Alphabet Books

I've been reading the so-called "alphabet series" of detective stories by Sue Grafton (born in 1940), "A" is for Alibi (1982), "B" is for Burglar (1985), and so on. I'm up to "F" is for Fugitive (1989). (The author is up to "W" is for Wasted [2013]). Perfect reading for a word nerd, don't you think?

Kinsey Milhone is the name of the detective the stories are about, so the first thing I wondered was, "What kind of name is Kinsey?" I found out in the third book, "C" is for Corpse, that Kinsey was given her mother's maiden name as her first name, a Southern custom. Apparently, Kinsey is an English surname meaning "king's victory."

The second thing I wondered was, "How come detective stories are so fun and easy to read, so much so that I do not expect to run across a word I do not know, like mackle."

My first jobs were in libraries, where I felt completely at home and loved being around books and people who loved books. My next jobs became a career, if you can call it that, at high-tech companies for which I wrote ads and direct mail about oscilloscopes, printers, and the like. There I felt like a round peg trying to smoosh myself into a square hole.

Anyway, what I learned, as a writer of this promotional prose, is that you want to aim for a reader at sixth-grade level with an unlikely specialty in electrical engineering. Then you are sure to be read and understood.

"Aha!" thought I, mulling all this over, writers of detective stories know about this sixth-grade reading level too. I'll bet that if you took the top ten books of fiction on the New York Times Bestseller List and ran them through the sixth-grade word filter, you would not find ten words above sixth grade reading level.

So what gives with mackle? I looked it up in accordance with Rule No. 1: Look up every word you don't know.

Mackle means "a blurred or double impression in printing" and comes to us from the Latin macula, which means spot, by way of the French macule, in the late sixteenth century.