266. The Specificity of Language with Eli Burnstein

Author Eli Burnstein discusses the nuances of language and how he dives into the details in his new book Dictionary of Fine Distinctions.
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Visit Eli's website:
https://eliburnstein.com/

Get a copy of Dictionary of Fine Distinctions:
https://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1454952350/

Fine Eli on social media:
https://twitter.com/eliburnstein
https://www.instagram.com/eatpraylovestein/

Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the podcast that takes a whole person approach to everything related to writing and editing. Have you ever wondered why it's important to choose and use just the right word? Author Eli Burnstein is here to tell us and to talk about his book, Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. This is the "Specificity of Language." Well, thank you so much for being here.

Eli: My pleasure. Thanks for having me!

Jennia: If you'd like to tell us even just a little bit about you and about your book?

Eli: Sure. So, I'm a humor writer. This is my debut book. It's called Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Subtitled "Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning." And as the title suggests, it is a collection of commonly confused objects, ideas, and above all, words. And not just commonly confused, but sometimes identifying distinctions we weren't even aware of in the first place.

Jennia: Yes! So happy that you've always been interested in this, because I can see from, like, a comedic standpoint, it would be helpful or even contribute to your material.

Eli: You know, I should probably clarify to readers so that I manage expectations, that though I am a humor writer, this book, it's quirky. It's not laugh out loud funny. Maybe there are a few moments that you might smile or be amused. I certainly tried to write it in a somewhat witty tone, but it's not like the—I publish online that's more laugh out loud funny. This is what I like to call a quirky reference book.

Jennia: So how did you come to the point of describing it as a quirky reference book? Was there any point in time where you thought, "Maybe I should just give the basic facts here, or the actual definitions and leave it at that?" Or was this always the plan?

Eli: I am no authority on these matters, but in writing, when I write humor, it's normally driven by a humorous idea. There's a premise, right? Whereas this, I had occasionally thought, in writing this, "Hey, should I make this funnier?" And I thought, "Well, humor doesn't quite work that way." You don't want to force jokes where they don't belong. I find that kind of feels a bit corny when you're just kind of throwing in zingers just because you feel obligated to make it funny. At the same time, as I went through it, I was certainly aware that it is quite a neurotic project, right? You're in extreme analysis mode all the time, and there's something that's kind of low level amusing about that. You're kind of in this hairsplitting headspace and I think that that brings out a little bit of humor more on the dry end than the kind of laugh out loud, hilarious end of the spectrum. And I also think a second source of humor in the book is I try to be extremely concise. And I think concision, strangely, can bring in, again, a little bit of amusement. There's sometimes a charged energy to things that are really, really brief to the point of blunt (Jennia laughs). So actually, I should add a third, which is that the book is illustrated by a wonderful illustrator, Lyanna Fink. And they add a lot of levity and charm and wit of their own to the book.

Jennia: Yeah, I was looking at some of the illustrations in the sample pages that are available on Amazon. You know, we have that saying about a picture is worth a thousand words. And that really was the case here, because it's so easy to get bogged down in wordiness when you're trying to describe something, like the difference between a bay and a gulf. But then when you saw those simple little pictures that were included, you just thought, "Aha!"

Eli: I completely agree for those entries where I'm describing something physical.

Jennia: Mhm.

Eli: You know, we're writers and we love to go on about the importance of language and words, but nothing like a visual to complement what you're talking about to really cement what you're describing. And I think for me, it proved a nice one two punch, right? First concise description and followed by, or paired with, an illustration that really makes explicit exactly what I'm talking about, right? So bay, gulf, and cove. Or—

Jennia: Coffee too. Like, that was another one where I'm not sure that I could have actually defined the difference between latte, cappuccino, and flat white. Before then, I may have had a vague idea of, one seems really foamy and one is also foamy, but perhaps not quite as foamy. I'm not really sure, but now I know.

Eli: Yes, exactly. So I thought that the visuals do a great job of kind of pinpointing where the difference lies.

Jennia: Yeah, you bring up another good point that I think definitely applies to authors and writers, and that is brevity of language, not just the specificity. And that you've really married the two by using those illustrations.

Eli: Yeah, that's true. And in fact, on the subject of brevity, my working motto for this is: Anything can be interesting, provided you're brief. For instance, you know, a lot of these, the difference between a gondola and a funicular or a satin and sateen in fabrics, any of these things you could go on and on and on at length. You know, one thing I learned in the writing of this book is that nuance is an infinite project, not just ranging across different subjects, but even within a single subject, you can just keep getting finer and finer. You can find ever-more nuanced ideas, ever-more nuanced hairs to split. And at some point, you do just have to stop and say, "Okay, I've achieved what I set out to do in this small space." And so, for me, it was very much striking a balance between getting to the heart of the difference, but not just packing it full of trivia and side facts. And, you know, I just wanted to get in and get out.

Jennia: What advice, then, do you have for authors when they might be weighing between choices with words or a word where they then might need to expand upon it? How persnickety do you need to be? (Eli laughs)

Eli: That's a good question. I'd say it depends on what you're writing. I think being careful in your choice of language is always a good idea. I'm sure that's not too controversial of an idea amongst writers.

Jennia: No, definitely not. And not for this show, for sure.

Eli: No, but it also reminded me that it is a lifelong project. You could always be more apt in your choice of words, and I think that is what makes some of the writers we love so powerful. A huge part of what kind of grips you is, at that line-by-line level, the description of whatever it is that's happening. And if the description is so accurate, if it really seems to track reality at this very granular scale, you just feel so keyed into the story. And it doesn't have to be a story. It could be an argument, be an essay, fiction, nonfiction, whatever it is. And I think that that does boil down to apt choice of words. So if you're really saying, "Was someone persuading someone else, or were they convincing someone else?"

Jennia: Yes!

Eli: "Were they envious or were they jealous?" Even at a subconscious level, you know, we may not have an articulate understanding of these differences or be able to, you know, teach a class on it, but at subconscious level, intuitively, I think we do understand and register these differences. You know, if you're a budding writer or an experienced writer, I think mastering the meanings of words, however subtle, is a worthwhile endeavor. But I think that there are dedicated resources to this beyond, you know, Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, which, of course, I'm happy to plug, but it is by no means exhaustive. So if you want to take a more rigorous approach, there are great reference guides. You know, we're all familiar with dictionaries and thesauruses, which are great. But then I would consider kind of next tier of useful reference books are usage guides. So Fowler's Modern English usage is a great resource. Garner's Modern English Usage is another one, and they will often have discussions on differences between words or the meanings of words. And Garner's and Fowler's are terrific. Merriam Webster also have a usage manual. I would add, on top of all the world of usage manuals, a third layer. And this is getting a little bit more obscure and maybe closer to kind of what animated my interest in writing this book, is a type of book called the "Synonymy," or a dictionary of synonyms. Synonymy is very much what my book project kind of draws on, is it looks at two or more words and elaborates on the differences between them. So it's not a thesaurus, which just lists the differences between words. A synonymy has short commentaries on all these different words.

Jennia: I can see that being a really great resource for writers too, especially because just with editing as an example, I will sometimes see a word that has been plugged into a sentence. And if you were to look at it only in its dictionary entry, it might seem like it could fit there. Or sometimes my authors have originally written in another language, and then they've translated it on their own and put a word in there, which, again, from the dictionary entry, it would look like it would fit, but it's not the context that we use it in. So I'm going to have to recommend (laughs) using one of these guides from now on.

Eli: Absolutely. And you raise a related issue, which is if you're new to English or if you're translating into English or even if you are a native English speaker or fluent English speaker, English has such a vast vocabulary. So this is a particular use to English speakers. Take the word "declare." Are you declaring something? Are you avowing it? Are you asserting it? Are you proclaiming it? Are you declaiming it? Let's just open up our thesaurus now and say, "Okay, proclaim, well, we've got declare, announce, pronounce, state, make known, and so on and so forth. So, you know, these words, you know, we all have intuitive sense of when to use one over the other, but you can really, you know, study the differences, and that effort is rewarded if you want to be a writer.

Jennia: Yeah. So I think too, not just for authors when they're writing and being able to pick and choose those words, but also thinking about the reader and how they're going to interpret that sentence, or that scene, or that person's reaction if they're using dialogue based on the word choices that you have used. Because some of these words that mean the same thing, there's this judgment applied to them. Or the reader can infer that perhaps a character doesn't like someone else or is joyful to see them just based on that one tag, for instance, in the dialogue.

Eli: I think that's totally right. Words aren't just different from one another with subtle shades of denotation, but also connotation, right? So every single word is this complex field of semantic association. So we have kind of the inner circle of official dictionary meaning, and then an outer circle of connotation, and then you could radiate beyond that towards its kind of metaphorical possibilities, right? And you take two words and they're just going to go take the reader in different directions. And I think that, you know, picking the word that you want really down to the, you know, the 16th of an inch kind of thing is—really does take the reader that much deeper into it. I almost kind of think of it as like the writer's equivalent of resolution in cameras or videography, right? You know, "Oh, is this 1080p or is it 4k?" And I think that if you're a good writer—or great writer, I think you're writing in 4k, you're getting people that really high resolution experience. And I think that brings people so deep into whatever it is you're describing or talking about.

Jennia: I love that. I love that I'm going to have to steal that from you and use it (both laugh).

Eli: Oh, God, please, by all means. I mean, I think another—and maybe to push that even further, you pick your words really, really well. I think you can get the message across that much more sharply.

Jennia: Mhm. No, I completely agree. And I think that also when people are choosing those words, they should also consider that we don't have tone when we are looking at just the written word. And so then even going back to, we were talking about the context of certain phrases or words, and how is that meaning going to change if we are taking the tone away and leaving the reader up to interpret that or add it?

Eli: That I completely agree with. Without all the physical cues that we use, the body language that we use with oral speech, it just raises the stakes on how you craft your sentences when you write, right? And word choice is a huge part of that.

Jennia: Mhm. So when you were putting this together, how did you choose what to include and what not to include?

Eli: Good question. And I don't have a great answer other than what interested me, but I did have some operating principles. So one was, I wanted to keep the selection eclectic, because I really wanted to showcase the diversity of nuance across all aspects of life. So whether it's food, or architecture, or literary devices, or natural landscapes, I wanted to kind of really give readers a sense of just the vast array of nuance in every single aspect of life. And I also wanted to offer a range of degree of difficulty, for lack of a better word—although (laughs) there's always a better word to choose. But let's say, since we're speaking and I'm not writing, let's call it difficulty. So there are some entries that are on the easier side, arguably—although, you know, everyone has different educational backgrounds, so they will know different things going in, so people will disagree as to which are obvious and which are hard. But I could say you could reliably say that an easier one might be something like the difference between... cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers might be one that a lot of people are familiar with, right? So they might not know those terms, but the concepts themselves are very straightforward. Cardinal numbers are one, two, and three, and ordinal numbers are first, second, and third. So that's a concept that's pretty easy to digest, and many, if not most readers will see it and go, well, "Oh yeah, I know that one." But then on the other end of the spectrum, I have "schlemiel" and "schlimazel," which is, you know, two Yiddish terms for different kinds of loser. Or I have a hermit and an anchorite, which is two types of kind of religious ascetic. So those, unless you're a medieval history PhD, you'd probably find that on the more obscure end of the spectrum. So, yeah, I wanted an eclectic array in terms of theme, but also kind of degree of difference, if you will.

Jennia: Yeah. I appreciate that you picked such a broad range, and not just because then it appeals to a larger audience, but I think it is important for people to realize that it's not just one particular area where this applies. And because I can see some people assuming, you know, in academia, we're going to be looking for this, or if I were to write a research paper on the Constitution or textile production, I might need to know these terms, but that it really applies to every single facet of our lives.

Eli: Absolutely. And I think it's, for me, was kind of fun to think about possible knowledge transfers among people with different educational backgrounds, right? So glossaries of terms are things people often encounter within a specific field. But unless you study that field, unless you, you know, study to become an accountant or study physics, you're not going to know those terms, right? So this is partly an exercise in sharing some of those terms and some of those distinctions more widely. So, to give you an example, I have the difference between an AmpVolt and watt. Which if you've studied electrical engineering or you're an electrician, you will probably know that quite well, but to the rest of us, it remains opaque. So I think, just, again, trying to concisely deliver that, bring that to a slightly broader audience without making it too complicated, but at the same time, trying to preserve some of the nuance, that was kind of the challenge.

Jennia: I can see that being a benefit to authors as well where they do have this broad selection to choose from or to learn from, because so often you do see, even in reviews, where that reader who does know so much about this one subject will pick up on that error, and then they blast it all over in their reviews (laughs), whereas the author might not have even thought to look it up. They might not even realize there was a difference that they needed to research to make sure they had chosen the correct word. But when you have something written this simply for you and in such clear language, so that you can understand the difference, and then you'll know it moving forward, you don't have to worry so much about some of those things. But I think another benefit too, is it just opens you up to realizing some of these commonly used words might not mean what you think they mean, and then you begin to question, "Am I using it correctly or not?" So then it's pushing you to further your own knowledge base.

Eli: Absolutely. I don't think I have anything to add to that (Jennia laughs). I think that's well put.

Jennia: Thank you! Well, do you have a favorite word or a favorite entry in here?

Eli: There are a few that maybe are my favorites. I think one that I kind of like was the difference between an umlaut and a diaeresis, maybe because, you know, being a writer, I'm naturally a word nerd, so—Well, let me start with their similarities. So both umlauts and diaereses refer to that double dotted accent or what experts call a diacritic, that double-dotted diacritic above letters. And they appear in a wide variety of languages. But the difference is that an umlaut gives vowels a more e-like pronunciation, or what people in phonetics call, a more fronted pronunciation, whereas a diaeresis indicates that a new syllable has begun. So they do quite different things. And let me just illustrate that. So an umlaut is kind of most archetypally associated with German.

Jennia: Yeah.

Eli: So the word "schon”, which I believe means "already," although don't quote me on that—Well (laughs), I am being recorded.

Jennia: (laughs) No one quote him!

Eli: Yeah, Google it! But schon without an umlaut becomes schön with an umlaut over that o, right? So s-c-h-o-n, "schon." And then s-c-h-ö-n is "schön." schon. So that's the umlaut rather in action. But the diaeresis is something that English speakers will be slightly more familiar with because there are a few words in English whose use of a diaeresis is optional, not required. But different magazines, different newspapers, depending on their house style, will use them. So the word we would probably most commonly encounter a diaeresis in is "naïve," right? So n-a-ï (with the diaeresis)-v-e. And the idea there is that it indicates that a new syllable has begun, just to go back to the definition of a diaeresis. So it tells us that there's a syllable break there. The idea is that we don't read naïve, like "nave," right?

Jennia: Yes

Eli: Which we would be inclined to do if it were conforming to the standard English pronunciation, right? So we know "naïve." The diaeresis clarifies that. Other examples are the name Zoë or Chloë may have a diaeresis at the end, right? So we don't say "Zo" or "Clo."

Jennia: (laughs) Some people do.

Eli: That's right. So that's the difference there. So I find that kind of a fun one.

Jennia: Well, did you have to do a lot of research for this book, or was it mostly just pulled from what you already knew?

Eli: Oh, no. (Jennia laughs). Lots of research was required. I'd like to pretend that I knew all this going in, but that was far from the truth. And, in fact, you asked earlier, how did I decide which entries to do, and I said the ones that interested me. And I think that a lot of the ones that interested me were ones I didn't know about but that I myself had wondered about, right? So there are counterexamples to that, like, the umlaut-diaeresis one was one I was familiar with, although it was still a really fun rabbit hole to go down. But, you know, a swamp, a marsh and a bog, for instance, was something I didn't really know. And it was interesting, you know, to spend a little time learning about the different kinds of wetland. So there's swamps, there's marsh—there's marshes, there's bogs, and there's fens—are the kind of four classic type of wetland. And though this is not my normal area of expertise or field of interest, even, like I said, if you're brief and if you want to kind of dip in and out, it's fun to just get a feel for. What's that all about? Why are there differences? How do we characterize these differences? But no, the vast majority of the book consists of entries that I did not know, or at least didn't know well, going in, and that was a big part of the fun.

Jennia: Great. Well, this has been fantastic! And do you have any resources besides what you've already recommended, maybe a starting point for someone who feels that this is of interest to them as well and it's something that they would like to get into?

Eli: Yeah, good question. I think that I've covered them. It's, you know, dictionaries are too obvious to even say, but dictionaries, thesauruses. Usage guides, I think, are getting into next level territory. And I think for budding writers, it's really a valuable and also really fun kind of book to look through. So Fowler's and Garner's are two big ones. There are others out there too, but just to listen to kind of experts, you know, elaborate on all these grammatical and linguistic concerns that keep coming up over and over. Another book from a few years back is Dreyer's English, which I think is a great book on language and writing. And I believe the back third of the book consists of commonly confused pairs—of a different kind than mine. Mine are more about things out in the world. So bays and gulfs, for instance. But his are more about homonyms. So the difference between "it's and its," or "there, they're, and their," or getting to more advanced territory, flaunt and flout, and elicit and illicit, and things like that, but still a really great resource. And then, I'd say, getting into the more deep end, there are what's known as English language corpora, right? Or corpuses. I think corpora is the plural. But, you know, I guess I'll have to consult my usage—

Jennia: (laughs) Corpora sounds better.

Eli: —Yeah, I'll have to consult my Fowler's to know what's the proper plural of that. But an English language corpus is a vast body of text, and dictionary writers, or lexicographers, use that to see how people are using the language, right? So there are these living and giant Internet databases of books, Internet articles. They're kind of just these massive, massive oceans of text, and some of them are available for free online. And if you want to look at how words are being used, you know, dictionaries, and thesauruses, etc., are a great starting point, and their sample sentences are a great starting point. But if you want to be, you know, a really rigorous, empirical lexicographer, you need to go to the field, right? And see how people are using the word, because these things are constantly changing. Not only do meanings shift, but what's okay and not okay. Even the spectrum is kind of constantly moving. So it's really cool to kind of dip into these powerful tools. I think one is the COCA or Coca. I believe you have partial access to that online for free, if not complete access. It's been a while since I last dipped into it, but, yeah, that would be my last recommendation.

Jennia: Great! And then if you would also like to just let us know when your book will be available and then where listeners can find it?

Eli: It would be my pleasure. So (laughs) the Dictionary of Fine Distinctions is now available for pre-order from all online major booksellers. You can also consult your local independent bookseller. Often they do have websites where you can make pre-orders. But the book will be officially out April 9 (Oh would you look at the date? Go get your copy now!) I hope you enjoy it!

Jennia: Great, thank you again!

Jennia: And that's all for today! Thank you for listening, and please check out the show notes for more information. And then please join me next week as Phil Gramlich joins us to discuss how to write about an iconic figure. Thank you!