WEIGHTY WORDS
By
Peter Glassborow
4/May/14
‘Oh no!’ Eloise exclaimed when she found the queue stretched right around the corner. She had assumed that she had left home early enough to be one of the first at the community centre for the charity book sale. The local paper had said that the sale would open at nine. As Eloise wanted to ensure she got precisely what she wanted she thought arriving at the centre at eight-thirty would be early enough, but now she was here and found there were already at least sixty people ahead of her in the queue. Eloise already felt frazzled that morning with the sarcasm that Tony, her husband, had directed at her for leaving the house so early. ‘More books, more words,’ he had laughed nastily, ‘don’t you get tired of it all, girl? It’s not as though you are having any success, is it?’ He was referring to her ambition, to be a published writer, that she had had since before they had married. All of her spare time was spent on either writing or editing her stories to send to agents and publishers.
When they had first married Tony had not seemed to mind her hobby, had even agreed to read some of her stuff at first and give his opinion. That had all ended years ago. ‘It’s full of bad grammar and bad spelling,’ he repeated over and over whenever she now asked him to read something of hers. ‘You’re not a good writer, Eloise. You should forget about it. It’s all just a load of wasted words.’
His view seemed to be reinforced by comments on some of her rejection letters. Most bore a brief “no thanks” or similar, but the few that had additional comments all mentioned her slip shod grammar and poor spelling, even giving a few examples of her worst efforts.
Eloise knew she could do better if she had some modern technology to help her. A computer would have a word processor with automatic spell and grammar checker, but her finances would not run to a computer. Instead Eloise was forced to scribble in an exercise book with a pencil, crossing out and rewriting until she was satisfied with what she had created. Then the good copy to send away was produced on an old battered typewriter that she had been given.
‘You’d do better to get some books on grammar out of the library,’ Tony had commented on one occasion when he had actually offered some practical advice instead of merely something sarcastic. ‘Get that and a decent dictionary. Otherwise it’s just lots of wasted words.’
Since then Eloise thought she had improved her grammar by carefully studying how the popular writers had constructed their sentences and paragraphs, but spelling was still her weak spot. Eloise would be convinced that her choice of spelling was correct, for even the most mundane of words, only to find out later that she was completely wrong.
‘You can’t spell for toffee, Eloise,’ Tony had told her several times last week after her last rejection letter had arrived. It contained some particularly sarcastic comments from a submissions editor about her poor spelling. ‘Why bother?’ Tony laughed after reading the rejection. ‘It’s just wasted words.’ His same old comment had so grated on her nerves that this time Eloise was determined to deal with this problem once and for all. And she knew exactly how she wanted to deal with it.
‘A dictionary,’ she promised herself. ‘A big one. Massive. The bigger the better.’
The annual charity book sale was always held in the local community centre, several local charities combining their efforts for the event. They gathered the donated books from the public and then sold them to people, like Eloise, wanting cheap bargains. Eloise had been to all the sales, each time purchasing more books than she could really afford. Each time she had gone past the table in the corner that had held the reference books and seen the dictionaries sitting there. Massive tomes labelled Oxford or Webster that she suspected had probably been purchased originally for a student, or to look good on a bookcase. She had often thought of buying one, and then her eye would catch a particular work of fiction on another table and her good intentions, and carefully saved money, would go on that. This time however she desperately wanted the biggest dictionary she could find.
Eloise was glad Tony had not volunteered to come with her. He hated waiting in queues, even more so if it had just been to buy another book. ‘Words, words, wasted words,’ he would chant whenever she mentioned about reading or writing. ‘More words than I can shake a stick at. What’s the point of it all? If you’re not reading them you’re writing them.’ In comparison Tony’s world was visual. TV and sitting out in the garden watching the world pass on the main road outside the garden fence was all he wanted since he had been made redundant.
At nine the centre doors opened and the queue pushed eagerly forward. As it was a weekday it was mostly made up of the unemployed and the elderly, all who seemed to have been training for today with a rugby team. Eloise could not believe the aggression of many of the people, even the elderly. There were already sharp words coming from inside the hall entrance as the crowd surged inside.
A sharp elbow jabbed in Eloise’s side as she squeezed through the door and she revised her wish that Tony be with her. An overweight male to push through this mob might be of some help after all.
Many of the crowd had brought carrier bags to haul away their booty. Eloise had not bothered, and anyway the organizers always had a bin of used supermarket bags for buyers to use. She did not expect to need those, not to carry one book. One big book of words. A dictionary.
Inside the hall trestle tables were piled high with second hand books. Hand written signs hanging from the ceiling told the buyers which tables held the historical, which the romance, sci-fi etc.
Normally she would have headed for the fiction tables. Today was different; it was the reference book table for her. Even so she had to skirt some of the more popular tables where the Catherine Cookson and Patricia Cornwell paperbacks were being grabbed in twos and threes by buyers. Eloise wondered at the feral expressions some of the women were showing and hoped she had never looked like that.
The reference book table was comparatively free of buyers and Eloise had no trouble moving to the end where the dictionaries were piled. Here there was everything from tiny pocket dictionaries to versions so big they looked as if half a tall tree had been cut down to supply the paper for them.
Eloise saw the one she wanted almost immediately. It stood out massively from even the other large dictionaries. Its thick grey cover was in a bad shape, almost coming free from the spine in places, but it was big enough to make her arm tremble when she lifted it in one hand. Looking inside she saw that it had been printed in 1958. ‘Must have cost a bit,’ she muttered to herself as she flicked through the pages. The printing was large and flawless with the paper as white as the day it had been printed on. There were even small leather tabs with single letters embossed in gold leaf showing where the beginning of each letter section began. Eloise had always had trouble remembering her alphabet and this impressed her as much as anything. ‘Some thought has gone into designing this,’ she decided, ‘it’s perfect.’
At the cashier’s table she handed over what she regarded as a pittance for her dictionary. The prices for all the books were on handwritten posters around the wall so Eloise did not try and offer more. One of the female volunteers manning the cashier’s table insisted Eloise take two of the supermarket plastic bags. ‘You’ll strain yourself carrying that under your arm,’ the woman insisted. ‘Put one bag inside the other, dear. That way the one bag isn’t taking all the weight.’ The volunteer frowned. ‘You know the cover’s loose?’
Eloise gave the woman a smile for her concern and helpfulness. ‘Yes, that’s alright,’ Eloise assured her. ‘I’ll get some string for it when I get home.’
Puzzled the woman asked, ‘String? I think you mean glue, don’t you?’
Eloise had meant string and this was the first thing she looked for when she got home. That was after she had rested her aching arms a little. The dictionary was even heavier than she had first realized and the long uphill slope to home had been a bit much for her.
The string was in the ends and odds box at the back of the kitchen cupboards. Hairy string they had called it when Eloise was a child. White and spiky and just about enough left on the reel for the dictionary.
Eloise’s writer’s study was in the attic in the roof. To call it a study was more symbolic for Eloise than anything. The only furniture was an old table and chair. At one end of this table was the typewriter, at the other her exercise books, pencils and all the rejection letters filed away in a shoebox. On the floor there was a single bar electric fire for the colder weather. The single dormer window looked out across the rooftops, and that was nice a nice outlook. Eloise liked to imagine showing a documentary film crew the view from the little window one day after she had become a famous writer. ‘Of course this is where I did all of my early work,’ she would say. ‘It’s simple, but it gave me so much inspiration at times looking out of the window.’
Eloise opened this window now and craned her neck out to look straight down. Tony was there directly below in his battered old deck chair, leaning back against the house wall. His pink bald spot showed through his carefully combed hair as he watched the traffic on the main road. ‘All words is it, Tony?’ Eloise said quietly. ‘A waste of words?’ and let the heavy dictionary go dropping straight down at that bald spot.
Even hitting Tony directly on the head she doubted that the dictionary, heavy as it was, would do any permanent harm. But the two house bricks she had tied to it with the hairy string were another matter.
The End
By
Peter Glassborow
4/May/14
‘Oh no!’ Eloise exclaimed when she found the queue stretched right around the corner. She had assumed that she had left home early enough to be one of the first at the community centre for the charity book sale. The local paper had said that the sale would open at nine. As Eloise wanted to ensure she got precisely what she wanted she thought arriving at the centre at eight-thirty would be early enough, but now she was here and found there were already at least sixty people ahead of her in the queue. Eloise already felt frazzled that morning with the sarcasm that Tony, her husband, had directed at her for leaving the house so early. ‘More books, more words,’ he had laughed nastily, ‘don’t you get tired of it all, girl? It’s not as though you are having any success, is it?’ He was referring to her ambition, to be a published writer, that she had had since before they had married. All of her spare time was spent on either writing or editing her stories to send to agents and publishers.
When they had first married Tony had not seemed to mind her hobby, had even agreed to read some of her stuff at first and give his opinion. That had all ended years ago. ‘It’s full of bad grammar and bad spelling,’ he repeated over and over whenever she now asked him to read something of hers. ‘You’re not a good writer, Eloise. You should forget about it. It’s all just a load of wasted words.’
His view seemed to be reinforced by comments on some of her rejection letters. Most bore a brief “no thanks” or similar, but the few that had additional comments all mentioned her slip shod grammar and poor spelling, even giving a few examples of her worst efforts.
Eloise knew she could do better if she had some modern technology to help her. A computer would have a word processor with automatic spell and grammar checker, but her finances would not run to a computer. Instead Eloise was forced to scribble in an exercise book with a pencil, crossing out and rewriting until she was satisfied with what she had created. Then the good copy to send away was produced on an old battered typewriter that she had been given.
‘You’d do better to get some books on grammar out of the library,’ Tony had commented on one occasion when he had actually offered some practical advice instead of merely something sarcastic. ‘Get that and a decent dictionary. Otherwise it’s just lots of wasted words.’
Since then Eloise thought she had improved her grammar by carefully studying how the popular writers had constructed their sentences and paragraphs, but spelling was still her weak spot. Eloise would be convinced that her choice of spelling was correct, for even the most mundane of words, only to find out later that she was completely wrong.
‘You can’t spell for toffee, Eloise,’ Tony had told her several times last week after her last rejection letter had arrived. It contained some particularly sarcastic comments from a submissions editor about her poor spelling. ‘Why bother?’ Tony laughed after reading the rejection. ‘It’s just wasted words.’ His same old comment had so grated on her nerves that this time Eloise was determined to deal with this problem once and for all. And she knew exactly how she wanted to deal with it.
‘A dictionary,’ she promised herself. ‘A big one. Massive. The bigger the better.’
The annual charity book sale was always held in the local community centre, several local charities combining their efforts for the event. They gathered the donated books from the public and then sold them to people, like Eloise, wanting cheap bargains. Eloise had been to all the sales, each time purchasing more books than she could really afford. Each time she had gone past the table in the corner that had held the reference books and seen the dictionaries sitting there. Massive tomes labelled Oxford or Webster that she suspected had probably been purchased originally for a student, or to look good on a bookcase. She had often thought of buying one, and then her eye would catch a particular work of fiction on another table and her good intentions, and carefully saved money, would go on that. This time however she desperately wanted the biggest dictionary she could find.
Eloise was glad Tony had not volunteered to come with her. He hated waiting in queues, even more so if it had just been to buy another book. ‘Words, words, wasted words,’ he would chant whenever she mentioned about reading or writing. ‘More words than I can shake a stick at. What’s the point of it all? If you’re not reading them you’re writing them.’ In comparison Tony’s world was visual. TV and sitting out in the garden watching the world pass on the main road outside the garden fence was all he wanted since he had been made redundant.
At nine the centre doors opened and the queue pushed eagerly forward. As it was a weekday it was mostly made up of the unemployed and the elderly, all who seemed to have been training for today with a rugby team. Eloise could not believe the aggression of many of the people, even the elderly. There were already sharp words coming from inside the hall entrance as the crowd surged inside.
A sharp elbow jabbed in Eloise’s side as she squeezed through the door and she revised her wish that Tony be with her. An overweight male to push through this mob might be of some help after all.
Many of the crowd had brought carrier bags to haul away their booty. Eloise had not bothered, and anyway the organizers always had a bin of used supermarket bags for buyers to use. She did not expect to need those, not to carry one book. One big book of words. A dictionary.
Inside the hall trestle tables were piled high with second hand books. Hand written signs hanging from the ceiling told the buyers which tables held the historical, which the romance, sci-fi etc.
Normally she would have headed for the fiction tables. Today was different; it was the reference book table for her. Even so she had to skirt some of the more popular tables where the Catherine Cookson and Patricia Cornwell paperbacks were being grabbed in twos and threes by buyers. Eloise wondered at the feral expressions some of the women were showing and hoped she had never looked like that.
The reference book table was comparatively free of buyers and Eloise had no trouble moving to the end where the dictionaries were piled. Here there was everything from tiny pocket dictionaries to versions so big they looked as if half a tall tree had been cut down to supply the paper for them.
Eloise saw the one she wanted almost immediately. It stood out massively from even the other large dictionaries. Its thick grey cover was in a bad shape, almost coming free from the spine in places, but it was big enough to make her arm tremble when she lifted it in one hand. Looking inside she saw that it had been printed in 1958. ‘Must have cost a bit,’ she muttered to herself as she flicked through the pages. The printing was large and flawless with the paper as white as the day it had been printed on. There were even small leather tabs with single letters embossed in gold leaf showing where the beginning of each letter section began. Eloise had always had trouble remembering her alphabet and this impressed her as much as anything. ‘Some thought has gone into designing this,’ she decided, ‘it’s perfect.’
At the cashier’s table she handed over what she regarded as a pittance for her dictionary. The prices for all the books were on handwritten posters around the wall so Eloise did not try and offer more. One of the female volunteers manning the cashier’s table insisted Eloise take two of the supermarket plastic bags. ‘You’ll strain yourself carrying that under your arm,’ the woman insisted. ‘Put one bag inside the other, dear. That way the one bag isn’t taking all the weight.’ The volunteer frowned. ‘You know the cover’s loose?’
Eloise gave the woman a smile for her concern and helpfulness. ‘Yes, that’s alright,’ Eloise assured her. ‘I’ll get some string for it when I get home.’
Puzzled the woman asked, ‘String? I think you mean glue, don’t you?’
Eloise had meant string and this was the first thing she looked for when she got home. That was after she had rested her aching arms a little. The dictionary was even heavier than she had first realized and the long uphill slope to home had been a bit much for her.
The string was in the ends and odds box at the back of the kitchen cupboards. Hairy string they had called it when Eloise was a child. White and spiky and just about enough left on the reel for the dictionary.
Eloise’s writer’s study was in the attic in the roof. To call it a study was more symbolic for Eloise than anything. The only furniture was an old table and chair. At one end of this table was the typewriter, at the other her exercise books, pencils and all the rejection letters filed away in a shoebox. On the floor there was a single bar electric fire for the colder weather. The single dormer window looked out across the rooftops, and that was nice a nice outlook. Eloise liked to imagine showing a documentary film crew the view from the little window one day after she had become a famous writer. ‘Of course this is where I did all of my early work,’ she would say. ‘It’s simple, but it gave me so much inspiration at times looking out of the window.’
Eloise opened this window now and craned her neck out to look straight down. Tony was there directly below in his battered old deck chair, leaning back against the house wall. His pink bald spot showed through his carefully combed hair as he watched the traffic on the main road. ‘All words is it, Tony?’ Eloise said quietly. ‘A waste of words?’ and let the heavy dictionary go dropping straight down at that bald spot.
Even hitting Tony directly on the head she doubted that the dictionary, heavy as it was, would do any permanent harm. But the two house bricks she had tied to it with the hairy string were another matter.
The End