Author: Dom

Book review: How to Argue with a Racist

To be honest, I don’t do a lot of non-fiction, but this one turned up on Twitter feed because Bernadine Evaristo recommended it. Given the current state of the Western Hemisphere right now, I figured I’m going to need a better position than, ‘You’re being a dick – stop it.’

And that’s what Dr Rutherford has attempted to provide: evidence-based, scientifically-proven reasoning through his extensive knowledge of genetics and race history.

He starts with a fairly deep and fairly dry delve into the science of genetics, covering what genetics is and the thinking behind it, and how are genetic makeup is spread across the world by migrations that occurred thousands of years ago. Now, I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, so I did find a lot it quite … deep, but the important aspect isn’t so much the science, as the history of migration, because this, coupled with environmental adaption, is why this whole race thing is really an artificial construct that has been co-opted by dodgy scientists and white supremacists to justify beliefs that are little more than superstition.

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Minding your Ps and Qs

The aristocracy – never had a problem with it until I decided to write a short story about werewolves in high society. Now it turns out there’s a bit missing from my grammar playbook.

Do I write:

‘I’ll bring the car around, Ma’am.’

or is it:

‘I’ll bring the car around, ma’am.’

Teatime and Macaroons by Joanna Kosinska (@joannakosinska)

I was pretty sure it was the second one because I ran across a similar problem while I was writing the Quisling Orchid. The book has a lot of dialogue (as all good books seem to), and a lot of Nazis (not necessarily a requirement for a good book). In this case, I knew I should write:

‘And why did you feel the need to let her go, sargeant?’

Small ‘s’ for sargeant, so I figured it was the same for the aristocracy:

‘I’ll have him flogged, your ladyship.’

though I had this notion that maybe ‘ladyship’ needed a capital letter:

‘I’ll have him flogged, your Ladyship.’

And that just looks weird.

Time for a [insert your favourite search engine here] search, and one of the first results that came up was from Merethe Walther’s seriously excellent blog. This page covers every common capitalisation rule, and a couple I hadn’t thought of. Definitely worth a read if you’re not sure, and still worth a read if you’re absolutely positive you’re doing it right.