To Tush, or Not to Tush?

That is the question.

“Hey nonny-nonny. Thou art a poltroon, forsooth!”

Or something. Lord save us from bad dialogue.

Tushery is defined as:

Writing of poor quality distinguished especially by the presence of affectedly archaic diction.

A definition from Merriam-Webster. And incidentally, if you’re wondering what a poltroon is, it’s a person who is pusillanimous. I can go on all day here… but I won’t because that’s basically part of the problem: flowery language.

Tushery is something that authors – particularly in the “golden age” of science fiction felt obliged to salt their dialogue with, in order to show that it was a genuine ye-olde knights-and-maidens-fest.

Egad. Zounds!

Et cetera. Ouch. Trouble is, it’s quite hard to break the mould, and not do it. If you set a story in the year 1,600 CE (that’s politically correct for ‘AD’) you rapidly find yourself agonising over whether to use bumpkinspeak, or modern English. That time, during the reign of Elizabeth I, really is the pivot point – when ‘goeth’ became ‘goes’ and ‘shoon’ became ‘shoes’ and so on… although ‘shoon’ is a little too authentic for our purposes. It goes beyond scene-setting and into the realm of putting obstacles in the way of the story, for the purpose of being clever.

Despite the Merriam-Webster definition, great literature is sometimes prone to bouts of something very much like tushery:

“Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz HIM dat ’uz bein’ sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, ‘Go on en save me, nemmine ’bout a doctor f’r to save dis one?’ Is dat like Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You BET he wouldn’t! WELL, den, is JIM gywne to say it? No, sah—I doan’ budge a step out’n dis place ’dout a DOCTOR, not if it’s forty year!”

– Samuel Clemens’ Huckleberry Finn, of course.

That dialogue might – might – be authentic, but it’s as near to impenetrable as makes no difference, for somebody in another country, a century later.

Somewhere, there exists a sweet spot where we remind the reader that our characters have a distinctive accent or speech pattern, but we don’t let it spoil the narrative. One one end of the scale, Roger Zelazny gave his fantasy characters modern American speech patterns… but his world(s) were also salted with anachronisms like cigarettes. In a multiverse with ‘leakage’ what gets through? English (probably the best language yet devised for conveying important abstract concepts like science)… and cigarettes. Maybe condoms, too.

T.H. White did something weird with Arthurian legend and anachronisms such as guns, too. But I’m more interested in the idea of modern English in conversations among characters in a historical setting. Because something inside me shrivels if I have to write “for he chooseth and he obtaineth that which he doth seek…”

Awfulness. Or am I mistaken? Leave a comment.

In two projects that I have going on at the moment, I have chosen to use modern English. Not a single “forsooth” has escaped my keyboard. (Except that one, and the one at the start of this article… which is two too many, in the 21st Century, I think.)

Let’s get tough on tushery; tough on the causes of tushery.