Narrelle M Harris: writer | editor | songwriter | crafter
Words are like oxygen
When I’m writing a first draft, I use certain words and phrases far too much, trying to capture the image and tone in my head for the page. Some scenes play out like a movie in my mind’s eye and I end up too prone to minute stage directions, to expressions that qualify and prevaricate and waver where no such […]
» Read moreI know I go on a bit about the correct use of language, but I’m not a complete stick-in-the-mud. Language evolves, I know. New words come in, archaic ones get shown the door and you only need to know them when you’re reading Austen or Conan Doyle or Shakespeare. For all that, I’m very fond of the dynamic way language […]
» Read moreI was explaining the difference between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes the other day, and the recipient of my edited-for-brevity wisdom suggested I should blog it, as it was the first time she’s understood the differences. So here it is. It’s certainly not comprehensive – the hyphen has a number of rules, all of which you can disover at […]
» Read moreYou know what surprised the merry hell out of me when I googled in preparation for this language rant? There is indeed such a thing as a ‘toothcomb’. A toothcomb refers to a dental feature in some mammals where a row of long, thin teeth mimic the teeth of a comb, and are used by the mammal in question for […]
» Read moreFor Melburnians who love cabaret, the dear old Butterfly Club may have been turfed out of its old home in South Melbourne, but it now has new digs in the city. The shiny new Carson Place venue is tucked down an alleyway, as all the best Melbourne venues and bars are. I was one of many, many people who helped […]
» Read moreMy father recently gave me a charming anthology called The Family Book of Best Loved Short Stories, a Doubleday edition from 1954, edited by Leland W Lawrence. He said he’d seized upon it long ago because it had Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King in its contents. I took it with me on my recent reading holiday because […]
» Read moreWhile watching a show about design a few months ago, I learned that the use of mixed upper and lower cases on road signs was a deliberate choice. Research showed that people could read the signs from a distance more easily because people could recognise the shape of the word before they could really even read the word. (For the […]
» Read moreI once wrote a feisty rant about the phrase changing tack (meaning to change one’s approach) and how some folks mistakenly write that as change tact, despite the term’s surely obvious nautical origins. It shouldn’t make me foam at the mouth, and yet it does. Okay. So I’m not necessarily a reasonable human being. The thing is, knowing the origins […]
» Read moreA few weeks ago, I wrote about how I would like my name to go down in history as a standard word in the English language, despite the inherent pitfalls in the idea. Several people made entertaining suggestions for what my name might mean, if the circumstances were ever right for it. Alan Baxter suggested: To narrelle (v) – to […]
» Read moreLike many people, I wouldn’t mind my name being remembered by history. Who wouldn’t want to be, like Shakespeare or Herodotus, known and named centuries after their death? But maybe not quite like other people, I’d rather like my contribution to history to be a new verb. Madeleine narrelled every Sunday. Or maybe a noun. Everybody appreciates a fine narrelle. […]
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