Grumps on a rainy day, with bonus head cold

[flemmings]

I think I'd enjoy the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences more if the language wasn't, to my ear, ever so slightly off, for something that's supposed to be about Victorian Englishmen and New Zealander Mary Sues female agents.

A clamor caused him to start, a tiny yelp echoing in the chamber.

When have clamours (and where'd the u go to anyway? Oh right- the American half of the duo took it out) consisted of one tiny yelp? The OED defines it as 'shouting; confused noise'-- something that persists, in any case. 'Urk!' is not clamour.

"Chaos and mayhem comes naturally to you, don't they, Miss Braun?" he seethed.

No, they does not. And while I'm not draconian about using substitutes for 'said' that don't involve speaking (like "'Yes,' he nodded") I'm not at all happy with that 'seethed.'

The scrawling of Books' pen was louder than usual.

Scrawl is a visual word, marking hasty and/or illegible handwriting; it has nothing to do with sound.

Well, and so on and so forth. Maybe it improves. In any case it's either this or Toby Daye being unintelligent in her inimitable fashion, so I'll take the pseudo-Victorians.

Comments

[incandescens]

Now if it had been "the scratching of Books' pen was louder than usual", that would have made sense.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Exactly. There's a certain fan-ficcy lack of focus to the language- failing to remember what the precise word is and using something close to it instead.

[incandescens]

One case might be bad editing or just a single mistake that slipped through, I suppose, but for it to occur consistently...

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Disagreement of number is probably one of those things that only subvocalizers catch easily, but most people manage to provide plural subjects with plural verbs nonetheless. I don't know what causes things like 'if I did have your definition for a sense of adventure.' Some dialect difference maybe. Or simply not thinking.

[incandescens]

There was one Jim Butcher book, one of the Harry Dresden series, where the word "lemur" was used throughout, and I would have expected "lemure" to be more appropriate. That must have slipped through quite a few stages of authoring and editing.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I had to think twice about that. But of course Dresden would be talking about spirits, not monkeys.

Come to that, I think it was Butcher who spelled dais 'dias' throughout the one book of his I read. Makes you wonder how much editing actually happened.

[incandescens]

That does surprise me. Lemur/lemure is... well, if not likely, at least comprehensible and wouldn't set off any spellchecks. But I don't think "dias" is even a proper word.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It's perfectly respectable Spanish. I'm not being facetious, BTW-- I think it's the familiar-even-if-foreign word unconsciously usurping the unfamiliar-even-if-native. I (and every other foreign Japanese speaker) have a similar problem with komodo dragons. ^_^

[incandescens]

(takes a moment to parse that) Oh dear. ;)