New Times,
New Thinking.

14 September 2010

A sneak preview of my new book

Here's something to whet your appetite.

By Mark Watson

Work continues on Can I Help You?* but the sheer volume of interesting queries means I’ve not quite succeeded in wading through them all yet. I think I’m going to split them into two separate blog entries. I haven’t quite finished. So do be patient for a while longer. Should be ready tomorrow. These are definitely the best and most moving/complex/interesting questions so far. I’m very optimistic the blog (or blogs) will be a cracker (or two crackers).

In case anyone is thinking “I do hope Mark had a pleasant day today . . . Why isn’t he telling us?” I should say that today has been lovely. I’ve just been settling in to Melbourne. It’s a very easy place to settle in to; that’s why I’m here in the first place. It always reminds me of a British city but with fewer people and more 1920s architecture and nicer wine. I’m hoping to live here one day.

So, I’m writing my new book. I wrote a lot of Eleven here and I am writing the follow-up here while I get the chance. It’s almost meaningless to give you even the sneakiest of sneak previews because it will probably change so much between now and publication that anything I say now is almost irrelevant. But just to whet your appetite:

*It’s a murder mystery.

*It’s to do with the TV industry.

*It’s about people turning into vampires. I’ve taken a look at the contemporary literature scene and realised that that’s what sells, these days. So all my characters are undead.

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I’m joking about the last one. All the characters are “undead” but only in the sense that they are “not dead”, ie alive.

Just a few words on the phrase “whet your appetite”, used above. A lot of people write it as “wet your appetite” and don’t trouble to think about what that actually means. “Whetting” means sharpening something — for example, a knife, when you rub it against a rock. Hence: “whetting the appetite”. Annoys me slightly when people get this wrong. If it was “wet the appetite”, it would probably mean the opposite — to dampen the appetite down.

Other misheard popular phrases:

“He did it off his own back” — the phrase is “off his own BAT”. It comes from cricket, where you’re only credited with runs that come off your own bat; ie you hit the ball yourself. However, interestingly, “off your own back” is so widely used that it’s now become a phrase in its own right. Which shows that, in English, even if you’re wrong, you can be right, as long as you’re persistent enough.

“He could care less” — for some reason I can’t understand, Americans and sometimes Canadians say this when they mean: “He COULDN’T care less.” Obviously, if you say “I could care less about ancient history”, then you’re saying that you DO quite care about it — which is the opposite of what the phrase was invented for. But this continues to happen quite a bit. This isn’t the biggest problem in the world but it is a problem. North Americans, sort it out for me, will you?

“Solid as a frog” — the phrase is meant to be “solid as a ROCK”. Admittedly, I just made this mishearing up because I only had two and it wasn’t enough to make a feature. If you have a common grammatical or syntactical error that makes you a bit annoyed, though, let’s have a conversation.

Ooh, I also don’t like it when people start things with “an” because of a following “h”. It sounds wrong. Eg “an hilarious film”. But this is more controversial.

For further not-very-well-substantiated linguistic prejudices, I refer you to one of the first blogs I ever wrote, entitled “I Mind Your Language”. I think it was some time around 20 February.

As I say, tune in tomorrow when they’ll be more substantial fair on offer. And by “as I say”, I mean “as I said”; by “they’ll”, I mean “there’ll”; and by “fair”, I mean “fare”. God be with ye (goodbye).

*Can I Help You? is a cross between an agony aunt column and 63336, the people who supply the questions for “We Need Answers”. Essentially, you can ask me for help on any issue — logistical, emotional or practical. Every now and again I will round them up on my website and try to answer them all. I don’t know how often, so you’d be well advised not to ask anything too urgent, eg “How do I get out of this burning building?” But it might suit anyone who has something that’s been on their mind for a bit.

This post originally appeared on Mark Watson’s blog.

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