Why do humans learn language in the first place? That is an easy question to answer, isn't it? Because we need and want to communicate with others and exchange thoughts and feelings about events and express who we are. OK. That is all well and good, but we can also take pleasure in the spoken word in other ways, too. A few months ago, I was in the small town of Taroudant in Morocco. Every evening, Taroudant's main square - Place Alayouine - was full of people. They came to chat, to eat, to meet friends and to be entertained by the snake charmers, the acrobats and escapologists. But I noticed that the biggest crowds were centred around the storytellers and it occurred to me that not only did the people love to listen to stories from older times, they also loved to listen to the sound of the human voice.
I am not suggesting for one moment that listening to stories has died out in Europe. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Think of Amazon's text-to-speech option or BBC Radio's afternoon story. What I am saying is that people like the sound of the human voice and will tolerate a certain amount of language play. This may be due to the fact that their own children, if they have any, do not use language to simply communicate their needs and wants. Children take joy from the sound of the words themselves by repeating them again and again and again. For example, they will repeat nursery rhymes about "Old King Cole" or "Baa Baa Blacksheep" and not because they serve a communicative function!
And it is not only children who play with language. Adults do it all the time. For example, writing and reading poetry is a form of language play and so is the telling of jokes and saying your prayers. Learning German inspired me to try out in English the German habit of putting words together to make very long ones. For example, the next "credit-card-in-waiting," "the big tick-in-the-box" of something confident and eternally true, "waspless-and-sandless-sandwiched picnics" on Weston beach, a "never-to-be-forgotten holiday." I also tried out the long sentence. The ability to write long sentences was once seen as a sign that one knew how to write and readers of Henry James will have come across many of them. I decided to include some of these in my current novella "Scenes from Endless Summer." For example: "Still frowning, she turned her attention to the music - a blend of light classic and popular and she outlined a smile when a vocalist opened up with his version of 'Nothing Else Matters,' and she closed her eyes in order to get a sense of the dancers shuffling, so close, so out of sight but within the arc of her outstretched arm had the door been open, but instead of opening it again, she took a breath and swayed along with these invisible dancers, joined them in their slow, quick-quick, slow, quick-quick waltz and she set about separating thoughts from feelings and words from pictures and silently translated her worries into a conversation with herself."
So, do try and experiment with your language when writing and do not allow grammatical rules to stifle you. However, a word of warning. There is a big difference between not knowing grammatical rules and making mistakes and knowing grammatical rules and bending or breaking them them to suit your style or your story.
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