Episode #318: American English?! No, Not That! Well....Maybe

Flashback to when both dogs were living large and living pretty while enjoying life.

I discovered the joys of the American English Language very late in life, but early enough that it came to be part and parcel of my palette when I began to take my writing seriously.

To reintroduce everyone to my former employment background, my very first job was working at the CT State Library in something called "The Connecticut Newspaper Project". The extreme T.L.;D.R. is that I helped prepare old Connecticut newspapers for microfilming. the date range of these newspapers with the late 18th century through the mid 1980's, with a particular emphasis on the 1850's to the mid 1980's.

As I got to reading those early newspapers, I slowly began to appreciate the elaborate workaround that newspapermen would do to skirt the strong libel/slander laws of the time period. For example, you couldn't use select adjectives to describe someone in print. Instead you would often put a letter or two, followed by an underscore, and because your reader was reasonably intelligent, they would instantly recognize the word in question.

Or, if you want to insult someone in print, you would have to get really creative with your insults. For example, if you wanted to call someone "week" when they were bragging about the rope tying skills, you could say that "I had to learn on the fly because I didn't have the luxury of someone helping me out by standing still."

Fast forward about a decade or so. When I decided to become serious about my writing, I knew I had to make my characters stand out in some particular way. The no-brainer for me was to flesh out my character's linguistic skills, and I did this with all of my characters throughout all of my stories. Like a stock character trait.

So what I've tried to do was to model my characters language/speech traits after those writers and journalists of the Victorian age: a sharp tongue, biting wit, a delicate mix of sarcasm and bluntness that allows the user to get their point/insult across without too much collateral damage. I also made sure that those particular traits were sprinkled throughout a given story, because as the old saying goes: saying less carries more of an impact than saying more.

To elaborate on the 'less is more' philosophy, I have found that you can easily establish the personality of a particular character is, by simply having them use one word that they can apply a lot of inflection with.

For example, whenever I use the worlds "Indeed", or "Quite", I'm imaging my character is wanting to get to the point of whatever issue they're dealing with so that they can move on, or they're simply agreeing with whatever salient point someone else is making. Whenever I use the word "Come", it's basically short hand for "we need to get moving on to the next issue at hand."

In summation, I try to create characters that are well-rounded, erudite without being snobbish and will often use language as a way to keep the antagonists at bay, or at least, in their lane.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved