Hackers and Crackers: A Linguistic Dilemma

A group of hackers wired a bunch of money to a foreign account. Someone hacked into the school's database and gave A's to everyone. Put up a firewall to guard against hackers. What is a hacker? Well, according to the news, entertainment, and most people you talk to, a hacker is a person who circumvents computer security. Works for me.

But one day, a kid on a message board made a post to clarify: crackers are people who break into computers; hackers are people who modify their computer's software to improve performance. Also, hackers don't like that their title is applied to people who do illegal stuff.

Ok, that's cool, too. I guess. I mean, it makes sense -- "cracker" seems to hearken back to safe-cracking, so that's cool. I don't know where "hacker" comes from, but I can accept it. It's nice to have a distinction.

So what do you call them in your fiction? Do you go with definitions, or with common usage? 

I bring this up for the benefit of new writers, those who are relatively new to the peer review process. The hacker/cracker issue may not apply to your current project, but I think it exemplifies a general concept I'm just going to call the "proper/common" issue. Now it's story time...

Writing fiction is far different from writing a research paper. I know that should go without saying, but I really want to stress it: Writing fiction is far different from writing a research paper. It is not the same as doing homework.

When I first started my adventures in fiction, I attended a couple writer's groups (Borders in Flint and Auburn Hills, for you Michiganders). One week I invited a friend from my Japanese class to sit in and maybe read something of hers. I read a section from something I had written (it was about eight or ten pages, double-spaced). The feedback I received from the regulars was pretty standard -- You don't have enough description; Your dialogue was good, but you should describe what they're doing; I have no idea where the hell your characters are because you don't describe it very well. I was pleased with the response, because they didn't find anything glaring that destroyed the story.

My friend asked if she could hang on to her copy for a few days. I said that was fine, since I had eight other copies to look over and decide which suggestions to follow. She gave it back to me a few days later, in class.

I think there was more of her writing on that thing than mine.

My first thought was that she spent a lot of time really analyzing the piece, and had written every single complaint and compliment that crossed her mind. That was not the case -- the margins were packed with things like, "incomplete sentence" or "missing words", even "don't start a sentence with 'and'". I was astounded. Not only did she apply the rules of grammar to the narrator, she hit all of the dialogue as well. Each page's margins were overflowing with rules-oriented comments, and the half-blank last page included a long note about how she expected good writers, but that everyone missed all the basic rules of grammar, so she couldn't take them seriously.

I'm not making this up. I still have that copy somewhere, because it was too beautiful to throw away.

The point of all of this is that prescriptive rules of grammar are pretty meaningless in fiction. If the general populace says "hacker," then it makes no sense for the characters in your story to say "cracker" -- unless they are real-life hackers who care about such distinctions. The characters in my story are not going to speak with perfect grammar because no one speaks with perfect grammar.  Even my "narrator," who has no discernable personality because the story is told in the third person, will not speak with perfect grammar because he's telling a story. This isn't an academic paper.

Do we still have to put our verbs in the middle of the sentence? Of course -- that's a descriptive rule, whose purpose is to describe how our language already works. To say that we shouldn't end sentences with prepositions is silly -- people do it all the time without creating confusion. That's a rule that was invented by a bunch of dead guys who wanted to sound smarter than everyone else. English worked fine before that rule existed, and it continues to thrive in spite of it.

Write your stories. Damn the rules. Let your characters speak like real people, not textbooks.

Bending Grammar to Your Will

Every language has a set of grammatical rules that it follows. For example, in English, a simple sentence like

Jim threw the ball

can be broken into its components

subject - verb - direct object

That is the basic form of English sentences, though obviously you can add things like adjective phrases and indirect objects, and you can change the tense of the verb to present or future. We're not here for a grammar lesson, however. Today we're going to talk about the darker side of English grammar, and how to conquer it and make it your slave.

I'm sure you've heard the rule, "Never end a sentence with a preposition." Well, I'm here today to tell you that rule is bullshit. That's what we call a "prescriptive" rule of grammar - it tells us how a sentence should be composed. The subject-verb-object rule mentioned above is called a "descriptive" rule, meaning it just explains how sentences actually are composed. What's the difference? English-speakers were creating SVO sentences before the rule; the rule is merely an observation. Think about how awkward the following sentences are

Jim the ball throwing.
The ball threw Jim.

The first is out because of the word order, and the second is weird because an inanimate object acted on a person. These are considered violations of the rule because they don't actually make sense if you try and interpret them as they are - they require work to put them right. On the other hand, look what happens when you mess with prepositions

Nashville is the city from which Nancy came.
Nashville is the city Nancy came from.

No meaning is lost between those two sentences, and in fact it takes more effort to misread the second one, which violates the "rule," than it does to read it and comprehend it. I bring this up to make one major point: Go with clarity. If you think your sentence actually makes sense and you think it sounds good, don't worry about people who say you're violating a rule.

The other idea I want to convey boils down to Sometimes don't go with clarity. You have to be more careful with this because, if it is misused, you end up destroying the story. But think - what kinds of situations exist in which even rules like Subject-Verb-Object can be violated? One that comes to mind involves characters whose primary languages are fundamentally different from English, like Japanse, which is basically Subject-Object-Verb. If those characters haven't had much experience speaking English, they may occasionally put their words in the wrong order. Another example is small children - they love playing with language and seeing what kinds of things they can put together. Excited people sometimes say weird stuff, as do people who are focusing on too many things at once. Think about what kinds of grammatical idiosyncrasies your characters have and work with them when it is appropriate.

Remember, grammar serves you, not the other way around. If rules (descriptive or otherwise) interfere with the story you want to write, throw them away. You're a writer. You're allowed to do that. Be clear. If you need a character to say something unclear, just make sure you have solid reasons for it.

Challenge: Take three characters and put them in a plausible situation (airport, bus, etc). For your characters and the narrator, pick unique styles of speech. Some examples include American South, New England, Urban, Broken, Stuttering, and Whatever You Think "Normal" Is. See what happens.

Choosing the Right Words

In a work of fiction, every word matters. I mean this in a very literal sense - every single noun, verb, adjective, and preposition makes a difference in the way the story is understood. "Hate" and "loathe" may be considered synonyms, but when only one of those words carries the idea of "disgust" with it, it is important that you choose the one that best fits your situation.

"Oh come on, Stan," you say, "the reader doesn't care! You're just being nitpicky." Both of those statements may well be true, but that doesn't excuse the writer from practicing precision. Imagine a violinist in an orchestra saying, "Well, I'm not in tune, but no one will notice." There is no way that would fly - even tone deaf people would consider that attitude highly unprofessional because it aims for something less than perfection. The same is true for writers. If you're shooting for "good enough," you aren't giving your work the proper attention and ultimately failing your readers.

Okay, so we've got the gloomy stuff out of the way...now what? Well, the first step, as with everything else, is "Write the damn story." Step three is going to be "Repeat step two." Step two is going to be tedious.

Start reading your work, one sentence at a time. Look at each sentence one word at a time and ask yourself two questions: 1) Is this word necessary? and 2) Is this the right word?

For the first question, you're looking at word economy. Even if you prefer a more verbose style, you still need to consider whether you need the words you choose. Take a look at the following paragraph:

The house was empty when William returned home. "Damn, where is everyone?" he muttered irritatedly to himself. He dropped the family's mail in a pile on the counter. They can sort their own mail, he thought to himself. He kicked off his shoes into the closet, then went in his room and collapsed on his bed.

That gets the job done, sure, but it needs to be thinned out. We can get rid of "home" in the first sentence because the verb "returned" implies that he lives in "the house." In the second sentence, chop "irritatedly" because William says "damn" and mutters, axe "to himself" because, well, there is no one around for him to mutter to. The third sentence can do without "family's" because a family is implied by the next sentence; "in a pile" because, again, the rest of the sentence implies what we're cutting. Italics are typically used to represent thoughts, so that can stand alone (and again, "to himself" can go because he really can't think to someone else). Finally, the last sentence can lose "off" and "in his room"; the former becomes unnecessary and the latter is implied. The result:

The house was empty when William returned. "Damn, where is everyone?" he muttered. He dropped the mail on the counter. They can sort their own mail. He kicked his shoes into the closed, then went and collapsed on his bed.

Much better! I think you get the idea, so let's move on to choosing the right words. This time, I will present you with two slightly different passages:

Allison was about to switch off her lane when yet another customer began unloading merchandise on the conveyor belt. "Find everything you were looking for?" she asked, running the items over the scanner and placing them in a bag.
The man mumbled an affirmation, watching the prices blink on the display. "Hang on, those shirts are on sale. Get it right."

And:

Allison was about to switch off her lane when yet another asshole started unloading merch on the belt. "Find everything?" she started scanning and bagging.
The man grunted, eyeing the prices on the display. "Hey, those shirts are on sale. Get it right, bitch."

The same action occurs in each passage, but they have distinctly different feels to them. This is the sort of thing a writer needs to pay attention to. Don't shrug anything off as "close enough," or you will reach a point where the story doesn't come across the way it was intended.

Challenge: Write a few sentences, then grab a thesaurus (or visit thesaurus.com) and start playing with synonyms to see how they change what you've written.