Grammar Girl: What’s your favorite word and why?
Lillian Li: "Segue." Its pronunciation feels so at odds with its spelling that it’s just delightful to me. It’s also not an uncommon word, so its weirdness kind of hides in plain sight.
GG: What’s a word you dislike (either because it’s overused or misused) and why?
LL: I’m trying to stop using the word “problematic.” It’s not the word’s fault—no one word can encompass as much complexity and history as “problematic” has been expected to communicate about our society and its issues. I just started noticing that the word “problematic” used to begin discussions, and now it’s become a stand-in for discussions we’re no longer having.
GG: What word will you always misspell?
LL: "Broccolinni." What a nightmare word!
GG: What word (or semblance of a word) would you like to see added to the dictionary? Why?
LL: None, but I would like the dictionary to come with a big fat disclaimer that it is not the ultimate authority on words and their meanings, that language and its definitions are constantly evolving, and that the people who write dictionaries are as susceptible to race, class, and gender prejudices as anyone else. So maybe we can stop using dictionary definitions to win arguments/write college papers?
GG: Any grammar pet peeves we should know about?
LL: My grammar pet peeve is people with grammar pet peeves. Like, live your life. Don’t be rude to other people just because you don’t believe infinitives should be split or that “their” can’t be a singular pronoun.
GG: To what extent does grammar play a role in character development and voice?
LL: My first book, "Number One Chinese Restaurant," tries to capture the bilingual experience, even though it’s written entirely in English, and so grammar plays a huge role in expressing the effort and ease that a character has in their native language (versus their second or third language). At the same time, I wanted to make sure that my portrayal of grammar was rooted in reality. That I wasn’t writing dialogue with arbitrary grammar “mistakes” simply to express that a character wasn’t speaking their native tongue.
One of my jobs, outside writing, is working in a Writing Center, where a good portion of my students are international students from China. Through that experience, I learned so much about why native Chinese speakers make a similar pattern of errors when speaking and writing in English. The Chinese language doesn’t have articles, doesn’t have gender-specific pronouns (in speaking), and so, when translating into English, dropped articles and misgendered pronouns are common. I tried to reflect and stay true to these patterns in my novel. Grammar was a way for me not only to portray my characters’ experience of the world, but also to be responsible to their multilingual backgrounds.
GG: Do you have a favorite quote or passage from an author you’d like to share?
LL: I took away the formatting of this passage so that it would read more smoothly, but you should definitely check out the original short story to see the author’s stylistic choices.
"A name [is actually] a memorial to the site where an idea once rested, momentarily, before moving on. If you listen carefully, you can hear it in there, but when you look inside, the idea-cage is always empty, and in its place, the concrete, the particular, something formerly alive, now dead and smashed." "The Book of Categories" by Charles Yu
GG: What grammar, wording, or punctuation problem did you struggle with this week?
LL: I always want to refer to animals and inanimate objects with “who” or “whose” even though gramatically I think I’m supposed to use “that.” But I just read Grammar Girl’s take on that particular issue and found it very helpful, so thank you!
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