Words and Music

When I was thirteen years old, I became obsessed with words. It was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, after reading SE Hinton’s The Outsiders (which I’m sure I’ll post about here at some point). I read tons of books from the local library – all the Hintons, Lois Lowry, Judy Blume, Paul Zindel – and wrote in a journal multiple times a day, though admittedly it was mostly about which member of Duran Duran was the cutest. (I still have the journals. So cringe-worthy.) But the point was I was writing. I was expressing myself. I was exploring what it means to use words in new and exciting ways, to communicate how I was feeling with pen and paper (because I am old and grew up prior to the ubiquity of personal computers and the advent of smartphones). 

This age of discovery coincided with the other great love of my young life: music. Thanks to my family, an appreciation for all genres and styles had been instilled in me practically since birth. My older sister’s obsession with the Beatles rubbed off on me simply by being around her. My two older brothers filled in the hard rock and heavy metal. And my dad, a sort of music polymath with a record collection in the tens of thousands, schooled me on everything else, from classical to classic rock ‘n’ roll to big band to opera. He’d even listen to the modern stuff from time to time. 

Being a teenage girl, of course my own tastes trended toward pop music. I’d grown up listening to Top 40 radio stations like WPLJ and Z100 out of New York. My record collection was made up of all the obligatory pop icons, from Duran Duran to Cyndi Lauper to The Go-Go’s to Madonna and as many 12” remixes of one-hit wonders as I could find in the local record shop. 

In my later teen years, I transitioned to more “alternative” music and tuned in to the legendary WLIR out of Long Island; my record collection became a CD collection populated by REM, Erasure, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, and Morrissey and the Smiths. (Though, keeping true to my roots, my first CD purchase was Wham!’s Make It Big.) 

Regardless, no matter what I was listening to, it always came down to one thing for me: the lyrics. A good beat is nice, but for me nothing was as important as what the singer was saying to me, as the words he or she was using to express whatever the song was about. Okay, “Like a Virgin” didn’t hold much weight with me; I’m not sure I even understood what it meant when it came out. Pop music did still appeal to me just because it was catchy and the people performing it were so darn good looking. But more and more, I sought out those songs with lyrics that made me feel something, even if I couldn’t exactly describe what that feeling was. Because isn’t that the beauty of music? When done right, it can evoke emotions we sometimes don’t even have names for. 

And, of course, I wrote about it. I wrote down the lyrics of entire songs on loose-leaf notebook paper and taped them up on the wall next to my bed so I could gaze at them while I listened and refer to them for inspiration for my own writing; aside from the journals, I was a nascent teenage novelist, though everything I wrote was pretty much an Outsiders knock-off. I transcribed snippets of lyrics into my journal, sometimes doing what amounted to close readings, teasing out possible interpretations, the more complex the better. (My treatise on the Police’s “King of Pain” comes to mind. Just like Sting, it took itself a little too seriously.) 

The older I get, the more I appreciate a good lyric, one that sticks in my head the way the jungle yell of “Tarzan Boy” used to when I was thirteen years old. (And now it’s stuck again, probably for you too. You’re welcome.) Once I find one, I will listen to that song to the point of complete overkill, putting it on endless repeat, waiting each time for that moment when the lyric comes through and my emotions surge: 

Thom Yorke of Radiohead singing, “I can’t help but feeling…I could blow through the ceiling…if I just turn and run” in “Fake Plastic Trees.” 

Green Day’s “21 Guns”: “Lay down your arms, give up the fight.” 

Glen Phillips—well, I could fill a book with his lyrics, but I’ll go with “all that you love will be taken someday, by the angel of death or the servants of change” from “Grief and Praise.” 

David Bowie in “Ashes to Ashes”: “I never done good things, I never done bad things, I never did anything out of the blue.” 

I can even wring meaning out of my beloved pop music: 

“I have no secrets from you, I have nothing left to hide”–George Michael, “Something to Save” 

Duran Duran’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”, aka my life anthem: “Always trying to control me, who do you think you are?” 

I could go on and on and on. 

Of course these words probably mean nothing to anyone but me—another genius perk of music, that we can all interpret it and appreciate it in whatever way we want. It’s individual; it’s personal. The most meaningful line to me might be the tritest to you and vice versa. And that’s okay. I will respect your assertions about whatever artist speaks to you personally if you can deal with the fact that I sometimes find boy bands deceptively profound.

Tighty-Whities: A Tangent

I’ve been editing books for coming up on twelve years now. And I like to think that this far into the game, I’m good at it. Strike that–I know I am. Editing is one of the few things in my life   I am strongly confident about. (Yes, it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition.) I am a nitpicker, a noticer of the tiniest details, two qualities that are essential to the job; one might call me a grammar Nazi, though I hate that phrase with all my heart. I can see extra spaces between words without visible spacing turned on, I know the difference between affect and effect, and I know when to use who and when to use whom. If there’s a plot hole, no matter how small, I will find it. If there’s a shift in tense or point of view, I will root it out.

However, I can’t do all of this without support. First and foremost among my resources is the Chicago Manual of Style, which lays out all the rules and standards for everything from when to use italics to when to spell out numbers to when to use US as opposed to United States (former for adjective, latter as a noun). It is a compendium of minutia regarding the English language and how to present it, and I love it more than almost any book on the planet. It is logical; it is dependable . I am constantly amazed by the depth to which it covers the subjects of grammar and usage. Seriously, it dives very deep.

Tied with CMoS, however, is the dictionary. Merriam-Webster, to be exact. Specifically m-w.com. I would say I use it more than any other site, perhaps second only to Google, which is another essential site to have at hand when doing an edit. One of the most basic practices for an editor is keeping a running style sheet–a list of words and phrases built as the edit progresses to keep track of when the author uses unconventional capitalization, for example, or how to spell a character’s name. On my style sheet, in addition I always keep track of all the words I look up in the dictionary, in case they appear in the manuscript again. In fact, often my sheet is nothing but a list of such words. For example, during about forty-five minutes of editing tonight, I compiled this list:

barefoot
runoff
walkie-talkie
tree line
seat belt
newspeople
shoulder blade

Now, I didn’t look up these words because I didn’t know what they mean. In fact I rarely look up a word to find its definition. Usually I’m looking to find out whether a word is hyphenated or capitalized, if it’s one word or two, and so on. I need to know not what it means but rather how it’s supposed to look. This, I believe, is the secondary purpose of a dictionary: not to define but to dictate the standard appearance of each word. That standard is important in editing, where consistency is the number one rule; it’s even okay not to follow a rule, as long as it’s done consistently.

Lately, since we’ve started this commonplace book project, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to my lists of words and keeping them more diligently, with the intention of at some point copying them into my CPB. I don’t know why; I just like words, I guess, and the more of them the better. And I’m always interested in interesting spellings or capitalizations, in learning new things about words that might already be familiar to me. For example, I’ve recently learned that stand-alone, as in a stand-alone novel in a series, is hyphenated. I’ve been not hyphenating it for years. Now each time I get to hyphenate it (which is fairly often, given my job as a copy editor of book descriptions), I get a little excited about it. Yes, I really do. I tell you, I am made for this job.

I’ve also recently had an epiphany about my dictionary habits–or, rather, about other people’s lack of them. I don’t mean the average person on the street; I don’t expect everyone to love looking up words as much as I do. But I mean fellow writers and readers, and particularly fellow editors. I oversee other editors’ work on a daily basis, and I’m always surprised and a little disheartened by how much they let slip by: missed hyphens, two words that should be one, unnecessary capitalizations, all things they could correct if they just thought to look them up in the dictionary. When I’m editing, it’s my strict practice to look up any word I am unsure about and even ones I am sure about, just to double check (in fact I just looked up double check to make sure it’s not hyphenated). I look up words I know I’ve looked up before; I’ve looked up tighty-whities at least three times–check out the comments at the bottom of that page–and been amazed and tickled each time that such a phrase is in the dictionary.

I also look up all words with hyphens, words without hyphens that look like they should be hyphenated, compound words, and words that look like they should be compounds but aren’t. And I do this not just because it’s my job to do so but because I am curious. On top of wanting the text to be error free, I simply want to know how these words are supposed to look. That other editors don’t feel this sort of intellectual curiosity actually saddens me. I don’t mean to sound superior, but I can’t understand how any good editor could be so uninterested.

So that’s what it comes down to for me: intellectual curiosity. I really believe that people–readers, writers, editors–who don’t look up words in the dictionary, whether for definitions or hyphenations or whatever, lack intellectual curiosity, and their reading/writing/editing suffers for it. I feel like a big snob saying this, and I would never say it to someone’s face (not a grammar Nazi, remember, nor am I some sort of dictionary fascist). But I can’t imagine being so uncurious. I can’t imagine not wanting to know if man-made really is hyphenated (it is) or if Cretaceous period is capitalized correctly (it is). I guess this is what makes me good at what I do. I like to think it’s also part of what makes me who I am.