Save Chambers!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have occasionally mentioned Chambers Dictionary, well, just once or twice...

Its parent company, Hachette (there's an apt name if I ever heard one) decided last month that it would be a good idea to close the Edinburgh office, out of which Chambers has worked for 190 years - for no doubt sound financial reasons, but no sound human reasons - and split ChambersHarrup between the faceless leviathans of Hodder and Larousse.

A petition has been started in the hope of saving the Edinburgh office - with its twenty-seven real people doing real jobs - and prevent Chambers being subsumed. PLEASE SIGN UP!

Links:
Save Chambers Petition (you don't have to donate to iPetition)
Buy Chambers Dictionary! (Nothing compares with a real one!!)
@ChambersOnline (on Twitter)
Chambers Online Dictionary (The online version)
Clishmaclaver (ChambersOnline's Brilliant Blog)

The background story can be read on the Publishing Scotland website, and in The Scotsman.

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Footnote, 16/11/09: the Chambers office is now due to close by New Year, with half the staff having left by the end of November. I am at a loss to describe how angry this makes me feel, and how sad I am. Bean-counters - I wonder how you sleep.

Clishmaclaver

Last month I posted about Chambers Online dictionary (here), and have been following their blog, Clishmaclaver, ever since. If you've not been over to see them yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. Recent posts have such inviting titles as: A Hairy Situation, Not Everything from Mexico is Bad, Textual Intercourse (you'll have to read it!), and The Emergence of Gambit, as well as the one I mentioned previously, Filth.

Those of you with a love of words - and I suspect many readers of this blog have a fairly intimate relationship with words - will find Clishmaclaver a great place to lose a few hours broaden your education. They also Tweet @ChambersOnline.

And if you don't know what Clishmaclaver means, I invite you to look it up in the dictionary!

Appropriate Speech

When the Reconstructed Man gave me the Chambers Dictionary for Christmas, it came with a free six-month subscription to Chambers Reference Online (dictionary and thesaurus). Now, while I am more than partial to a spot of page flicking, my copy of Chambers weighs 2.5kg and I don't always have it with me, so I just love this resource.

The lovely people at Chambers, obviously being modern folk, also have their own blog, Clishmaclaver, and recently, they published this post.

In it, Ian Brookes discusses the place of profanities in the dictionary and in everyday language, and the very narrow line between causing offence or not. He also touches on swearing by fictional characters, and how in some cases "...the swearing is integral to the situation and appropriate to the characters..."

Now, this is related to a problem I'd been having with my baddie. Whenever I read through his dialogue I felt it just wasn't convincing; he sounded too educated, too middle class. Now, many people don't like swearing, and I know so much of the advice on the subject warns writers away from it, but once I started introducing a few obscenities into his speech, he came across as much more plausible. I mean, a man of his calibre just wouldn't say, "Well, I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree on that, old chap." He'd say, "Fuck you."

Do your characters swear? Does it bother you?

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ADDENDUM: And there was me thinking, 'I'm sure I'll get away with using a screen-shot of the Chambers site for my post illustration; no one from there is ever gonna visit my blog." Only took them a few hours... thanks for the tweet guys! You can follow their twittering @ChambersOnline!

Determined - My Writing Word of the Moment

In November last year Womagwriter posted the following quote, pinched from J A Konrath’s blog:

There's a word for a writer who never gives up: Published

It struck a chord with me at the time, and even though months have gone by, this remark keeps popping into my head.

It is a welcome visitor just now. At the moment I am smothered with work, a mountain of washing, a house that is buried under five years’ (of not more) of junk, the demands of three small (but lovely) children, and endless paperwork of other people’s making. As soon as I stop to write, the whole world crashes down around me, and the result (not surprisingly) lacks lusture.

I can imagine that these are the circumstances under which people consider giving up; but I’m not. Why? Because of JAK’s remark. Because the only way to be one of the two in three thousand slush-pile survivors is to keep going. And because I don’t want them writing on my grave: “Could have made it, but didn’t try hard enough.”

What’s your 'writing word of the moment'?

I have to tell you that the highlighter is Photoshoppery; I don't want you thinking I'd do that to my beloved dictionary.