Words on the Chopping Block

Words On the Chopping Block

‘Tis the season for ghouls, warlocks, incessant reruns of Hocus Pocus, and all things creepy. Being a born-near-Halloween baby, I usually do not subscribe to the blood and gore some people savor during this time. I prefer clever costumes, candy, and parties, but not the death and evil stuff. However, in this blog post, I’ll do my best to swing a metaphorical axe with diabolical intention.

 Be Still My Previously Beating Heart

Elision is the blood-curdling tearing out of sounds, letters, syllables, or words. Omit the sound, insert an apostrophe with vampiric accuracy. Contractions and elisions are similar in that they both use apostrophes, but contractions always stitch together a two-word minimum. At times, elisions do combine two words (e.g., it is to ’tis), but usually they pluck out a letter or two from a single word. In poetry, elision supports the meter, keeping the beat—like a steady gush of blood—flowing.

Shakespeare’s Web of Roots

Shakespeare’s poetic dialogue casts its spell in iambic pentameter (mostly). Iambic pentameter’s not-so-secret formula is five sets of paired unstressed/stressed syllables. As Edgar Allan Poe’s rhythmic beat of his tell-tale heart would quoth: ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum.

To “screw his courage” to the iambic pentameter “sticking place” (Macbeth, Act I, scene vii), Shakespeare employed elision. In Renaissance English, each syllable had its say: “embarked” was pronounced “em-bar-ked”; “ravished” was “ra-vi-shed”; “drowned” was “drow-ned.” Shakespeare often replaced the E in the suffix with an apostrophe, breaking three-syllable words down to two and two-syllable words to one. 

Nefarious Halloween Fairies

All three of the aforementioned verbs appear as elisions, “embark’d,” “ravish’d,” and “drown’d,” in Titania’s Act II, scene 1 come-uppance speech in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania, the Queen of the Fairies clobbers her husband with evidence of how his selfish behavior has turned her fairies’ romps into a nightmare. “But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.” 

Warning: Don’t hagride fairies—especially on Halloween.

Out, Out, Damned Elisions!

In the bloody Scottish play Macbeth, Lady Macbeth invokes evil spirits in Act I, scene v, commanding them to “Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” and “And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers” (lines 51 and 55). She uses elision to cast a spell to suck all kindness from her very bones yet keeps the iambic pentameter rolling.

Macbeth fears witchcraft and evil in Act II, scene 1, as he panics before killing the king. A bloody spectral dagger appears before him, and as his fear bubbles, so do his elisions:

Now o’er the one-half world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s off’rings, and withered murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf…

Warning: Beware the Ides of March in October. Wrong play, but the sentiment rings true.

American Horror Elision

We Saw-obsessed Americans chop off parts of words, and (most of the time) we sop up the blood of the missing letters with an apostrophe. Word chopping is fine for spoken language and dialects, but it haunts our formal writing—and, more often than not, it has absolutely nothing to do with poetry, iambic pentameter, or horror. Well, it scares me.

Preposition Poltergeist

One of the top American elisions is an abbreviated version of the preposition “because.” We lop off the first syllable and say/write ’cause.

Example, no elision: Alas, I cannot kill because Mom said no.

Example, American elision: Alas, I cannot kill ’cause Mom said no.

(Ten points to the house that noticed the iambic pentameter in that example.) 

Two Letters Too Long

The other American biggie is when we chop the word “and”— ’cause three letters is just too many to live with. We can’t seem to agree on the number of apostrophes to insert, so we’ve stocked a veritable mad scientist’s laboratory with specimens.

This example found next to the jar marked “Abby Normal”:

We Park ’n’ Ride our brooms so we can rock ’n’ roll to Guns N’ Roses while eating our fish ’n’ chips and mac ’n’ cheese in the Steak ’N Shake parking lot near the cemetery.

Warning: That diet will infest your brain.

Writing Warning

In modern English, “stalked” and “stabbed” are single-syllable words. When pursuing elision in any format, ram that apostrophe stake into the heart of the word to slay the missing letters or syllables. It drips with fright’ning imagery.

Somebody turn on a light.