs of money to the poor while dressed in rags, earning himself the name The Beggar Who Gives Alms, while also using the name Leblanc as an alias

    • At this point he’s also adopted a daughter, who calls him Papa— until he makes the choice to distance himself from her for her protection, and insists that she only refer to him as Monsieur Jean 

    Each of those names carries vastly different contexts and meanings. Some of them signify respect, some derision, some are shields to protect him from scrutiny, some are weapons used to hurt him. And that’s just a single character in a single book.

    This is the first part of a four-part series on choosing names and why they matter.
    Part 1: A Person by Any Other Name
    Part 2: Politics of Place
    Part 3: A Take on Taxonomy
    Part 4: Imaginary Worlds

  • On the Map

    jwtroemner

    I’m one of those proud nerds who loves looking at a map when I open a book. So when I created the world of Koleth, of course I wanted to include maps.

    Koleth was built from below the ground up– by which I mean, I started with plate tectonics on a globe and worked my way up. Which is how I got this delightfully messy world map over here:

    From there I added some national divisions, etc:

    (Ignore the massive poles– map projections can be tricky that way).

    But all that’s way too much information to include on a map for this one story. So I zoomed in a bit, lightened it enough so I wouldn’t murder my printer, and added the locations I mention in the Dealmaker’s Gambit.

    And then traced over that with a good old sharpie and some highlighters (it was a slow day at work.)

    After that it was a matter of cleaning it up in photoshop, adding some text, and voila!

    That looks like something that you might find in a book!

  • Down the research rabbit hole

    jwtroemner

    I’m sure that sometimes it can seem like I’ve given up on writing entirely, but I promise, I’m still working hard at it. It takes a long time to put a book together, and putting words on page are only a fraction of the work that goes into it. Even when you’re writing fiction, there’s a whole lot of research involved, and a simple question can send you down into some really weird places.

    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    For example:

    I need to know how long it would take to properly clean and disassemble a gun, so I know how long the other character in the scene has to perform an action.

    Turns out that time depends entirely on the kind of gun we’re talking about. It’s a trope at this point that a modern handgun can be disassembled and reassembled in a matter of seconds, typically while the petulant protagonist keeps eye contact with whoever just challenged them. But I’m not looking at a modern handgun, I’m looking at something significantly lower-tech than that.

    So let’s look at rifles circa 1840.

    Turns out that’s actually a turning point between flint-lock and modern weapons. And since our gun-wielding protagonist is lower-class, she’d probably be using an old gun rather than a shiny new one. So let’s look through the same database but back up a few decades, and search for guns in the first quarter of the 19th century.

    I throw out the pistols and revolvers– I wanted this to be a rifle. Reading several paragraphs into the description of the first, I toss that one out as well: it’s a smooth-bore gun, meaning it’s about as accurate drunk as it is sober. I said this character is a pretty good shot, so that won’t do.
    Which leads me to this one:

    Picture from Militaryfactory.com

    A rifled barrel, a little more than twenty years old at the time, but one of the first models to use interchangeable parts (and therefore relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to disassemble and reassemble for cleaning). And then I can start the process of watching Youtube videos of gun collectors talking about their favorite antiques.

    That’s where I find out that in a pinch, the rifle can be converted into a smaller (and less accurate) handgun, and that it had an adjustable trigger to make it a good gun for sharpshooters (relevant to another character).
    I also learned that the assembly of this gun requires a screwdriver, which would make it take significantly longer to assemble and disassemble than modern handguns. Plenty of time for the other character in the scene to get pretty far along his task.

    And sure, I probably could have saved myself an hour or so of research by just making up a number and handwaving it as “it’s a fantasy story, don’t worry about it”, but from that I got a whole lot of detail that I never would have gotten otherwise.

    It’s one of the things I really love about this job.