Pets & peeves



"Insomnia in a small town," Duncan, BC, 2007 © Len Langevin

Pet: the word “clean” to mean “empty.”  Last night our train made an unscheduled stop in Weldon, North Carolina, so the crew could manually set a switch. It had been raining, and the town was darkly shiny, pink-amber from sodium vapor lights. A woman sitting behind me showed her daughter. “Look it,” she said. “The streets is so clean. They’s nobody out, not a single body out there.”
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Peeve: when a writer, of all people, uses “verbal” to mean “oral.”
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Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and the narrator knows what happened to them but withholds the information in order to build suspense. This is what Raymond Carver called a cheap trick.
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Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and not even the writer knows what happened to them.