Quotation marks in 1906. Starting stories in the middle. Road trip words.
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyuan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, I have some funny thoughts about quotation marks from an old usage guide. And then we'll talk about a writing technique called in medias res. But first, I want to do a quick clarification about the pronunciation of August in last week's show about capitanims, words that have different meanings, whether they're capitalized or lowercase.

Capitalized August is the month, but the lowercase form, which means inspiring or worthy of respect, can actually be pronounced multiple ways. Merriam-Webster lists two, but the Oxford English Dictionary lists four American pronunciations. Auguste, which is the first pronunciation listed in Merriam-Webster, so I believe it's the most common.

August, with more of a W sound at the beginning, and then two forms with more emphasis at the beginning. August and august. British English is more sensible with only one pronunciation. August. When I re-listened to that show, I thought my intonation was weird in that section, so I wanted to give you a little more information. But however you pronounce it, it has a different meaning when it's capitalized versus lowercase.

And I got to wondering how the two forms are related. They both come from a Latin word that means venerable. The month name came first, going all the way back to the year 8 BCE, and it's meant to honor Caesar, the Roman ruler, who was sometimes called Augustus Caesar, meaning venerable Caesar. It was part of his full name.

The adjective came to English from the same Latin word more than a thousand years later in the 1600s, and I couldn't find an explanation why the pronunciations are often different.

One thing jumped out at me reading Ben Yagoda's book, Gobsmacked, about American and British English. An aside that in their 1906 usage guide, The King's English, the Fowler brothers devoted five full pages to the question of where to put terminal punctuation, like periods, relative to quotation marks. And I thought, I want to read those five pages.

Well, unfortunately, they turned out to be pretty tedious, but the section right before it about when to use quotation marks in general made me laugh more than once. These old style books often have a lot of character, so I'm going to share that with you today. This begins on page 280 of The King's English.

Quotation marks, like hyphens, should be used only when necessary. The degree of necessity will vary slightly with the mental state of the audience for whom a book is intended. To an educated man, it is an annoyance to find his author warning him that something written long ago and quoted every day, almost ever since, is not an original remark now first struck out.

On the other hand, writers who address the uneducated may find their account in using all the quotation marks they can. Their readers may be gratified by seeing how well-read the author is or may think quotation marks decorative. The following examples start with the least justifiable uses and stop at the point where quotation marks become more or less necessary.

Now, the first example is John Smith Esquire, quote, Chatsworth, unquote, Melton Road, Leamington. The Fowler brothers say the implication seems to be living in the house that sensible people call 164 Melton Road, but one fool likes to call Chatsworth. This is deemed the least necessary use for quotation marks. The next example.

How is it that during the year in which that scheme has been, so to speak, quote, in the pillory, unquote, no alternative has, at any rate, been made public from the Times?

The Fowler brothers say, somewhat sarcastically, that if in the pillory is to be treated as a quotation, then every metaphor ought to be treated as a quotation, adding, here, moreover, quotation marks are a practical tautology after, so to speak. The next example.

Robert Brown and William Marshall, convicted of robbery with violence, were sentenced respectively to five years penal servitude and 18 strokes of the, quote, cat, unquote, and seven years penal servitude from the Times. Again, the Fowler brothers note dryly, there is by this time no danger whatever of confusion with the cat of one tail. The next example,

not forgetful of how soon, quote, things Japanese, unquote, would be things of the past for her. From Sladen.

The Fowler brothers say, this may be called the propitiatory use, analogous in print to the tentative error with which, in conversation, the Englishman, not sure of his pronunciation, offers a French word. So trifling a phrase is not worth using the cost of quotation marks. If it could pass without, well and good.

And I had to look up propitiatory. It means intending to procreate or gain the favor or goodwill of someone. And now I'm skipping a few examples here, and this is the last one. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits, yet so as, quote, with a difference, unquote, from lamb.

The Fowler brothers say, with a difference. Ophelia saying, oh, you must wear your rue with a difference in Hamlet. They say that might escape notice as a quotation if attention weren't drawn to it. That, they seem to think, is worth the quotation marks. You can find that kind of fun commentary in modern usage guides, but it's much more common in the older ones.

And who were the Fowler brothers behind the King's English? Well, they were Henry and Francis Fowler, both important literary figures in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The King's English was their second book after they began working together on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Britain, and it became a huge success. And yes, that's the same Guernsey as in the number one New York Times bestseller from 2008, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Writing the success of The King's English, the brothers were commissioned to write the concise Oxford Dictionary and later began to work on the usage guide called Modern English Usage. This book was still underway when World War I broke out, and both men enlisted, putting the project on hold. Although they both returned from the war in 1916 and resumed work on the book again, Francis died a couple of years later from tuberculosis.

Henry went on to finish the book himself and dedicated it to his brother when it was finally published in 1926. Amazingly, both the concise Oxford Dictionary and Modern English usage are still in print today, although Modern English usage was significantly updated by Oxford English Dictionary editor Robert Birchfield in 1996.

That book is now called The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and it was the first comprehensive usage guide I bought when I started the Grammar Girl podcast. And going backward for a second, Guernsey, where the Fowler brothers got their start, is a self-governing dependency of the British crown and is officially called the Bailiwick of Guernsey. A bailiwick is an area that's under the jurisdiction of a bailiff.

In the U.S., we think of a bailiff as an official who helps keep order in a courtroom. But in Britain, a bailiff is more like a sheriff. A bailiff can make arrests, serve court papers to a person, and seize the property of a debtor. There's also the term sheriff-wick, but it seems to have fallen out of favor sometime in the 1800s. So the baila in bailiwick refers to a bailiff.

The wic part is from a word that used to mean a house or dwelling place, as in a town, village, or hamlet. It's very old, derived from the old English word wic, W-I-C, which even showed up in the epic poem Beowulf. Over time, the meaning of Beowulf as an administrative region was extended to mean one's natural or proper sphere. That's why today I can say the English language is my Beowulf.

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I swerved to miss a fallen branch as rain hammered against the windshield. Mary's shallow breathing was just barely audible from the seat behind me. She was unconscious but still alive. We'd make it to the hospital by around 1 a.m. if the storm hadn't washed the bridge out.

Before you get worried, no, I didn't actually drive someone named Mary to the hospital in the middle of a stormy night. But that dramatic opener demonstrates one of storytelling's most powerful techniques, starting in the middle of the action. It turns out there's a fancy name for this kind of narrative device in Medias Res.

The phrase comes directly from Latin, where in means into or in, medias means middle, and res means things or affairs. So in medias res literally means in the middle of things.

The Roman poet Horace first used the term in his Ars Poetica when he advised epic poets to skip the backstory and start where the action is. We'll talk more about Horace and epic poems in a sec. But first, what does it mean to start In Medias Res? Think of In Medias Res as the storytelling equivalent of being dropped into the deep end of a pool. There's no gentle wading in from the shallow end.

Our opening scene would feel a lot different if we'd started with, it was a typical Tuesday at the office. I got my coffee, checked my emails, and so on. Not quite the same, right? So starting in the middle takes us instantly from curiosity, what's this story about, to intrigue, what happens next? And we don't have to wade through a boring workday and some emails to get there.

So far, we've talked about inmedious rays as a device for fictional stories. But this technique isn't just for novelists trying to write the next bestseller. It can work anywhere. People use narrative storytelling. Journalists use it to hook readers into feature articles. Filmmakers grab attention with dramatic openings. And even your favorite streaming series probably starts with a bang before rewinding to explain how everything went wrong.

The ancient Greeks, those epic poets Horace referenced, were total pros at starting in the middle. Homer's epic poem Odyssey drops us right into the midst of Odysseus' story. He's trapped on the island of Ogygia, where he's been held captive for seven years by the nymph Calypso. He desperately misses his wife and son back in the kingdom of Ithaca, and he wants nothing more than to get home.

Homer starts in the middle of Odysseus' predicament, before backtracking to tell us about the epic journey that got him there. Homer could have started with Odysseus setting out from Ithaca, but then we might not have been so immediately drawn in. Starting in the middle creates instant emotional investment. Think of it like walking into a room where everyone's crying. You immediately want to know what happened.

When readers encounter characters in the middle of intense situations, they naturally start caring about the outcome. It also helps writers dodge the dreaded info dump. Instead of front-loading a story with background details, they can weave important information throughout the narrative. Rather than explaining that a character is afraid of heights before the action starts, we can discover this when they're already dangling from a cliff.

Plus, starting in the middle respects the reader's ability to piece things together. It treats them like detectives who can gather clues and solve the story's mysteries as they go along, which is part of the fun of reading a great story.

But starting in Medias Res can be challenging, too. Timing is important. Starting with action can strip away the emotional buildup that makes certain stories work. Imagine if Shakespeare had started Romeo and Juliet with the tomb scene. Romeo, believing Juliet is dead rather than in a temporary sleep-like state, drinks poison beside her body, and when she wakes to find him dead, she takes her own life with his dagger.

Well, if Shakespeare had started the play there, we'd miss all the family drama, the secret marriage, the banishment, and most importantly, the love story that makes their tragic end matter so much.

And speaking of backstory, when a writer starts in the middle, they usually need to fill that in to give the story context. But too many flashbacks can make your narrative feel like a time-traveling ping-pong match, bouncing readers back and forth until they're dizzy and confused.

Finally, there's the challenge of sustaining momentum. If the middle of the action opening is the most exciting part of your story, everything else might feel anticlimactic. The real art of starting in the middle lies in finding that sweet spot, the perfect moment that's exciting enough to hook an audience, but doesn't give away all of the writer's storytelling secrets at once.

It's about creating those wait, what? moments that make readers absolutely want to know both what happened in the past to create the current predicament and what happens next. Isn't it amazing how a technique that's been around since ancient times can still feel fresh and exciting? That's the beauty of language and storytelling. Some tricks never get old, and they just find new ways to surprise us.

That segment was written by Karen Lundy, a former Quick and Dirty Tips editor and digital pioneer who's been spinning words into gold since before cat videos ruled the internet. She created one of the first online writing workshops, and she's published thousands of articles on the art of writing. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at chanterellestorystudio.com. Finally, I have a fam-liked story.

Hi Grammar Girl! My name is Yehudit and I live in Baltimore. I have a family story for you from a road trip that I did with my family. Back in 2016, my parents and my two brothers and I went on a cross-country road trip in my parents' RV. We were all adults, but it was a really fun family trip that we did one summer. It was two weeks long, we did tons and tons of driving, and we invented a couple words because we drove like through Texas, which takes, you know, all day, and a bunch of... We just did so many hours of driving, especially out west where it's very, very empty.

And we invented a couple words. One of them was swerver for like someone who swerves a lot. We also had a word called rumbler for like a truck, usually a truck, sometimes another car that would like intentionally drive on the rumble strips. And another word we invented was pokey for like a slow poke.

And to this day, whenever we're driving together or even just sometimes if it comes up in conversation, we mention those words that we invented on our road trip. And it's always a really fun way to remember a great trip. So thanks so much for your podcast. And I hope you enjoy the story. I did enjoy it. I love how familects instantly called them on the good times we had in the past.

If you want to share the story of your familect, a word you use with your family or friends that's just an insider thing nobody else would know, send it to me through a voice chat on WhatsApp or call the voicemail line at 83-321-4GIRL. And both those are in the show notes.

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoops in marketing, Holly Hutchings in digital operations, Brandon Goetjes, director of podcasts, Morgan Christensen in advertising, and Dan Feierabend in audio, who collects novelty and comedy records. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily. That's all. Thanks for listening.