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Saturday, October 7, 2023

Slang and Abbreviation

Writing about music so much, and classical music, in particular, it wasn't hard to spell words out.  For one thing, I didn't actually know the abbreviations, and I'm not one for using abbreviations anyway.  Once Millennials got into classical music, I get the impression that the music abbreviation industry flourished, because—as we well know—this generation is abbreviation crazy.  (Just last evening I blogged about hyphens versus dashes, and discovered how to generate an m-dash on a phone.  I'm going to put m-dashes anywhere it makes sense!)

The bad thing about slang and abbreviations, in my mind, is that they often create the feeling of being an outsider in anyone who doesn't know the term (abbreviation or slang, as the case may be).  That's the effect it has on me, anyway.  I look up the terms on the internet ASAP*, but I still feel slightly miffed.  Just to think of someone referring to a treble clef as a 'trebbie' gives me hives.  Also, having spent absolute years weeding out, and minimizing the amount of music terminology in Helen, to make it palatable to a general audience, I'm inordinately sensitive to inserting technical music terminology into any of the stories. 

Furthermore, for years early music was considered a fringe area.  Famous classical musicians were often actually hostile towards anyone espousing historically accurate ('authentic') performance practices, until it seemed like suddenly one day, it was standard.  Using viole da gamba was fine, and so was valveless horns.  So, not taking any chances, I spelled everything out. 

But now, I worry whether that actually dates the writing, making it sound like it was being written by some Victorian scholar.  I have to gradually get used to the idea that, given that the Helen stories (or story; it's just mostly a single story) are/is about a musician, the more I fiddle with it to make it less strange to some groups, the more I ruin it for some other  group. 

Two wonderful things that happened, in my battle to introduce non-musicians into the story are Lalitha and Sita!  Lalitha was a musician, introduced to diversify Helen's circle of friends, and Sita was a non-musician.  As I wrote the story, the two sisters became gradually so important that they defined the direction of the story, and in a wonderful way. 

Off to fix myself some brekky, as we say in Australia.  (Or do we?)

Kay

*As Soon As Possible.

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