It was a dark and stormy night

Storytelling, exclamation marks and untranslatable words ✨

Hi friends,

It was a dark and stormy night. I wanted to build an igloo out of blankets and never leave. But I had tickets for a storytelling event. Peering out the window, I saw rain lashing down sideways. So I mentally scanned my selection of shoes (all desperately inappropriate for wet weather, in different ways), chose the least-worst and set out into the icy rain. Because, being human and in possession of a brain, I absolutely love stories.¹

Moisture steaming off me when I got there, I sunk into stories about spirits, ghosts, women transforming into birds, birds transforming into princes, and my absolute favourite: a little poo who came to life. His name? Dunglet.

“Dunglet, you’re here! Wonderful to see you” say the villagers whenever they see him.

Dunglet starts off as an adorable child helping his family to bake bread and plough fields. Dunglet goes on to devour his entire family and the whole village, but let me get back to why I like him so much.

I probably love Dunglet because I adore diminutive suffixes like -let, -ing, -kin or -in. (Did you know a puffin chick is called a puffling?)

And because Dunglet made me hoot with laughter, when I was least expecting it.

Because the story of Dunglet – like all the other stories I heard that night – comes from Palestine (and from a collection of Palestinian traditional stories called Speak, Bird, Speak Again.)

I had forgotten that humour can exist alongside pain.²

Into the links.

How to exclaim

“Noisy. Hysterical. Brash. The textual version of junk food. The selfie of grammar. The exclamation point attracts enormous (and undue) amounts of flak for its unabashed claim to presence in the name of emotion which some unkind souls interpret as egotistical attention-seeking.”

Oh! As someone with a lot of feelings (!) I lean on the exclamation mark more than most. So I loved this whimsical exploration of the exclamation point.

How To Exclaim

Careful with Chat GPT

I understood AI hallucinations as an abstract concept. Then I read Elif Batuman’s story about Chat GPT making up Proust quotes and I was like…oh now I get it. For the record, I no longer welcome our robot overlords.

How to research emotionally sensitive subjects

Content design and content strategy pals, I’m thinking of you here. I recently read Kate Every’s excellent article on user research, design and trauma. Among the helpful resources, I particularly liked

How to research emotionally sensitive subjects

Americanisms that aren’t Americanisms

When I was at primary school, there was a grave and terrible judgement reserved for examples of Truly Bad Language™. (My school wasn’t Crunchem Hall but it also wasn’t far off).

If you messed up, teachers would write in red pen: “American!” or bark at you: “British English, please.”

We’ll get into prescriptivism versus descriptivism and the colonial and racial politics of this kind of language policing in a future newsletter. But for now, let’s just bathe in the glory of finding out that a lot of those so-called Americanisms… just ain’t.

Top Ten Americanisms that aren’t American

An untranslateable word: qaher

I love untranslateable words. Most of the time, when we call a word “untranslateable” we mean that it holds particular nuance.

It is not more or less translateable than a word like hello, goodbye or thank you. But some words make me think longer and harder, like qaher.

“There is no English equivalent to the Arabic word qaher قهر. The dictionary says “anger” but it’s not. It is when you take anger, place it on a low fire, add injustice, oppression, racism, dehumanization to it, and leave it to cook slowly for a century. And then you try to say it but no one hears you. So it sits in your heart. And settles in your cells. And it becomes your genetic imprint. And then moves through generations. And one day, you find yourself unable to breathe. It washes over you and demands to break out of you. You weep. And the cycle repeats.”

~ Khadijah Muhaisen Dajani

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