Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Op & Or

Op

Op — an operation.

Doctors and nurses often use this word. When time is valuable and lives are on the line, words get chopped to pieces so you can spend more time ‘prepping for op’. But let’s set the medical profession aside for the moment, because I want to talk about the way you use this word already and might not realize it. Let’s talk about ‘black ops’.

A ‘black op’ is a covert operation performed by a government or business outside the ordinary channels of command, with the intent of obfuscating accountability. A well-known example includes the Greenpeace trawler, Rainbow Warrior, which was wrecked while docked in an Auckland, New Zealand harbor in 1985. French DGSE agents were involved in monitoring the Rainbow Warrior and the subsequent bombing of the ship, in an attempt to prevent the Greenpeace protest movement from calling attention to French nuclear test sites in the Marshall Islands. French covert agents rigged two explosives on the Rainbow Warrior: one less powerful one, which was probably intended to convince the crew to evacuate, then another more powerful explosion to sink the ship. Unfortunately, the ten minute time lapse between explosions was enough of a lag for some reporters to return to the boat, retrieve their gear, and investigate the damage. This is how the photographer Fernando Pereira got caught up in the second explosion and drowned, buried in the quickly sinking Rainbow Warrior.

France denied accountability, but New Zealand officers cornered a number of French agents before they could extract themselves. What would normally be a mystery with no satisfying explanation was blown wide open. French agents were arrested and held prison sentences for their involvement. The French Minister of Defense resigned from his post.

This was a very public exposé of a black operation. But even though we know many details, we don’t know what we don’t know. Who is ultimately responsible for the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the death of Fernando Pereira? Whoever it was was using a ‘black budget’, or a budget set aside by a government with no oversight, to fund their operation. Like most intelligence agencies in the interest of their national security, the DGSE makes a portion of their operation intentionally secret. The French government in 2020 maintained a black budge of at least 70 million Euros^{[citation needed]}. With no oversight, it’s possible that the French Minister of Defense might be ignorant of the conspiracy to authorize this bombing. It could be argued that the agents given sentences were doing their duty and following orders. Someone was most responsible for the series of events that led to a national embarrassment, an 8.1 million dollar French settlement to the Greenpeace organization, and the death of Fernando Pereira. But due to the nature of how black ops subvert the usual chain of command, it’s unlikely we’ll ever be certain who that was.

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Or

Or — A word that connects two alternatives, making both true (inclusive or). Or, a word that connects two alternatives, making one of them true (exclusive or). ‘Or’ connects possibilities, equivalencies, or consequences. ‘Or’ is a conjunction. In the Schoolhouse Rocks song, Conjunction Junction, ‘or’ is one of the conductor’s three favorite cars (along with ‘and’ and ‘but’) “hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” It will get you there if you’re very careful.

‘Or’ is about making choices. Or, possibly, about refusing to make choices. When a writer drops ‘or’ into a sentence they sometimes signal for the reader to decide what’s best. When editing, keep an eye out for ‘or’. It’s often an indication the writer is taking the easy way out by not making a decision. Strong writing takes chances and makes choices. Weak writing burdens the reader with a choice of which phrase or sentence might be the best way to write or may be the most interesting option.

It’s the writing equivalent of Buridan’s Ass. According to the thought experiment named after the 14th century philosopher Jean Buridan, a donkey is equally hungry and thirsty and placed equidistant between a bale of hay and a bucket of water. As long as the relationships are perfect, and nothing is changed, the donkey eventually dies of thirst and hunger. In its desire for both, it chooses nothing.

Likewise, an author who passes decisions off to the reader makes their writing more vapid. You don’t need the word ‘or’ to do it, either. You could always waterlog your reader with adjectives until they swim in a murky morass. Mark Twain understood this idea. When one of his students wrote a letter to him, Twain wrote back:

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

Twain was known for his directness, with long passages of dialogue and practical language. But he could set an enchanting scene as well. Here’s a sample passage from Huckleberry Finn. As pragmatic as Huck could be, he could also be quite the romantic.

“Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn’t hear nothing for you couldn’t tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.”

Huck only gives us two adjectives in this paragraph. He says the river looks ‘awful pretty’. This is a deliberate choice toward weak language. Everything in Huckleberry Finn is processed through the eyes of a poor thirteen year old boy from Missouri with a surprising talent for bluntness. So oftentimes Huck tells the reader exactly how he feels instead of hiding behind allusions. In this case, Huck can’t help but be moved by everything he witnesses, and ignores the writer’s motto of ‘show don’t tell’. Describing his environment to the reader isn’t enough; he needs to tell you that everything is pretty, because he’s overwhelmed with the beauty of it all.

The other adjective is hard to spot. It’s the word ‘still’ in “…her powwow shut off and leave the river still again.” Here, Twain is positioning his adjective to feel like a noun. The river becomes still, as if it is transformed.

While Huck has a folksy way of talking, Twain is playing Cyrano de Bergerac hiding in the bushes, filling the paragraph with powerful verbs that anchor the reader to Huck’s raft. ‘Slipping’, ‘belch’, ‘rain’, ‘wink’, and ‘joggle’ all embody a mood without interrupting the flow of narration. Instead of forcing the reader to dig themselves out of a heap of adjectives, Twain draws his reader through the setting through a series of descriptive action verbs.

Finally, at the end of the paragraph, Twain gives us one more reminder that Huck is still a boy. Huck tells us the river gets so quiet that we wouldn’t hear anything, but then doubles back because of course we would hear frogs. And in the little moment of mild embarrassment, Huck becomes a weak narrator and fiddles with ‘or something’. Twain knows that plain language and brief sentences make for the best writing. But he also knows how to construct a sympathetic character. Huck is human, and we recognize him by the way he talks.