Love the Language

Alan Moore reveals you the secrets of writing: HERE!

Excerpt from page 14 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 7th episode of the series,  Language As Technology. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] you’re going to need a love of language, of new and unusual words. There wasn’t a lot of that around in the working-class neighbourhoods that I grew up in. Nevertheless, my mother particularly enjoyed unusual words, as if they belonged to better-off people but that she had somehow got hold of them.
She would take such glee in saying, ‘Oh, our Alan, why do you have to be so obstreperous?’
I think it was contagious because I began to gather unusual words and there are some fantastic ones out there: craquelure, which is the web of fissures in the varnish on a painting; or xanthic, which is a much nicer way of saying yellow; and quaquaversal, which means spreading out evenly in all directions.

I used the last to describe a massive pile of pornography as a ‘quaquaversal strumpet cascade’. You might only ever use these words once, if that, but it’s great to know them. [...]

Stream the full course HERE!