Green stuff and ignorance

(Borrowed from Married to the Sea.)

Just sharing a comic today, which certainly hit on how I feel reading The Lord of the Rings or Watership Down, or other masterpieces by Englishmen who must have spent all their childhoods frolicking in a clearly-labeled countryside. I try not to skim passages that read to me like:

The sweet odour of the smendley mixed with that of new-mown grass, for it was Spring; the curmudgeons bloomed merrily in the hoary elbows of the Mother-Doing-Laundry, and the swips sang amongst the buds upon the branches.

I find myself in a similar position reading The Stand, Stephen King's American epic, except in this case it's cars rather than nature whose names are a dizzying blur. I could care less about cars, but not much less, and I could much more easily care more if I cared to, which I do not.

Not that I begrudge King his interest, any more than I begrudge Tolkien his Shire-y upbringing. It's just interesting to notice the things that a narrator knows by name. Of course a good narrator knows enough to explain what he's on about to ignorami like myself when it's important.* The rest of the time, we can look it up if we need to know.

* We as writers might remember to use the common name of anything that ends up in the foreground of a story. Don't think of it as lowering yourself to the level of your stupidest readers; think of it as expressing the hope that your work will still be read when our household names are but a distant memory.