Chicanery

CHICANE, n. I’ve been reading a lot of urban planning blogs. It’s a coping mechanism; the world at large is on fire, but sometimes individual cities and towns are still doing right by their residents—making safer, more accessible crosswalks (my town did this!), helping people get ebikes, planting sponge parks, putting up bollards, that sort of thing. It is possible to make the world better!

One of the things towns can do to slow motorists and make safer streets is to add “chicanes,” an obstruction or narrowing of the road, usually one that forces drivers to navigate a shallow S-curve, the idea being that they will slow down and pay attention as they do so. This word came to urban planning from auto racing—some racetracks have these tricky curves as a feature.

But before that, it came from the French verb “chicaner,” which you might recognize as a relative of English “chicanery,” or trickery. The verb means to quibble, to contest for bad reasons, to create difficulties, to trick, or, in an older sense, to offer narrow passage through a series of obstacles. It probably formed by association with the verb “ricaner” (to laugh mockingly, to jeer). The Trésor de la langue française says the sound “tšikk” expresses smallness, which is very cute to me, and cites the word “chicot” (a stump or a piece of wood, and by extension a small remaining piece of anything).

“Chicanery” in English has a particular association with legal or political trickery, and legal proceedings and politics do both often have the feeling of threading an obstacle course. Chicanery is pejorative, which is why I was mildly surprised to see the word “chicane” in the context of “a good thing that we should add to our city streets.” But it makes sense now: sometimes it’s better for things to move slowly. If the best way we can get drivers to pay attention is by tricking them, then I’m all for chicanery.

I've been pretty deep in editing and drafting my own writing and thus haven't read much recently, but here's a little small-r romance for you:

Don’t Drag This Out (bi cis m/nonbinary, contemporary) by Emery Lee. Thomas Mori is a drag artist named Mia Sake, and one night when she’s performing as sexy Totoro, she accidentally rocks Brian Ramirez’s world. He discovers bisexuality, she shows him New York City, and both of them gradually discover talking about their feelings. This is very much “new adult”—the characters are twenty-one or so—and sometimes I felt like their worried mother, but perhaps you’re younger and/or cooler than me and this book will be just right for you. Ebook purchased from itch.io.

Nobody’s Bargain (bi m/het f, both cis, contemporary, erotic) by Kali Decker. In this novella, Hitha, a divorced Indian-American journalist recovering from the trauma of her abusive marriage, finds Ren, a washed-up white rockstar recovering from a whole host of mental health and addiction troubles, in a dive bar in small-town Kentucky (KENTUCKY MENTIONED!) and they have several days of mindblowing sex and emotional revelations. He’s twenty years older than her and too drunk to get hard when they first have sex and it’s gorgeous. The prose and characterization in this are perfect. Ebook purchased from Kobo.

And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I’ve been reading These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs, an epic sci-fi revenge quest that stars a hot lesbian hacker on the run with her even hotter girlfriend, a brooding ex-assassin with a bionic arm. I haven’t finished it yet, but it also contains a vicious bloodthirsty monster of a woman who is outwardly beautiful and obviously very stylish and powerful, and therefore I can confidently recommend it. I am a simple creature; I love a villainess.

That's all for this time. I'll be back in your inbox on July 13.