How the Dog Days of Summer Can Supercharge Your Descriptive Writing

The Dog Days of Summer—
days when heat and humidity reign,
sizzling July days that melt into August. 

Don’t waste them allowing your writing to languish. Instead, study the descriptive paragraphs, sentences and phrases found in summer poetry. Think about how words transform into specific moods and pictures. Then apply what you learn to your works in progress.

Here are a few examples.

A stanza from John Koethe’s poem, “Sally’s Hair”

It’s like living in a light bulb, with the leaves
Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass
Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy
Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass.

(Copyright © 2006 John Koethe.)

 

Discover how Phillip Lopate uses a loaf of bread to describe layered city sounds in “The Last Slow Days of Summer” .

I’m lying on the grass, listening to city sounds.
They come to me in three-dimensional form,
Like a loaf of Wonder Bread. Baby carriages squeak
Near the middle. Cars humming through Central Park,
Somewhere near the back of the loaf.
What sound would be the end-piece, the round brown sliver?
The unzipping of airline bags.
Or a glove thwacked
By a rookie pitcher who falls apart
In the eighth inning.

(“The Last Slow Days of Summer” from At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay, copyright © 2009 by Phillip Lopate.)

 

 In his “Summer Song” William Carlos Williams describes the moon fading on a summer morning and then adds himself to the scene.

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

(This poem is in the public domain.)

 

And, finally, study poet Mark Strand’s character description in “My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer”:

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

From Mark Strand: Selected Poems, by Mark Strand, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1979 by Mark Strand.

Make time during these Dog Days to read and study more summer poems. You’ll find them online at:

The Poetry Foundation

The Academy of American Poets

Poem Hunter

A reminder: In narrative writing use descriptive language sparingly and with good judgement. Keep it in your writer’s “toolbox” as a technique for advancing plot, character and theme.

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Language, Larpangarpuage or Anguagelay—Whatever You Call It, It’s Complicated!

Learning correct verb tenses and grammatical rules can be confusing, but add jibberish word games, and language gets REALLY complicated.

My mother and her siblings spoke Arp. Mom claimed they invented this game when they were kids, but a quick search online shows that Arp was commonly spoken among school-age children when my mother was young.

It works like this:

When a vowel or vowel sound (a, e, i, o, u, or y as in why) is found, “arp” is placed in front of it. Two or more vowels together are treated as one.

If a vowel or vowel sound occurs as the final letter of a word, it is only given an “arp” if it is the only vowel or vowel sound in the word.

eg. fish becomes farpish 
Harry becomes Harparry 
condition becomes carpondarpitarpion

Mom and her siblings spoke Arp until the days they died. When the three of them were together, for the rest of us it was like visiting a foreign country.

Arp is just one of many jibberish languages.

Pig Latin is more familiar:

Pick any English word. Next, move the first consonant or consonant cluster to the end of the word. Now add “ay” to the end of the word. That’s all there is to it; you’ve formed a word in Pig Latin.

eg. fish becomes ishfay
Harry becomes Arryhay
condition becomes onditioncay

Supposedly, Thomas Jefferson maintained some privacy by composing coded letters in Pig Latin to relatives and close friends.

Jibberish, or jargon, languages transcend place and time. They have existed at least since the Victorian era.

In Victorian England, merchants used “Back Speak” to converse behind buyers’ backs.

Words were spoken backward.

eg. fish becomes hsif
Harry becomes Yrrah
condition becomes noitidnoc

Black slaves in the American South invented a language called “Double Dutch”; in the early 20th century, German dock workers created a jibberish language called “Kedelkloppersprook;” and in the 1970s, the kid’s TV show Zoom made “Ubbi dubbi” popular with the school-aged set (all you have to do is say “ub” before every vowel sound).

(Do you want to speak Minion-ease?
There’s an English to Minion translator online!)

The list of jibberish games is considerable. Check out LingoJam online to translate English to Arp, Pig Latin, even Shakespearean and Morse Code—or create some jibberish of your own!

LANGUAGE.
Whatever the form—it’s complicated!

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Quiz: Those “Cray-Cray” New Words!

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New words are constantly slipping into our vocabulary. Let’s see how many of these you can define without looking them up. Give yourself 5 points for each correct answer and an additional 25 points for the bonus entry.  Answers are at the end of this post.

snervous (adjective–5 points)

mansplain (verb–5 points)

Squatch (noun–5 points)

glamp (verb–5 points)

cray-cray (noun–5 points)

demonym (noun–5 points)

Chiweenie (noun–5 points)

subtweet (noun–5 points)

aquafaba (noun–5 points)

schneid (noun–5 points)

onboarding (noun–5 points)

ghost (verb–5 points)

noob (noun–5 points)

bitcoin (noun–5 points)

facepalm (verb–5 points)

BONUS:
word salad (noun–25 points)

ANSWERS:

snervous:  to be scared and nervous at the same time

mansplain: to explain something to a woman in a condescending way

Squatch: nickname for Sasquatch

glamp: to camp with with amenities not usually found in the wild

cray-cray: anything that seems crazy

demonym: a word used to denote a person who is from or inhabits a particular place (Sooner, Hoosier)

Chiweenie: cross between a Chihauhau and a dachshund

subtweet: term for a mocking or critical tweet that alludes to another Twitter user (often without directly mentioning the user’s name)

aquafaba: the liquid that results when beans are cooked in water

schneid: a losing streak

onboarding: the act of orienting and training a new employee

ghost: to abruptly cut off contact with someone by not accepting phone calls, instant messages, etc.

noob: a person who recently started a new activity

bitcoin: a digital currency created for use in peer-to-peer online transactions
(I admit, I still don’t “totally” understand how bitcoining works.)

facepalm: to cover one’s face with the hand as an expression of embarrassment, dismay, or exasperation

BONUS:
Word salad: a string of empty, incoherent, unintelligible, or nonsensical words or comments

How well did you do?

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