I recently completed working with the copyedits for my next novel, A New Kind of Bliss. The copyeditor commented about one of my narrative sentences, which read, “She crossed her legs like they were on display at MoMA.” She asked if I really wanted to use that acronym, pointing out that all readers would not know it meant the Museum of Modern Art.
I thought for a moment, then decided to go ahead and keep the line as it was. Readers not familiar with New York might not know the exact meaning of the acronym, but I do feel they will know it stands for a museum, and thus they will get the point.
I remember one of my all-time favorite TV sitcoms, Frasier. Occasionally the characters would make a reference to something over my head, but that did not diminish my enjoyment of the show. “Renata Tibaldi,” for instance, was an opera star referred to in one episode. I’d never heard of her, but the use of her name was scripted in a way that allowed me to get the joke. Even when the District Attorney on my favorite TV drama, Law & Order, dismisses a judge as “wanting to be Learned Hand,” I knew he was talking about a past judge, even if I’d never heard of him. Because the name struck me as odd – it made me picture Thing, the hand in the box on The Addams Family – I looked him up out of mere curiosity. I may not be ready to compete on Jeopardy!, but I learned something.
What’s your opinion about books that use unfamiliar references or terms? I’m not talking about books so tedious that you need a dictionary to get through them, but books with a just a few alien references, if that many. Do these stimulate your curiosity, do you skip over them, or do you get annoyed at the writer for using them in the first place?
This post was submitted by Bettye Griffin.
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as a Book Reviewer and Co-Host of Urban Literary Review radio show i dont give them much thought unless it is slang only found in a certain area. I am in NYC so i would know MOMA but if i was in Kanas nope and Texas forget about it — however if you use something made familiar by Pop Culture like “she crossed her legs like she was on ANTM – America’s Next Top Model.” LOL maybe? or any other Pop Culture reference but MOMA is good for the crowd outside of NY that Reads the Sunday NY TIMES which these days are very few. But with Bush out and Thinking back in vogue maybe cause i know there are many debates being held due to Barack and NYTIMES is back on top along with WashPost
” ‘She crossed her legs like they were on display at MoMA.’ [...] Readers not familiar with New York might not know the exact meaning of the acronym, but I do feel they will know it stands for a museum, and thus they will get the point.”
As L Martin Johnson Pratt’s example of “she crossed her legs like she was on ANTM” suggests, (almost) the same sentence, with a different acronym could mean something very different. I’m from the UK and I wouldn’t recognise either MoMA or ANTM. So if I’d just read that one sentence of yours I’d have had no idea if her legs were on display in a TV show, a burlesque show, an art gallery, somewhere where debutantes cross their legs demurely or somewhere else entirely.
Unless the unfamiliar terms are two or three to a page, I am usually intrigued and investigate.
I’m from NY so MoMA is familiar. I’m glad you left it in.
I love it, if it doesn’t get silly. It’s a judgement call how much is too much, but a few here and there are cool. I think the trick is to make sure that most, if not all, of your references are in a context which makes it clear what you mean in general, even if the reader doesn’t get the exact reference itself.
And as a data point, I’m in California and have never been to New York, but I know what MoMA is. I’d have had no clue whatsoever what “ANTM” meant, though.
Another thought — if your POV character is a couch potato who lives his/her life with a TV remote attached at one hand, continually flicking through pop-craze type shows, then “ANTM” would be a good reference. Even if I didn’t get it, if the TV thing had been clearly shown in the book to that point, I’d have assumed it was a reference to some popular TV show I don’t watch. If, on the other hand, the character had been shown to be into the less popular cultural pursuits — fine art, opera, theater, literary fiction — then even readers who couldn’t parse “MoMA” specifically would probably have gotten the idea. A character whose frame of reference is in museums and concert halls probably wouldn’t have used an acronym meaning a burlesque hall or a porno flick — or at least that probably wouldn’t be one’s first assumption.
Angie
I also know MoMA, but wouldn’t know the TV show reference. I like that it is high-brow because it makes the character observing it high-brow. If you want to eliminate the confusion, just spell out the acronym. I don’t think it loses anything.
She crossed her legs as if they were on display at the Modern Museum of Art. Then even if you didn’t get the acronym, you’d get the reference.
I think that is a little strange of a picture for me since Modern art tends to be so abstract, but I’d rather trust the intelligence of my readers, than assume they can’t fill in the blanks.
I write Science Fiction Romance, so I count on my readers to fill in the blanks all the time. They need to figure out alien words through context. I think that is part of the fun of writing Science Fiction Romance. It is like writing a romance and playing word games at the same time.
Jess
Well, um, I thought MoMa was the name of a family-owned cafe, like “Mama’s” or “Mom & Pop’s.” I live in Alaska.
I think you should have followed the copyeditor’s advice, especially if you want a wide audience.
I lost my dang comment!
Here’s the short of it. I’m glad you didn’t follow the copyeditor’s suggestion in this instance. As Angie said above, as long as the context implies your meaning it’s all good. Just for the few comments here you can see that no matter how popular/general the example you use there’ll still be those that don’t get it for a variety of reasons that ultimately fall under the heading of unfamiliarity.
I
I hope readers don’t mind the occasional obscure reference, because for the historicals I’m writing, I feel they’re necessary.
I have a heroine who reads Mary Astell and Aphra Benn. I think even if readers don’t know who those two women are, they’ll get that Lady Anne goes out of her way to find female writers, not necessarily easy to do in 1786, because as an intelligent woman raised by a scholarly and encouraging father, she wants to be inspired by other intelligent women.
And then I misspelled Aphra Behn’s name and hit the ’submit’ button…
I didn’t know what it meant, and I probably wouldn’t have been willing to look it up, so I probably would have just skimmed over it.
I think it is always a bad idea to talk down to readers. If we never encountered anything new or unfamiliar in the books we read, we would all still be on “Dick and Jane”.
But I do hope Lady Anne manages to recognize that although Aphra Behn was a pioneer, in that she managed to support herself with her writing, she was also a second-rate hack.
I love local references and cultural references, if the context is clear enough. Just because something isn’t immediately familiar doesn’t mean it’s too hard for the reader; it’s an opportunity to transport the reader into another place.
I’m not crazy about pop culture references like ANTM. They can be just as exclusive as place-culture references like MoMA. ANTM is more ephemeral too, plus it doesn’t help build up a sense of place or character.
“I hope readers don’t mind the occasional obscure reference, because for the historicals I’m writing, I feel they’re necessary.”
I absolutely don’t mind; I *like* that. One of my biggest peeves in romance lately is having things over-explained as if the book’s a fourth-grade primer and the reader can’t handle anything unfamiliar.
That said, sometimes such references can be made reasonably clear. In some fiction, sticking in a lot of references that never come clear can end up feeling like name-dropping rather than building the atmosphere of the story. I’m not keen on the clumsy spell-it-out approach, e.g. “she crossed her legs like she was on ANTM – America’s Next Top Model”. There’s a reason that’s mainly seen in nonfiction. There are other ways though, e.g. “she crossed her legs like she was on display at MoMA. Maybe the 1940s Design exhibit.”
However, if clarifying the reference weighs down the prose too much, I’d leave it as is. I’d rather see an unexplained local reference (and something like the Bodleian, MoMA, or Aphra Behn isn’t *that* local) than something bland like American Idol.
I used the word “Nosferatu” once in a manuscript, and didn’t change it when the CE asked. There was some context (the word eerie was in the sentence) and I just liked it.
I wouldn’t have known MoMA. But no big deal! If everybody gets it, no one feels extra smart. : )
I’m cool with reading a term I may not know. If I’m too curious then there’s a good chance I’ll look it up. I feel as though its cross promotion of a sort.
Really if it makes sense and the point gets across then do what you think best.
It depends – if the reference takes me out of the story then I don’t like it. I’m in the UK and sometimes I’ll read a book that mentions a make of car that isn’t sold internationally under that name. That always jerks me out of the story where if they’d used a more general reference like all terrain jeep for example I would have been ok. The MoMA thing would jerk me out and so would ANTM as it sounds like a cashpoint. I think it would read better as ‘like a modern art exhibit’.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, everyone! I’m glad I kept the comment in, especially since it is the only possibliy unfamiliar reference in the book.
I too am from the UK, and recognize MoMA – but even if I hadn’t, the suggestion that she “…was on display at…” somewhere would have called to mind galleries and museums.
Unless we’re talking ridiculous made-up languages, or overly pretentious quotation dropping, I’m absolutely fine with references that I’m not immediately familiar with. As long as the context is there, and they ‘fit’ with the character, the reader can work it out.
Unfamiliar words jerking the reader out of the story? If you extend that idea logically, do we now have to take care not use any words longer than three syllables so that the reader is never presented with a word they don’t know?
One of the pleasures of novel reading is that it allows one to explore other settings and themes – if one homogenizes the language, surely it takes away some of the nuances of the writing?
“I used the word “Nosferatu” once in a manuscript, and didn’t change it when the CE asked.”
That sounds like the right call. There really is no substitute for Nosferatu.
I don’t see the point of trying to write in such a way that every possible reader will comprehend the text at the same level. That only matters when writing instructions for packaging. In fiction, it just makes everything bland. It also seems likely to handicap the author. E.g. if you’re concerned about your book being eventually translated into, say, Portuguese, would referencing a Shakespeare play alienate that readership? Not that Shakespeare’s unknown in non-English-dominant nations, but he’s not taught as widely so the references aren’t universal. Same goes for Jane Austen. And Dick and Jane.
There was a bit about this in The Guardian newspaper yesterday, in a piece by Lucy Mangan in their ‘Building a Children’s Library’ column. I’ve excerpted the relevant parts, but the whole thing is available online. She’s talking about the ‘Just William’ books by Richard Compton.
“I fell in love with William Brown the very first time we met, in Torridon Road library. He had just received an entire shilling from a generous aunt and was swaggering into his local sweetshop to buy an unprecedented sixpenn’orth of Gooseberry Eyes from the surprised owner. And then I read “‘Gotter bit of money this mornin,” explained William carelessly, with the air of a Rothschild,” and lost my heart to Crompton’s hero for ever. Oh, the exuberant confidence of it — the splendour! The magnificent insouciance!
… Nor did I know quite what a Rothschild was, but I deduced (and had confirmed later by my father) that it must be the name of a famously rich family, and it was actually this — this oblique promise of induction into a world of fluent and evocative expression — more than William’s notoriously anarchic spirit, that drew me in.
….The books I had read so far had all stayed carefully within the semantic and grammatical comfort zone of their readers. Now I saw that an author’s vocabulary should exceed her audience’s grasp — else what’s the bloody book for?”
I wonder if the writer’s comment that she could deduce the meaning of Rothschild is relevant – as long as you can get the sense of the passage, doesn’t matter if a particular reference passes you by. FWIW, I’m in the UK and would have known MoMA.
ANTM would baffle me.
If I’m not familiar with an acronym I make a mental note of it and look it up later. It doesn’t distract from the story. In fact, some things that are unique to a town or an occupation makes the character and/or setting more authentic.
I live in New Zealand and had no idea what MoMA meant at all. My editors/CE often remark about the New Zealandisms I use in my writing. I also lived in the UK for six years and everything runs together. I use words and don’t realize they’re not familiar to US readers.
I think as long as the context is clear to the reader something like this is fine. For example, if I write a NZ setting, and use a NZism, the reader usually gets it from the context. If I write a US setting and use a NZ word then obviously it doesn’t work. (unless one of the characters comes from NZ.)
I like such references because (if I find it interesting), I learn about entirely new subjects and it means the author is giving his/her readers credit for being intelligent enough to (a) know the reference offhand, (b) figure it out using context, or (c) investigate further on their own.
{waves to fellow Kiwi, Shelley}
FWIW, it irritates the heck out of me when I’m reading a book, lost in the magic of the story and bam, there’s an acronym for something that I have absolutely no idea what it stands for and I’m jerked harshly out of my reading pleasure.
By all means, explain it in full the first time, use the acronym thereafter. I’d have no idea whatsoever as to what MoMA means (aside from a maternal reference perhaps?) and I do think it’s a bit of risk to assume that everyone who reads your work will know what it is. You’re writing for a WORLD wide audience, not merely the US, not merely NY.
I’m certainly not saying that anyone should dumb down their writing, just that it could be a mistake to assume that everyone who buys your book knows exactly what you’re referring to.
I have no problem reaching for a dictionary or synonym finder when an author uses an unfamiliar word, in fact I relish those words when I meet them, but acronyms can be so specific to where and what you’re writing that they deserve to be explained.
Hi, Jane O,
Aphra Behn a 2nd rate hack? By our judgment or by that of people in her own time? Anyway, it is immaterial whether Behn was a stellar writer or not; it has no bearing on her being read by Lady Anne. I’ve read a Barbara Cartland book out of curiosity, but it’s not an experience I’ll repeat.
Yes, Behn had some questionable and offensive ideas in her writing. Despite creating a heroic character in Oroonoko, (her most famous work) it is clear she saw him as an ‘exception’ in his race, and that she didn’t view slavery as particularly reprehensible. But that’s part of Lady Anne. It is 1786; she reads widely, but it doesn’t mean she likes or agrees with everything she reads, nor does it mean she thinks every book/play/poem by a woman is a masterpiece!
Donna
I like RfP’s version: “She crossed her legs like she was on display at MoMA. Maybe the 1940s Design exhibit.”
That gives the reader an extra hint and a good visual without 2×6ing upside the head.
But then, I love obscure words, deep concepts and mental trickery. One of the harder novels I’ve read was Peter Watts’ SF Blindsight. I felt like I’d run a brain marathon! I was very proud of myself lol.
Good topic. I’ll have to go back through my story and see where I’ve made things TOO obscure.
“You’re writing for a WORLD wide audience, not merely the US, not merely NY.”
Absolutely, but that’s the giant question: How does an author transport a varied readership to that NY setting without some local’isms? Should a character in Ghana squeeze on board a “tro tro” headed to Accra, or catch the “intercity bus”? And did US editions of Harry Potter really need to localize the language? (In that instance, I think if readers can figure out “quidditch”, they can work out that “car park” = “parking lot” and “shan’t” = “won’t”.)
I like such references when they’re not overdone. Even if I don’t take the time to look up the ones I don’t know, as long as I can get enough of an understanding to not be pulled out of the story.
Chances are I’ll remember it, even if I don’t remember the book, and when I hear it again, I’ll get a better understanding.
After all, I don’t want to read books, even popular, commercial ones, where I never learn anything new.
I believe it gives a book more reality when a book has actual places and institutions mention. I enjoy seeing or reading about something or place I know; but also looking into new places and things mention in a book.