It would not be wonderful

WONDERFUL, adj. Everyone on my corner of the internet has been discussing this 2015 academic article, “They Can’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities” by Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel, in which English majors are asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and then explain them aloud. It’s a fascinating article, if an alarming and depressing one (no shortage of those in the world). Mainly what I took from it is that the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House are fucking great.

This sentence in particular struck me:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

It’s the usage of “wonderful” I love. Bleak House was published in 1853, and back then “wonderful” still meant something that would fill you with wonder. London is so muddy, per Dickens, that it would not be astonishing to meet a Megalosaurus there.

In the intervening years, “wonderful” has undergone a linguistic process called “semantic bleaching,” where a word's original definition weakens, usually because people have taken up using it as an intensifier. Awesome went through this, and so did great and many others. When I encounter "wonderful" these days, my first understanding is always something along the lines of "very good"—but the Bleak House sentence doesn't really make sense, understood that way.

(Well. It would not be very good to meet a dinosaur in the street. Do you see that thing up there? No thank you.

Regarding the image above, E. H. Lupton pointed out to me on Bluesky that in the mid-19th century when Dickens was writing, people thought Megalosaurus was a quadruped, like in the sculpture, so “waddling like an elephantine lizard” is Dickens paying careful attention to the science of his time. Now we think Megalosaurus was bipedal, so not much like an elephant or a lizard, but still a great description.)

Anyway, the "it would not be wonderful" sentence relies on the surprise inherent to "wonderful" as in "fills you with wonder." London is so muddy that you wouldn't be surprised to meet a Megalosaurus. What I've just written is a much worse sentence, but this is the work of reading: you take in Dickens, you pick it apart, you kludge it back together the best you can, then you evaluate the difference between your bad version and the original, and it fills you with wonder.

In small-r romance, here's what I've read lately:

Enemies with Benefits (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Roxie Noir. With the caveat that the premise is more like rivals with benefits—I reserve “enemies” for characters who’ve tried to kill each other—this contemporary is a ton of fun. Violet and Eli grew up in the small town in Virginia as ultra-competitive academic rivals who were obsessed with each other. After a decade apart—he left town, she didn’t—they find themselves thrust together as coworkers at a wedding venue, once again in competition for a cash bonus awarded to the most valuable employee. The banter is great, the chemistry is hot, there’s an external conflict that forces them to work out whether they really trust each other, I had a great time. Does a man who doesn’t password-lock his phone and yet still uses it to take naked photos of his partners really deserve hero status in this day and age? No, but he worked hard enough to fix it that I eventually forgave him. Indie published, free download from Amazon in 2025. (This one's always free, I think.)

Wild Pitch (m/f, both cis and bisexual, contemporary) by Cat Giraldo. This is a baseball romance. She’s a pitcher, he’s a catcher, I barely know what any of this means, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Sierra Ramirez is the first woman to play in the majors, and Mateo Reyes is a star athlete she’s idolized her whole life. He helps her find acceptance in the league and unlock her potential. They work amazingly well together on the field, and it would be reckless to risk her career for a romance, but the two of them are so attracted to each other that they can’t resist. Loved that Sierra has two moms (they met playing softball) and a big, loving extended family and Mateo has a big, loving extended family with some real complicated relationships. She's Latina and he's Filipino. Most importantly, they’re both bi (yesss) and it’s femdom (yessssssss). Indie published, free download from Amazon in 2024.

In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read a fantasy novel (Rebel Blade by Davinia Evans), a comic thriller (Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene), and two volumes of poetry (The Crown Ain't Worth Much and A Fortune for Your Disaster, both by Hanif Abdurraqib), all of which were great, but we hosted our kid's entire daycare class—so many three year olds plus their parents and siblings and teachers—for a potluck yesterday, and I am still very tired. So that's all for this time, and I'll be back in your inbox on June (!) first.