Sometimes one feels privileged to have been witness to the first murmurings of a change in the use of language; at others, one feels tears squeezing through one’s lids at the realisation that a metaphor is seriously ill.  Of course, it could just be the odd malapropism to which even seasoned journalists fall victim from time to time but as with the case of “refute” – as in, Miss X totally refutes suggestions that she ate Miss Y’s Chihuahua –  the wrong usage bullies its way into the language and pretty soon everyone is refuting everything else with gay abandon.

There are those, of course who say, “Why does it bother you so much?  Language evolves.’  And so it does but it’s when it “devolves” into some sort of gibbering primordial bollocks that I get a little upset.  It's when meaning is altered in such a significant way as to mislead.

When I read: “His hosts laid out all the stops…” in an article about the official welcome for a state dignitary, I am called to wonder what the journalist (presumably paid – although, being The Independent, with its penchant for using interns, - possibly not) believes the “stops” are that are being so carefully “laid out” in welcome.  And as to what makes the laid out stops so impressive,  I really don’t know.  

Nor, sadly, do I know what goes through the minds of people who write, “should of”, when they mean “should have” but I have little doubt that before too long, we’ll all be doing it.

There are lots of things that I hate.  Indeed, far too many to go into here so I shall concentrate upon the one thing for which I reserve a reasonable quota of my not inconsiderable ire.  I refer, of course, to the Microsoft Word Grammar Checker.  It is the clearest evidence (were any needed) that not only is Beelzebub American, he also works for Microsoft. 

Now, I’m the first to admit that a piece of software that stands guard over the language is a beguiling idea but each time I see one of those little green vipers squiggling beneath words (or, sometimes, entire tracts), I find I cannot stop my brain from chiming,  from chiming “Garbage In; Garbage Out”.

A recent encounter involved the sentence:  

"He looked around, expecting to see some sort of reinforced glass ticket booth (no doubt employing some sort of microphone and speaker arrangement via which he would tell the lobotomised twat within that he had no intention of donating a brass-farthing) and a queue snaking away from it."

According to the infernal machine, the term “had no intention of donating” would be better rendered as “did not intend to donate”.   If anyone reading this believes this would be an improvement on the original, perhaps they would explain but I contend that the former expresses a far more imperative aversion to donating than does the latter. 

Another mysterious command is prompted by this passage:

"Arthur had sat outside the headmaster’s office awaiting his turn and wondering why it was that the great military academy was having to plunder his grammar school for suitable candidates."

Microsoft apparently takes a dislike to the verb “having” and suggests that I “consider revising”.  I presume it would prefer “had had” rather than “was having” in order to maintain some form of tense consistency with “had sat”.  Why did it not object, therefore, to “awaiting” and “wondering”?

Capricious, the Grammar Checker cannot be accused of not being.  

But then it was, I suppose, designed for office workers and so the language it prefers is formal and structured in a way that fiction need not be.  Indeed, one of the joys of fiction is the encounters we have with an author’s idiosyncratic usage and long may it remain so.

Finally, a little quiz.  Consider the passage below. How many times and where does the Grammar Checker take offence?  No cheating!

“Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless. Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”

I’ve just concluded an experiment.  When I began “The Rothko Room”, my aim was to create two major story strands and unite them satisfactorily by means of a third.  I began each story as though it were a separate tale and, although there were characters hinted at in one, they became realised only in the other.  In this way, I felt that I might be able to construct an entire imagined, yet plausible whole. A common thread runs through each and at 30,000 words of one and 22,000 of the other, I am almost at the point where I can begin to draw the threads together in the final 20,000 or so.

I was a bit worried a couple weeks ago, when I lopped about 17,000 words out of the pair of them but I can now announce that  the experiment has been a complete success.

So I’ve decided to abandon the idea altogether and concentrate only on one of the plotlines. Why?  Because the stories come together “satisfactorily”, not “beautifully” or “elegantly” or “marvellously” but “satisfactorily”.  The art does not, as they say, disguise the art.  As I say, I’m pleased with the way each tale works and the way in which common threads have been sustained but it is too obviously a work of artifice – a conceit; a gimmick.  I honestly believe I can make a very good story out of one, and another – perhaps even a sequel – out of the other.  So today, I resolved to abandon one.  Cast it adrift for many months and hope that it’s still alive when I return to it.  It will be a difficult choice, since I hate both the bastards with equal venom. 

You can catch up with this week's excerpt and perhaps you can guess whether is stayed or was cast into outer darkness.