Hello, Word Suitcase readers! This newsletter normally arrives in your inbox on Sunday, which today is not. In theory it also comes every two weeks. I meant to send this last weekend, but our household was struck by back-to-back illnesses, the second of which was covid. We’re recovering, but I think this will be the only newsletter this month.
SNIT, n. I wanted to write a character describing someone else as “in a snit,” and then I thought to myself, as I do three hundred times per page while writing fiction set in 1820s Paris, “Is this a weird Americanism?”
Yeah. It totally is.
Granted, sometimes a word being a weird Americanism isn’t enough to stop me from using it. It’s my novel, and I am a weird American, after all. In the end, I backed off “snit,” which means “a fit of temper, a bad mood,” and dates from 1939. The first recorded use is in the play Kiss the Boys Goodbye by Clare Boothe Luce, spoken by a character from the South. Other than that, nobody seems to have any idea where it came from. It might be onomatopoeia; “snit” sounds like “fit” and also like “snotty,” which we associate with rude behavior and also crying.
“Snit” is also the name for another, even weirder Americanism, a cultural tradition particular to the upper Midwest. Should you find yourself out for brunch in Minnesota or Wisconsin and ordering a Bloody Mary—a cocktail made of vodka, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, and various other flavorings—you might be served a small glass of beer alongside it. This little beer is a “snit,” etymology unknown, but supposedly the tradition originates in Midwesterners making Bloody Marys with beer during a vodka shortage in the 1950s and not wanting to waste the extra beer, which is a very Midwestern attitude. I lived in Wisconsin for five years and I don’t think I ever heard anyone use the word “snit,” which I now count as a great personal tragedy. However, I can confirm that a brunch place I used to go does still serve Bloody Marys with a beer on the side. This was baffling to me at the time and remains so. (Don’t worry, though, I’m not in a snit about it.)
Due to living in plague times, I haven’t read very much lately. Apologies! In small-r romance, it’s just this one little gem:
Seure the Tempered (cis f/nb, fantasy, novella) by Rien Grey. Like the other works in this sapphic, Arthurian-legend-inspired series, this is lushly written and blisteringly hot. This particular entry involves a magic, traveling library, a sorceress who can never leave it, and a curse broken by kinky sex. I love the exploration of gender, sexuality, and neurodivergence—Seure is agender, ace, and autistic, but they’re able to break this particular curse in a way that suits them and the sorceress they rescue, thanks to their calm and clever temperament. The colorful, intricate prose carries so much brilliance, and I look forward to the rest of the series.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, which is a wild, fast-paced space opera that takes the common sci-fi notion that humans would be at the mercy of any aliens we encountered, due to their superior strength and technology, and flips it on its head. Here, in space, humans are monsters: huge, fast, strong, aggressive, warlike, and with far too many teeth. The internet sometimes calls this trope “Humans Are Space Orcs,” and Tesh clearly has fun with that. Kyr, the main character, really is a monster when we meet her: a profoundly unlikeable young woman who has been shaped by the fascist death cult in which she was raised, an outpost called Gaea Station where a remnant of humanity lives after the destruction of Earth. Kyr does not know she is a monster, or that nobody, not even her friends, likes her. She thinks she is a hero, or destined to be one, because she excels at martial training. She expects to be assigned to combat. When her assignment comes down instead as “Nursery”—the fascist death cult’s rape-and-forced-birth section, where Kyr is supposed to spend the next 20 years pregnant by any man who wants her, making babies who will then be passed off to someone else to raise—her world falls apart and she begins to question things for the first time in her life. Instead of going to Nursery, Kyr steals a spaceship, an alien prisoner, and Gaea Station’s other most fucked-up mean, violent queer kid—who is, delightfully, her opposite: a computer geek with no aptitude for exercise—and runs the hell away. But it turns out that when you’ve been shaped by a traumatizing dystopia, you carry that inside you. Running away doesn’t change Kyr, at least not at first. Slowly—but over the course of many breathlessly compelling action sequences—she becomes a better version of herself, and it is so satisfying to read. There’s also a sweet, put-upon nonbinary alien, a freaky god machine, and a supporting cast of wonderful characters who shine as Kyr starts to notice that other people matter.
That’s all for this one. I wish you all better health than we’re having, and I hope to be back in your inbox in October!