Like the heroes of so many popular stories and myths, Sherlock Holmes was born in poverty and nearly died at birth from neglect. Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle was a novice medical practitioner with a dearth of patients. To while away his time and to help pay a few bills, Doyle took pen in hand and created one of the first detectives to base his work squarely on scientific methods.
In December of 1887, Sherlock Holmes came into the world as an unheralded and unnoticed Yuletide child in Beeton's Christmas Annual. When, not long after, The Strand Magazine began the monthly serialization of the first dozen short stories entitled "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," the issues sold tens of thousands and the public furiously clamored for more.
At the height of success, however, the creator wearied of his creation. He yearned for "higher writing" and felt his special calling to be the historical novel. In December 1893, Doyle introduced into the last story in the Memoirs series the arch criminal Professor James Moriarty. In "The Final Problem," Holmes and the evil professor wrestle at a cliff's edge in Switzerland. Grasping each other frantically, sleuth and villain plummet to their watery deaths at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.
With Holmes forever destroyed, Doyle felt he could abandon his mystery stories and turn his authorial eyes to the romantic landscapes of the Middle Ages. He longed to chronicle the clangor of medieval battles, the derring-do of brave knights, and the sighs of lovesick maidens. But the writer's tour back in time would not be that easily booked: Sherlock Holmes had taken on a life of his own, something larger than the will of his creator. The normally staid, stiff-upper-lipped British public was first bereaved, then outraged. Conservative London stockbrokers went to work wearing black armbands in mourning for the loss of their heroic detective. Citizens poured out torrents of letters to editors complaining of Holmes's fate. One woman picketed Doyle's home with a sign branding him a murderer.
The appeals of The Strand's publishers to Doyle's sensibilities and purse went unheeded. For the next eight years Holmes lay dead at the bottom of the Swiss falls while Doyle branched out into historical fiction, science fiction, horror stories and medical stories. But he wasn't very good at "higher writing."
Finally, Doyle could resist the pressures from publisher and public no more. A hundred years ago, in September of 1903, ten years after the "death" of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle's detective rose up from his watery grave in the Reichenbach Falls, his logical wonders to perform for the whole world. "The Adventures of the Empty House" demonstrated that Holmes had not really perished at Reichenbach. He had only faked his death in order to avoid retribution at the hands of Moriarty's henchmen.
"The Return of Sherlock Holmes," the series of 13 stories that brought back Doyle's hero, was greeted eagerly by detective-starved British readers whose appetites had been whetted by "Hound," and the author continued writing stories of his detective right into 1927. When in 1930 Arthur Conan Doyle died at age 71, readers around the world mourned his passing. Newspaper cartoons portraying a grieving Sherlock Holmes captured the public's sense of irreparable loss.
Such is the power of mythic literature that the creation has outlived his creator. Letters and packages from all over the world still come addressed to "Sherlock Holmes" at 221-B Baker Street, where they are answered by a full-time secretary. Only Santa Claus gets more mail, at least just before Christmastime. More movies, well over 300 of them, have been made about Holmes than about Dracula, Frankenstein, Robin Hood and Rocky combined. Sherlock Holmes stories written by post-Doylean authors now vastly outnumber the 60 that Doyle produced. More than 150 societies in homage to Sherlock Holmes are active in the United States alone.
However many times the progenitor tried to finish off his hero, by murder or retirement or flat refusal to write any more adventures, the Great Detective lives, vigilant and deductive as ever, protecting the humble from the evils that lurk in the very heart of our so-called civilization. Sherlock Holmes can never really die. His readers will never let him.
© Richard Lederer
But as she became an adult, then a soccer mom, and, ultimately, an empty-nester, she began to realize that a gazillion neologisms -- around five thousand new words each year! -- were altering the way she looked at the world and occasionally requiring a reality check. Stressed out from life in the fast track spent networking with yuppies, yumpies, and dinks, she disconnected her cellular phone and paid some megabucks to go to a fat farm. Feeling like a couch potato, she stopped her feeding frenzies and gave the high five to grazing on nouvelle cuisine.
As newly minted words added to the currency of the language of the wicked awesome 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Boomer felt as if she was having a bad-hair day every day in a world in which the parts of speech and meanings of words transmogrified under her very eyes and ears. FAX, Fedex, microwave, scroll, and Xerox had turned into verbs, and Bill Murray got slimed in the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters. Crack meant more than just a small opening, and ice more than frozen water, and going postal became not just a decision to mail a letter. A pocket wasn't just for pants, and a bar code was no longer just ethics for lawyers or the etiquette of behavior in a cafe, and rap wasn't just '60s talk. Zapping was not something that futuristic ray guns did but something that people did with a microwave or a television remote control (along with surfing). A set point was no longer just a tennis score, and spin was not just what a tennis ball did, especially in the hands of the spin doctors. IRA no longer stood just for "Irish Republican Army," CD s were no longer just certificates, and PC came to signify both personal computer and politically correct.
A pound was no longer just a unit of currency or measurement but, in the words of James J. Kilpatrick, my colleague in columny, "the little thingamajig above the 3 on a standard typewriter or computer keyboard. It looks like a blank tic tac toe game that has had too much to drink."
Known as "elephant's ear" in Sweden, "small snail" in France and Italy, "cat tail" in Finland, "monkey tail" in Holland, "spider monkey" in Germany, "cinnamon cake" in Norway, "little dog" in Russia, and "shtrudel" in Israel, the @ -- or "at-sign" -- has become a standard symbol in electronic addresses. Used for centuries in the sense of "each at the price of," the @ has taken on the locative sense of "at."
In fact, the hot new technology of the computer thoroughly befuddled the meanings of back up, bit, boot, browser, crash, disk, dot, hacker, hard drive, hit, mail, memory, menu, mouse, net, park, prompt, provider, scroll, spam, surf, virus, Web site (no longer just where Charlotte lives), and window. As the wonders of the computer impacted on her mind, she acquired a new user-friendly vocabulary: clip art, desktop publishing, emoticon, floppy disk, ink-jet, Internet, keypad, kludge, laptop, morphing, mouse potato (a couch potato attached to a computer), number crunching, software, spreadsheet, and voice recognition. To add to these sound bytes, bit-map, chat room, HTML, home page, netiquette, netizen, URL, VCR, World Wide Web, zettabyte -- and, of course, millennium bug (shortened to Y2K) -- all debuted in dictionaries in the 1990s.
No wonder that Boomer began feeling like a dissed gomer, dumbed-down dweeb, bummed out newbie, totally loose cannon, and ditzy airhead.
As the Me Generation (a term invented by the writer Tom Wolfe) grew up and grayed, our disoriented Boomer found that the business of America appeared to be business, and the business of business was to devise a lexicon of new terms to describe new fiscal realities. The second half of the twentieth century was a "golden" age of commerce -- golden handshakes, golden hellos, and golden parachutes. The increasingly proactive world of business also gave us ATMs, baby Bells, bank card, debit card, domestic partner, entry level, Euro dollar, family leave, glass ceiling, intrapreneurs, maxed out, pink collar, PIN, power breakfasts and power lunches, and power ties, program trading, quality circles, queen bees, telemarketing, and white knights.
But Boomer found that life among the movers and shakers was fraught with the perils of greenmail, hostile takeovers, junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, and poison pills. It was also a decade of considerable monkey business -- sleazebags and sleazeballs engaging in insider trading, often leaving paper trails that led to smoking guns and white collar prisons. Boomer was bombarded with hundreds of high-tech brave new words for a brave new world of science and technology. She found herself playing telephone tag with such cutting edge dictionary entries as blusher, bullet train, call forwarding and call waiting, CAT scan, COBOL, cold fusion, faux pearls (and faux anything else), fiber-optic, fuzz-buster, global warming, greenhouse effect, laser, makeover, meltdown, microwaveable, nuclear winter, quark, super collider, tanning booth (and bed ), voice activated, voice mail (a new oxymoron), and voiceprint.
As Boomer grew up, she found that medical breakthroughs broke into the headlines almost every day: alternative medicine, arthroscopy, attention deficit disorder, bikini cut, genetic counseling, geriatrician, ibuprofen, in vitro fertilization, liposuction, liquid diet, live liver donor transplant, Lyme disease, mad cow disease, minoxidil, passive smoking, PMS, product tampering, Prozac, seasonal affective disorder (which yields the bacronym SAD), sunblock, taxol, and toxic shock syndrome. For a while, she joined the fitness craze and became a triathlete who built up her abs and glutes with low-impact aerobics, aquacise, dancercise, and jazzercise.
At the same time, Boomer was troubled by the spread of AIDS drugs through the decade and the population -- ARC, AZT, HIV complex, homophobia, and safe sex (had it ever been safe?); crackhead, crackhouse, freebase, gateway drug, ice, and narcoterrorism.
Our Boomer became swept up in an age marked by considerable political and social change, and this change in turn left its mark on the American language -- action clothing, Afrocentric, bag lady, blended family, carjacking, charter school, codependent, condo conversion, Contra, co-parent, designated driver, designer jeans (genes, or anything else), distance learning, disinformation, Ebonics, exit poll, extended care, gentrification, gerontocracy, glasnost, global village, gridlock, happy hour (which usually lasts longer than an hour), health spa, high top, homeschooler, Kwanza, mall rat, managed care, no-growth, quality time, POSSLQ, rust belt (or bowl), seatbelt laws, significant other, single parent, singles bar, stepfamily, superfund, surrogate mother, touchy feelie, and trophy wife.
Boomer learned to come to terms with glitzy, in-your-face new entertainment terms, such as acid rock, action figure, boom box, breakdancing, bungee jumping, cable-ready, camcorder, channel surfing, clear channel, colorization, closed and open captioned, docudrama and documusical, extreme sports, gangsta rap, ghetto blasters, hackysack, high top, infotainment, laser and compact disks, line dancing, MTV, new wave music, new age anything, road rage, slam dunk, snowboarding, sound bite, snowboarding, televangelist, ten-speed, and veejay.
Lucky Boomer. Throughout her life, a growing interest by foodies in ethnic and regional cuisine added a menu of new words to the American palate, food court, and vocabulary. The American obsession with food is reflected in the neologisms bagel chips and bagel dogs, biscotti, blush wine, brew decaf, buffalo wings, callaloo, chimichanga, corn dog, enoki, fajita, farfalle, frozen yogurt, green goddess dressing, ice wine, latte, mesclun, microbrew, oat bran, primavera, ranch dressing, sea legs, shiitaki, smoothie, surimi, and wine coolers -- many of which are comfort foods, not junk foods. Boomer wasn't really distraught, and certainly wasn't ready to quit the day job or go postal or ballistic. In fact, this whole business of linguistic change was a no-brainer to her. She knew that, just as one never steps into the same river twice, one cannot step into the same language twice -- that, even as one enters, the words are swept downstream into the future, forever making a different river. Or, to switch the metaphor, she knew that language is like a tree that sheds its leaves and grows new ones so that it may live on. Changes in our vocabulary occur not from decay or degeneration. Rather, new words, like new leaves, are essential to a living, healthy organism. A language draws its nutrients from the environment in which its speakers live. Throughout history, as people have met with new objects, experiences, and ideas, they have needed new words to describe them. During the second half of the twentieth century, the tree of American English experienced a riot of new growth -- a sign that our multifoliate language is deeply rooted in the nourishing soil of change.
© Richard Lederer
But stop and think for a moment. Just when does the Third Millennium of the Christian Era begin? There are those among us who point out that Christ was one year old at the end of the first year A.D. and that the first decade A.D. was not over until the end of the year 10. Each new decade, therefore, ends with a year that ends with a zero and each new decade begins with a year that ends with a one. Historical records reveal that the start of the twentieth century was celebrated on December 31, 1900, not 1899.
Millennia being clusters of a thousand years, the last year of each millennium mustend in zero and the first in one. The one thousandth year was A.D. 1,000, and the first day of the Second Millennium of the Christian Era was January 1, 1001. Therefore, the Second Millennium ends at midnight on December 31, 2000, and the New Millennium begins the next day -- January 1, 2001.
These members of the Puristic Chronology Society will stay home on the night of December 31, 1999, while we yahoos will be dancing in the streets to celebrate the arrival of the Third Millennium A.D. One year later, 'round midnight, the literalists will go out to ring in the twenty-first century and find only a small gathering of themselves.
I respectfully suggest that the world throw two humongous global bashes: On December 31, 1999, let's ring in the last year of the Second Millennium. A year later, December 31, 2000, let's whoop it up for the start of the Third Millennium. And while we're at it, let's make every effort to spell millennium correctly, with a double l and a double n between the two m's. So many people omit that second “n.”
Now that we've solved those mind bogglers, here's another question that it's about time we ask about time. When the twenty-first century dawns, what are we going to call its first decade? The Zeros? The Zilches? Too dismal. The Noughts or Naughts? Unfortunately, naught (or nought) means a person or thing of no worth or value. Too disparaging.
The Hundreds? The Thousands? Too vague. The Two Thousands? Too long. The Aughts or Oughts? Too ambiguous, too prescriptive.
The Aughties? That's how some people referred to the first decade of this twentieth century. Apparently it arose from the game we call tic tac toe, which was also known as "naughts and crosses." “Naughts” became shortened to aughts, or oughts. But to our ears, The Aughties (or Oughties) sounds a bit stuffy, a bit British, a bit quaint and musty -- hardly the shiny positive that we need to launch a space age, computer driven decade.
Another problem with Aughts and Aughties is that it's doubtful that we will pronounce the zeroes in the next nine years as aughts. People will probably call the year 2000 "two thousand," then 2001 "two-thousand-one," 2002 "two-thousand-two," and so on.
Surely we can usher in the next century with something more cheerfully optimistic -- perhaps the Ohs, an exultant exclamation that conveys the sense of wonder and infinite potential that await us. Let's just hope that the Ohs don't become the Owes, or the Oh- Ohs.
© Richard Lederer
For stimulation, Honor( de Balzac drank at least fifty cups of coffee a day, and died of caffeine poisoning. 
The German poet Schiller started each of his writing sessions by opening the drawer of his desk and breathing in the fumes of the rotten apples he had stashed there. Victor Hugo went to perhaps the most extreme lengths to ensure his daily output of verbiage. He gave all his clothes to his servant with orders that they be returned only after he had finished his day's work.
Compared to such strategies, my daily writing regimen is drearily normal. Perhaps that's because I'm a nonfictionalist -- a hunter-gatherer of language who records the sounds that escape from the holes in people's faces, leak from their pens, 
and luminesce up on their computer screens. I don't drink coffee. Rotten fruit doesn't inspire (literally "breathe into") me. My lifelong, heels-over-head love affair with language is my natural caffeine and fructose.
To be a writer, one must behave as writers behave. They write. And write. And write. The difference between a writer and a wannabe is that a writer is someone who can't not write, while a wannabe says, "One of these days when . . ., then I'll . . . ." Unable not to write, I write every day that I'm home.
A grocer doesn't wait to be inspired to go to the store or a banker to go to the bank. I can't afford the luxury of waiting to be inspired before I go to work. Writing is my job, and it happens to be a job that almost nobody gives up on purpose. I love my job as a writer, so I write. Every day that I can.
Long ago, I discovered that I'll never become the great American novelist. I stink at cobbling dialogue, episode, and setting. A writer has to find out which kind of writer he or she is, and I somehow got born an English teacher with an ability to communicate ideas about language and literature. 
Early on, I also discovered that I am more lark than owl -- more a morning person than a night person -- and certainly not a bat, one who writes through the night. I am usually up around 7:30 a.m. and striking the keyboard within an hour.
Genetic and environmental roulette have allowed me to be able to work in a silent or a noisy environment. Usually, I have the radio on playing classical music or Public Radio talk. I'm also a speaker, columnist, and article writer; so phone calls and faxes and e-messages chirp and hum and buzz in my writing room, and I often have to answer them during those precious morning hours. 
That's all right with me. Fictionalists live with their characters, who get skittish and may flee a noisy room. As I write my essays, my audience of readers are my covivants, and they will usually stay through outerworldly intrusions. Besides, the business of the writing business gives me the privilege of being a writer. In fact, I consider the writing only about a half of my job. Writers don't make a living writing books. They make a living selling books.
I write very little on paper, almost everything on my computer. My work possesses an informational density, and the computer allows me to enter all manner of matter onto the hard drive and accumulate that density. Theodore Sturgeon once wrote, "Nine-tenths of everything is crap." The computer allows me to dump crap into the hard drive without the sense of permanence that handwriting or type on paper used to signify to me. I'm visual and shape my sentences and paragraphs most dexterously on a screen. The computer has not only trebled my output. It has made me a more joyful, liberated, and better writer.
© Richard Lederer
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