A couple days ago I started watching Sherlock, a series on the BBC that takes on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson adventures in a modern context. All of Sherlock’s quirks and personality traits are present in the series, including his love of playing the violin when he’s thinking. When I heard it mentioned on the show, a glimmer of hope shot through me - maybe they’ll handle his violin playing appropriately, or maybe they just won’t show it at all, but oh dear do I ever hope they don’t ruin it! And then, one episode later, Sherlock picks up his violin and, to my chagrin, starts playing. It’s funny, though, because the notes his fingers are making and the strokes his bow is taking are obviously different from the music that the audience is hearing. This happens in every single movie or show I’ve seen that features a musically-inclined character (with very few exceptions), and it always niggles me. In the corny-yet-emotive music movie August Rush, the main character’s mother is supposed to be an extremely gifted cellist, and the actress who plays her apparently had no experience with the instrument whatsoever - watching her fingers move sluggishly over the fingerboard when she’s supposed to be playing a lively Bach sonata made me cringe in my theatre seat. In Master and Commander, Russell Crowe’s character Jack Aubrey plays the violin…but from the portrayal of his musicianship in the film, he doesn’t appear to be very good: sloppy fingers, bowing that doesn’t match up with the music, really horrible and painful-looking posture. Now. I fully understand that stringed instruments are difficult to learn and master - I did that shit, and it took me YEARS. However, the actor’s craft is to portray a character from his head to his toes, and if a character is supposed to be extremely proficient with a musical instrument, it would seem to logically follow that the actor put some time and effort into learning how to convincingly fake-play said instrument. I’m not at all saying that every actor who plays a musical character has to learn their character’s instrument - that would just be absurd. What I’m saying is that actors who work on big-budget productions like the three I mentioned above have a shit ton of resources at their disposal, and I’m sure it can’t be that hard to consult with a violinist or cellist to learn what it sounds like when a bow changes direction, what it looks like when playing chords rather than individual notes, how fast one’s fingers actually have to move, and (at the very fucking least) proper posture. When I’m watching a show or a film that I’m really enjoying and suddenly the musician character pulls out his violin and starts “playing” a beautiful cadenza or partita, I want to keep watching and believing in the show or film’s world…but I can’t. When what I’m hearing is so vastly different from what I’m seeing, it takes me out of the created environment and ruffles my feathers a little bit. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t bother people who aren’t as terribly familiar with stringed instruments as I and other orchestral musicians are - I’m not sure if they even notice that something is amiss. But I always notice, and it makes me clench my fingers into fists and close my eyes exasperatedly. Is a little bit of effort to make the character entirely believable too much to ask?

I know a lot of words and I know a lot of synonyms - when I’m trying to think of a particular word, sometimes I also think of all that word’s synonyms and then try to say them all at once. For example, slouch + slump + hunch = slunch. “Slunch” actually came out of my mouth when I was trying to describe my shitty posture to my friends - when I’m playing violin I throw my shoulders back and my chin up and everything is right and great, but when it isn’t violin time my shoulders slope and my head hangs forward just a little on my neck because my muscles are always tight and tired. The resulting effect is something close to a hunchback, and I was desperately grasping for the word “slump” when my brain was like “hey! I can’t come up with the word you really want right now but you could also say “slouch” or “hunch” because they mean nearly the same thing!” So “slunch” fell right out of my mouth. This idiotic mixture of synonyms in my brain happens far more often than I’d like to admit. Edit: for those wondering, “slunch” is also the term I’ve appropriated for food in between lunch and dinner: supper-lunch or super-lunch. The more you know.

One of the things I appreciate most about the aging of the Internette is the evolution of “lol.” Initially it meant “laughing out loud” and was appropriated as shorthand in AIM and MSN messaging. It was rapidly discovered, however, that everyone who types “lol” does not actually literally laugh out loud, and so “lol” became closer in meaning to “haha,” which I’ve always thought of as a sort of lazy punctuation mark with which one opens or closes a sentence to a crush or frenemy in text or online. Recently, at least in my experience, “lol” has become the text equivalent of a nervous laugh. What do you type when you have no idea what to say? You type “lol” or “haha,” which is literally transcribing a nervous and uncomfortable laugh into whatever textual conversation you may be having. If you were having that same conversation in real life with your mouth instead of your fingers, that would be when and where you would giggle fakely and glance around for an out, and now I can’t stop reading “lol” as that same sort of fake and socially uncomfortable laugh. I think that’s what it was meant to be all along.

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