Dear Readers:
One of Dr. Ink’s most sycophantic readers, Susan Ager, complained to Doc about how we in journalism often “blather” to each other without the benefit of sufficient information. Now Doc greatly respects Susan, whom he met years ago when she was just a high school journalist and her parents brought her in to Doc’s office for an interview…but that’s another story.
Susan, a gifted writer from Detroit, inspired the etymological Doc to look up the word “blather.” The divine Ms. Ager had used it correctly, of course. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as: “to talk nonsense; babble.”
It comes into English from Old Norse “bladhra,” which turns out to be the same word as “bladder.”
Now the Norsemen were wonderful beer drinkers, consuming quarts of brew from great drinking vessels made out of animal horn. Upon consuming mass quantities of foamy liquid, they would boast and swap stories until, until…their bladders burst.
What the scatological Doc is postulating here, readers, is an image cluster that associated wasted language with pissing. Blather and bladder.
Just yesterday, Dr. Ink praised a journalist for a recent story. The reporter was most grateful and almost surprised by the response since he had received little feedback. Doc said, “Well, I didn’t want you to think that you were just pissing into the wind.”
Now that the conceited Doc (conceited, as in extended metaphor) thinks about it, the act of writing is about filling up and emptying out. We digest information and drink down quarts of stuff. While the human body excretes waste, the writer expresses the essence of the story.
Doc, who won’t quit while he’s ahead, now thinks of all that liquid consumed by reporters at their desks: coffee, bottled water, Diet Cokes, and those urgent journeys to the rest room. The great Greta Tilley used to say that she knew she was making progress on her story when she found herself making serial strolls to the john (or jane).
Dorothea Brande in her wonderful book from 1934, “Becoming a Writer,” includes advice for writers on how and what to drink: “If you have an ingrained habit of putting off everything until after you have your morning coffee, buy a thermos bottle and fill it at night. This will thwart your wily unconscious in the neatest fashion. You will have no excuse to postpone work while you wait for your stimulant.”
Doc’s blathering has almost ended. But first he wants to know this: What do journalists drink these days while they are writing or preparing to write?
