Punster, humorist, author, journalist, one Edwin Neumann (1919-2010) delighted us with his observations and love of language and news. His best-seller Strictly Speaking: Will American Be the Death of English? became a classic. It invited me to laugh at my own lazy use of language and that of others, both a curse and delight.

In keeping with the Neumann tradition, some recent usage horrors are difficult to overlook or underhear. They really clank. For example, consider one of the zombie language changes creeping into our local television weather reporters’ mouths and brains.

“Rain will develop overnight.” That sentence, or its variations such as “We can expect rain overnight” or “Up to an inch of rain will fall overnight,” have held firm for decades as a simple, direct, sentence. But now a new entrant has entered the meteorological field.

“Rain will develop in THE overnight.” A perfectly good adverb is suddenly wrestled and shape shifted into a noun. But this differs from the usual language changes. American English loves inventing new expressions by changing a word from one part of speech to another. Most often, American English loves finding ways to shorten language. This habit shows up in another local weather forecasting favorite, as in this sentence. “Temperatures will remain relatively unchanged in the metro.” Except for the proper name of a subway or underground, “metro” serves as an abbreviated adjective for “metropolitan.” Thus, in the recent past, listeners could hear, “Temperatures will remain relatively unchanged in the metro area.” Saying “the metro” instead of “the metro area” not only shortens the sentence by eliminating the fairly abstract word “area,” but also it puts emphasis where it should be, on the more concrete and specific “metro,” which occupies the key place of emphasis at the end of the sentence. That’s all well and good.

“The overnight,” works counter to that. “The” adds, rather than subtracts, an abstract word to the sentence. Instead of simply being a strong adverb, nestled directly up against the verb, now we’ve complicated the entire sentence by adding an entire prepositional phrase, “in the overnight” to answer the question of when the rain will happen.

We could push this zombified language even further. In changing “overnight” from an adverb to a noun, we’ve made “overnight” into a thing rather than a when. It’s almost as if “overnight,” the thing, is pregnant with the rain that it is carrying inside. You just can’t trust those overnights and what they do overnight!

If the Alpha dog weather forecaster begins to use this expression, it will probably only spread to all the others as they compete and jockey for position. I suspect “in THE overnight” sounds more sophisticated to the ears of these speakers, much in the way that the ungrammatical “I” used in place of “me” has spread through the air waves, or the way the word “homage” is mispronounced. The word is pronounced “om’ij,” but now in just the past few years announcers are converting it into “oh’maj.” Oh my! There ain’t no such animal. But I suspect that saying it that way makes speakers think of themselves as sounding more sophisticated in a Frenchified sort of way. Zombie Ego.

In just a year, media has changed another word usage that has lasted for hundreds of years. Hardly a single local or national news, sports, weather, financial report, or what have you, can pass without some reporter saying the grammatically nonsensical “It is concerning.” Much of the time, they mean that something is disconcerting to them, but that might require a bit more education or a dictionary. “It is concerning” has become THE expression for announcers to express CONCERN or anxiousness over something–falling stock prices, lack of housing for the homeless, the possibility of slippery roads, listeria in our packaged salad mixes, and anything else that comes to mind.

Until recently, if someone said or wrote “It is concerning,” we would have to ask what is “it” and what is “it” concerned about?

For clarity and preciseness, the verb concern has always been a verb (what is called a transitive verb) followed by words that tell us who or what concerns us. Example: “I am concerned about losing my job” makes perfect sense. In that sentence, the “I” indicates that he or she is anxious about something. “Losing my job” answers the question about what causes the anxiety. Clear.

But to say, “I may lose my job. It is concerning,” makes no sense. If “it” refers to “losing my job,” then what “it is concerning” means is “Losing my job is concerning.” Concerning what? I didn’t know that “losing my job” could be concerned about anything. A person certainly could; however, that’s not what the sentence says.

Suddenly, everything is concerning. While we do live in a fearful, anxious world for many people, “It is concerning” has become a voguish tagline to either summarize an idea or to introduce one at the expense of language variety, power, and precision. This clichéd tag is said so often that it already has lost much of its force of language, if it ever had any.

Actually, “It is concerning” very much abstracts our language rather than giving it punch. In the end it abstracts us and our concerns or emotions. The phrase gives us a way to say that we are concerned or anxious about something while being ambivalent or removed from direct, living interaction with that concern.

The phrase becomes a tagline much as does “and stuff.” What did you do today? Oh, I went shopping and stuff.” The listener is supposed to either just pass off the “stuff” as irrelevant or intuit what the speaker means as “stuff.” Stuff could be anything from reading magazines to going to the doctor to robbing banks. The speaker is saying, “Well, you get what I mean. It’s no big deal.” The same could be said of “It is concerning.” But at a cost.

Consider the difference between “I may lose my job. It is concerning,” and these statements:

My greatest concern is that I lose my job. (one sentence, w/o the abstract “it”)
I’m terrified I might lose my job.
I might lose my job!

Or consider this weather forecast: “We have some weather issues to report with some winter storm warnings and advisories for some areas. The cold front is expected to bring rain first, followed by a few inches of snow. Since the ground is already frozen, the rain will freeze as soon as it hits the ground, making driving hazardous and very concerning.”

It sounds as if “driving” is not only hazardous but is concerned about something. “Drivers” could and should be concerned about this slippery mess, but not “driving.” The report was meant to warn drivers, so perhaps what should have been said more forcibly and clearly might be: “The Weather Service has issued winter storm warnings and advisories for freezing rain turning to snow, making driving hazardous. Drivers should stay off the road except in emergencies. (or) Drivers should proceed with extreme caution. (or) Travel is not advised.”

Forget concerning. We need to say what needs saying rather than bleeding words of their power and concreteness. We can be concerned, but we can’t be concerning. Saying that becomes very disconcerting.

When concerning is used as a preposition meaning “in reference to,” then it works fine, such as in “Concerning your report of 5 April, we want to congratulate you on a job well done.”

When concern is used as a noun meaning something that is important to us or something that we are anxious about, it works fine too, such as in “My main concern is to find the lost dog before the coyotes get her.”

In contrast, think of this funny screenplay interchange:

“You slept with Rhona, cleaned out our bank account, and sold my mother’s jewels. It is concerning.”

“Did Josephine tell you this? She has a big mouth. It is concerning.”

“I want a divorce.”

“That is concerning.”

I’ve never sat down to trace the actual genesis of a book, so this outline should be instructive to myself and perhaps other readers. First, I have to say that, as with most things in life, both hard work and luck are involved.

To put things in context, my poems and articles have had a relatively easy time of appearing in publications, but books and other forms of writing were another matter. Early on, some of my writings had some very close calls. I had a screenplay that nearly succeeded in becoming a motion picture, followed later by a novel that several New York publishers praised, but ultimately passed on because they did not feel confident about which genre category it belonged. This was Tell Me the Night by Cara Mitchell (one of my pseudonyms), based on the true story of a young man and woman who spent a summer quarantined in a rural Midwest cemetery that had to be moved. This mystery romance was my magical book. I never had to wonder what to write next because the characters came alive and told me what to write. Finally my agent/editor who helped me rewrite the book, said she had failed me, and said the book was too good to fail, so she returned it to me. Consequently I self-published it, as I wanted to move on.

At the same time I had a similar experience with a nonfiction work, The Warlord Cowboys of China. I had spent twenty years doing off-and-on research of Fred Barton, the Montana cowboy who went to China during the warlord years and created the world’s biggest horse ranch and longest horse drive. The Western or “cowboy” presses did not take it for a variety of reasons, such as they thought book was not enough about Montana because it went to China, and such. Understandable. After many attempts to find a publisher, I decided that the research and incredible story was just too good not to be put out there for other researchers, historians, horse lovers,–and lovers of the Old West, spy stories, and Hollywood.

Self-publishing the book led to speaking engagements and a flurry of communications with readers including Barton and cowboy relatives who could add to information already in the book. At that point, I began to collect materials to revise and expand the original book by over twice its length.

Warlord Cowboys was self-published in 2009. Two years before that, McFarland & Company, the leading independent publisher of academic, nonfiction, and popular culture books, had published my The China Clipper, Pan American Airways and Popular Culture. I was proud of this book because the publisher took a chance with it. For the first time, they included several expensive full-color plates and many b/w’s in the book. The book became successful for them, so in one of those probably rare instances in publishing, their acquisitions editor contacted me in the spring or summer of 2014, asking if I might have another book for them.

I told him I was working on expanding and revising my earlier Fred Barton book, but did not know if it would be appropriate for the kind of book they usually publish, although I could tackle more of the popular culture angle since Hollywood and its cowboy stars were certainly involved in the story. I sent him a copy of the self-published book, along with ideas of what would be changed and added. At that point, the timeline for Fred Barton and the Warlords’ Horses of China: How an American Cowboy Brought the Old West to the Far East began:

September/October 2014. Signed contract with McFarland with the understanding that I would pull the earlier self-published book off Amazon and deliver a manuscript by Nov., which I did. Title and text revisions were advised. While I can suggest a title, graphics, and possible cover illustration, I will have no control over page size, format, paperback or hardback, in order that my book conforms to McF’s book series and marketing.

December 2014. After manuscript delivered, McF. office manager needed the following for marketing efforts: 1) working title, 2) author bio, 3) additional features of book such as index, maps, etc., and 4) book description for book’s back cover (McF sent a list of do’s and don’t’s). The Director of Sales & Marketing also sent me a list of promotional services they provide, and a list of how I can promote the book.

January 2015. The Assistant Managing Editor sent me a list of which graphics/photographs were useable and which were not. She also addressed some permission problems and wanted a replacement map.

2 February 2015. Advertising Coordinator sent a copy of how the book was listed on McF’s online catalog, of which I was to check for errors (there were some.) For promotion, I could also request that McF send me 1) a hi-res cover image (tiff), 2) a PDF promotional flyer, 3) a PDF bookmark, and 4) a PDF poster of my book. I did take advantage of all of these.

27 February 2015. Assistant Managing Editor said my map was still not good, but they would try to massage it into the manuscript. The manuscript was now ready for editing. Hooray!

May 2015. A flurry of emails from the Acquisitions Editor with questions about the meanings of some text sentences, about how the cowboy music lyrics could not be used because rights would be too expensive, and about some more questions about which photographs could be credited to my own collection.

June 2015. Advertising Coordinator shows how the book is featured in McF’s new catalog, even though my book is not yet published.

(THE GREAT WORRISOME COMMUNICATIONS BLACKOUT FROM JUNE TO NOVEMBER!)

2 November 2015. Executive Editor says book is ready to go to printer, but also asks if certain sentences can still be stricken, or revised. Earlier, (Oct. 2014) I had to take out my entire introductory page as it was written to attract a general reader rather than a more academic one. I did do that because most of the rest of the book was also written for a general audience, not just for the footnote conscious. (I was even able to sneak in some of my own side comments to give it some color.) Most importantly, I had two weeks to submit the index for the book. Yike!

2 November 2015. Advertising Editor asks me for a list of possible reviewers with contact information so they might receive review copies. Lists are sent over the next two weeks after I requested a list from McF of the list they typically use.

December 2015. Book has been published, and my author’s copies arrive.

December 2015-present. The real work of promotion continues…..

In summary, it took a good year and half between contact with the publisher and actual publishing. This included working directly with seven people at McFarland, and indirectly with the people who were doing reading, layout, cover design, etc. for them. Mostly it involved communications with the Executive Editor, Acquisitions Editor, Director of Sales and Marketing, Office Manager, Assistant Managing Editor, Assistant Marketing Manager, and Advertising Coordinator. Biggest headaches in the process: acquiring permissions, creating graphics up to publishing standards, having to leave out so many illustrations, adding even more documentation, indexing. The actual research and writing was work and fun. It’s the other things that suck up all the time and create frustrations. McF staff was easy to work with, a blessing.

Dealing with Ivan Doig’s death this past month led to a re-examination of the mentors who provided roots, planting a tree in my own writing. Two others who clarified my own orientation, Seamus Heaney and Bill Rose, also departed in recent years. What commonality between these authors struck my writing soul? What were their lessons? All were either Scots and Irish, but I am not. So why their appeal?

I first met Ivan Doig in Billings, Montana, at a writers’ roundtable. He had just come out with a little memoir called This House of Sky, which deeply affected me. Over the years, he graciously gave readings and shared with my students and writers’ groups in Montana, and later in Washington State, where we both ended up after spending much of our lives in Montana. He showed the value of having a background in journalism, interviewing, and library research to create a fictional or non-fictional hard-knocks world where matters of the heart power their way into landscapes as hard, sparse and grand as his words. Ivan had an ear for the voices of his characters. That made both major and minor characters equally alive for the reader. I was always struck by his boxes of index cards where he kept recorded speech habits and expressions that might appear in a book. If you said something that captured your essence or captured local color, you could be part of a character in his books.

Seamus Heaney was no different, capturing the human voice wedded to the land, where hard, honest work and a sly sense of humor could keep you from being swallowed. Each word had to be earned. There was a sparseness here set against the human voice. I responded to his sensibility, and he responded to mine, so I felt totally comfortable in workshops I had with him in Dublin and Sligo.

Bill Rose really gave me the clue as to why he, Doig and Heaney form such a triumvirate for me. Bill was pipe major for the Caledonian Pipes and Drums of Billings, Montana. His career as an architect showed up in his art. Even in watercolor painting, he was a careful draftsman concerned with form to reveal feeling. We both enjoyed the confluence of painting, poetry and prose in capturing the essence of people living in the West. The Western landscape is certainly very architectural, immense yet sparse, awe-inspiring yet swallowing. His work captured that, even when portraying people in the city. The epiphany came for me when Bill said that the vast Western expanse enforced a certain feeling. It was one of walking a fine line between loneliness and solitude. Landscape molded its people, or at least selected the people who lived upon it. I saw this in all his works. Doig captured it in his prose. Heaney had his own Irish version in blunted, sparse words. It’s a feeling similar to the call of the sea, which these artists also considered, be it Heaney’s Beowulf and his Viking longboats, or Doig’s Sea-Runners.

Which leads me to me. As I grew up on the Mississippi in northern Illinois, for whatever reasons. the West exerted its pull on me. Just before graduating from high school, I became aware of feelers being extended to see if I would be interested in being nominated to attend one of the military academies. My taciturn grandfather, who had been at sea most of his life, wanted me to instead attend the Merchant Marine academy. He had taken me fishing as a boy, and we had survived a hair-raising incident in a storm on a Minnesota lake where our boat was in danger of being swamped. At the same time, I had to cut out fish hooks impaled in my own hand while a huge northern pike, also attached to the hooks, thrashed about, driving the hooks farther into my flesh. That story is for another time. Suffice it to say, later my grandfather said that he could tell I was an independent loner who could survive the solitude of the sea that many could not. He would back my following his life at sea. Of course, I did not do that and followed my own path. I went west to Colorado, then Montana, and then Washington, but found my seas and Big Sky with the towering waves of the Rockies and the vast inland sea of the High Plains. Rest in the peace that solitude of the heart grants, grandfather, Ivan, Sheamus, Bill.

This is a long blog, so bear or bare with me if you choose. Henry Thoreau and Robert Frost asked to “simplify, simplify, simplify.” We are certainly doing that with popular word choice. American English is indeed a living, limber language. It borrows from any other language it pleases, changes its own so-called rules or methods of organization and what is acceptable and what is not, and just makes vocabulary up where none existed before. You have to love its robustness while wondering how anyone can ever learn it. English is willing to change with its times, being quite susceptible to popular culture. As we busily add to the language, we also delete much of the wealth and subtleties of English. While there is nothing new in saying this, the speed at which this happens surpasses previous evolutionary language change. This can put a writer and reader in a quandary.

A classic example is the language change on the local television news and weather. As a former journalist, I subject myself to the debasement of watching what no normal young person in their right mind would watch, hence all the senior citizen drug commercials every three minutes. Where we live in southwest Washington, we endure four major network stations, all based in Portland, Oregon. These Yumpy Portlandias usually compete with each other by using the same format of having two narcissistic news anchors, a weather person (a.k.a. “Chief Meteorologist,” blessed by thy name), a fired-up usually semi-comic sports broadcaster, and, depending on the time of day, various others reporting on traffic commute times, health issues, more health issues, did I mention health issues? and what is trending on the Internet. In other words, except for the usual gang shootings and city hall and court house beats, there is no “hard news” unless it is pilfered from the national network outlet, which will repeat the stories in the following half hour anyway. Just in case we are not paying attention, Friday night reports repeat over the weekend and on Monday. To their credit, the stations do occasionally feature worthy investigative reporting to keep their hand in when it comes time for regional broadcasting awards to be doled out.

Under FCC regulations, all these stations must pretend to work as a service to the community in return for using the air waves that belong to all of us. Each broadcast “team” tries to convince us of the great job they are doing, by adopting such slogans as “We Are on Your Side” (how do they know which side I am on?), “Watching Out for You” (They had better if they tick me off one more time!), and “This Is Home” (Then why don’t you watch your language, find some news, and please wipe off your feet!) They all now hope that we will become part of their “teams” by communicating to them our own news stories to help them fill their news-less space. This has led to endless stories of parents posting some gripe with different schools. Do we really care if Johnny missed a bus?

The Weather Shtick Vortex of Poor Speech misses the bus too. Do egotistical weather announcers on television hear what they are saying? Talk about word padding to sound important and to stretch out the time they have to compete with the news anchors! It used to be that we could expect rain, but no longer. Now we can expect rain events, or have a rain scenario, or have rain issues, or experience rain conditions, or we will enter a rain mode!

Or even worse, “I think in my own mind, we are going to enter a rain regime either in the midday time frame or going towards the evening hours. We can even expect steady rain at times.” First of all, if the chief meteorologist thinks in his own mind, where else would he think–in his big toe? Sounds like it. Secondly does he or she know the difference between regime and regimen? I think, in my own mind, NOT. And if it only rains at times, how can the rain be steady? Probably all that was really meant was, “We can expect rain around noon or dusk.” And I’m sure the rain will be ongoing, to use the darling word of all announcers. It used to be that rain could continue or linger, but no longer. All things must be ongoing, wiping out all other words in the English language. It’s an ongoing problem. Oops! We can’t say problem any longer either. We now only have issues. And if the weather is really bad, “it can be concerning.” I didn’t know that weather had feelings so that it could be concerned. I suspect that these announcers mean the threat of weather can be disconcerting, or the announcer was concerned about the bad weather, but what do I know! Lastly, they usually say that a weather front or something is going to try “and” do something, rather than the correct try “to” do something. We have ongoing issues with this “stuff.”

Likewise, connectives such as “likewise,” “in addition,” “however,” “furthermore,” “consequently,” “moreover,” “nevertheless,” “otherwise,” “therefore,” “in contrast,” and a host of other words that show different. distinct relationships and emphasis between thoughts, aren’t even protected under The Endangered Species Act, as “but” or “and, ” or the current darling of financial broadcasters “that said,” or the continuing infatuation with the now ancient Valley Girl Talk’s “like” reduce the language . Like…. in other words, like the news, all ideas are like rendered equal, much like whether or not Kim Kardashian has like again changed her hair color is like given the same amount of time on the news as like a national disaster. That said, for some people, KK is a national disaster, but I did not like say that. Just sayin.’

As weather broadcasting competes with news and sports, hype rears its ugly WiFi head. After all, weather people have to compete as local celebrities with other broadcasters who attend parades, fund raisers, schools, and other public events. So, even when the weather turns benign or stays the same for periods of time, something must be hyped. The word “impact” handily serves this task. In doing so, it erases other colorful words. We love the word because it sounds so strong. “The fog will impact driving in the morning hours.” Sounds like a meteorite slamming into Earth. Before the “impact” rage came and someone decided it would be the cat’s pajamas to turn the noun into a verb, meteorologists said such things as, “Fog will affect morning driving.” “Morning fog may reduce visibility to a quarter of a mile.” “Fog may create dangerous driving conditions in the morning.” Now “impact” is used for just about anything. And let’s not even talk about most announcers not knowing when to use “me,” “him” or “her” in place of “I,” “he” or “she.” As Thoreau and Frost might say, “Impact, impact, impact.”

Sometimes it’s not the quality of one’s literary efforts, but the intent of the efforts that makes a difference in people’s lives.  I learned this lesson the tough way early in my writing career.

During my college days in the middle of Iowa’s cornfields, my roommate and I lived next to a very interesting classmate.  As resident assistants, it was our job to try to know everyone on our floor of the men’s dormitory.  This classmate kept to himself, but we found him to be a genuinely nice guy.  He was an absolute mathematical and science whizz.  He had been an avid bicyclist, even racing through the mountains of Europe, long before the U.S. enjoyed teams competing for winning the Tour de France and other races.  Unfortunately, his bicycling ended when he crashed streaking downhill on gravely mountain curves.  He skidded fifty+ yards on his face and head.  Some hundred stitches were required to put his head back together again.  Worse, the brain trauma left him with epileptic seizures.

Grand mal seizures sometimes occurred while he was in class.  This made other students very uncomfortable, if not horrified.  As a consequence, his social life was severely diminished.  He was in a race to obtain an education before the seizures made that impossible.  One day while he was walking across campus to class, he went down on the sidewalk with his worst seizure yet.  He died on the spot.  We had no idea he had died until we returned from our own classes.

The Dean of Men, who also lived in our dormitory, was not one who could handle a crisis or problems.  Days later, when our classmate’s parents from the East Coast showed up, he could not face them.  So he directed me to meet them and take them up into the attic to claim the items their son had stored there in a trunk.  It was heart-wrenching to watch his mother tenderly touch or unfold each article as memories and grief flowed over her.  Her departing words were how she was afraid her son had died alone and had no friends.

Her words struck my roommate and me to the core.  We had to do something to show her that there were people who cared for her son.  We did not know what to do, but finally came up with a poem (actually verse that was nearly doggerel and a bit embarrassing) that expressed how we felt about her talented, kind son, and we put it in the mail.

A month later an official-looking letter came to us from the Surgeon General of the United States.  Our classmate was his nephew.  He thanked us, saying that the letter had done wonders for helping the parents through their grief.  In fact, the verse became the centerpiece of the memorial service for their son, and our writing would always be cherished by the family.  It is not something I would want to put into a poetry collection, but it probably touched more people than any published poem could.  One never knows.

One writer’s statement that has really stuck came from fellow ex-Montana writer Ivan Doig.  He mentioned how sweet it was to live in the anonymity of the suburbs.  That might sound counter intuitive at first, especially for authors wanting to become known.  The anonymity there proves a real blessing for a writer.  You have neighbors, but they really don’t know what you do.  Most do not know your full name, so you, your work or obsession with writing are really left alone.

They think you are another regular bloke bringing in the groceries, mowing the lawn, carrying in the mail, and because this is the NW, watching the roof moss slowly but surely devour your shingles. True, your ears may have to endure the occasional garage band start-up that plays scream therapy music or endure barking dogs, but,  for the most part, you are insulated, blissfully lost in the burbs where only your words can find you.

Uninterrupted, I thought of Ivan’s words when I carefully carried out and mailed my latest baby or manuscript swaddled in a big U.S.PS. flat rate box.  The baby enjoyed a many-year gestation period, and was born two weeks before the contracted publisher’s due date.  It was a great feeling.  Burbanites had no idea of what was going on.