cimorene

Journeying through Golden age detective novels, most of the time the plots have furnished my major complaints, but this time I've found someone who has a wildly wrong idea of how hyphens work.

It's not often that terrible punctuation is the biggest problem in a published novel! Given that publishers have editors and proofreaders, perhaps the real surprise is that it happens as often as it does. But still, it's been quite a while since I've run into it.

And regardless, this George Bellairs is special. Hyphen errors aren't all that rare, but I've never seen someone so determined to use them as this. It's like he's bought a pack of a thousand and they're going to spoil if he doesn't use them up quickly.

These are all from one chapter.

As Littlejohn started-up Haworth’s car,

took the rebuke lying-down,

Just before the ironmaster re-entered, Littlejohn heard the front-door open and slam.

few hundred poundsworth, turned-out by a first-class maker!

On the top of a massive secretaire lay a gun-case,

"It’s just damned nonsense going-on with it.”

( Read more... )

I actually started composing an Angry PSA post about how COMMAS OBVIOUSLY DON'T WORK LIKE THAT¹ YOU FOOLS before it occurred to me that I might need to take a chill pill.

Prescription: Take new Diana Wynne Jones book^&hearts!!!, comfort jewelry, and thermos of chocolate café au lait to Boring Lecture By Hot Teacher^TM tonight. Bake a chocolate cake when I get home.

In more cheerful news I just found out that I:Scintilla, this industrial-metal-electronica band I recently discovered that I dig even though their promo pictures (and to a lesser extent their lyrics XD) are all "Goth Teenies Who Just Discovered MySpace", is releasing a new album soon. I've been playing this track at least like three times a day for the past month or so:

1. Like this: Bones always pulled this - his, 'I don't kiss and tell' routine, and Jim was pretty tired of it. Two comma fails in one sentence? It's like this sentence structure was created just to irritate me! :[

...and it occurred to me that I now have a tie for favorite epithet I've ever read! That doesn't happen often. I mean usually there's ONE most horrifying fictional occurrence (example: child rape, still the top of The Horrifying Things Scale) or ONE hilarious epithet. Shocking things tend to blow whatever previously-most-shocking thing came before them out of the water, instead of leaping into a dead heat.

Poll #893 Funniest Epithet

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

View Respondents

Which of my two favorite epithets is funniest?

View Answers

The average-sized apartment for a man who lives alone
3 (20.0%)

The red-haired athletic tennis player with a permanent bandage as a facial accessory
12 (80.0%)

Indeed those are funny but this write-in is funnier:

View Answers

Speaking of The Horrifying Things Scale, I still place penis shrapnel at a mere 9/10 while child rape takes the cake at 10/10, but until recently I'd read three child rape stories and only one Penis Shrapnel Story, because, really, penis shrapnel: it's not the kind of thing you just come up with. But as of two days ago I've now had to say that I have read two penis shrapnel stories. Admittedly, there was no shrapnel, but there was a surprise!penis disfigurement involving Metal In A Way That Penises Aren't Meant To Involve Metal. And I think that, morally, that has to be grouped with Penis Shrapnel.

Dear Producers of Engrish,

There's a big difference between a "bootie" and a "booty", and only one of them is a shoe. (The first one.) The second one is either a prize, or someone's ass.

Thanks for your attention to this matter,
Cim

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Tom Jones - Sex Bomb

Dear Brother Windows,

When I said that I prefer the Oxford comma and that there is debate about whether it should be used or not, the "debate" thing was an indication that in fact, neither way is definitively correct or incorrect. Both usages coexist. They compete. So an appropriate response to "I would use it" is not "You'd be wrong"; the whole point is that neither way is actually wrong. Also, I'm pretty sure that no non-native speaker of English is going to correctly correct my punctuation, ever. It's certainly never happened before. I was affectionately known as Grammar Cop within the family when I was a wee one with reason.

Lovingly but admittedly somewhat snootily,
Cim

ETA: On the subject of grammar, The Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect Passive.

Current Mood: working
Current Music: Billie Holiday - No Good Man

Dear Badthor,

The word "holiday" is just a noun, not the name of a religious holiday, and should not be capitalised except within a title or on a holiday card.

WRONG: "I'll try to make it home for the Holidays."
RIGHT: "I'll try to make it home for Rosh Hashannah"/ "I'll try to make it home for the holidays."
RIGHT: Happy Holidays! HAPPY HOLIDAYS! (you can capitalise your holiday card text however you like)
WRONG: hApPY hOlIdAys! (except like that)

No ~~LoVe~~ ~~Love~~ love,
Cim

Dear Plebe,

A "wall" is a dividing structure. That paper that you glue all over it is called "wallpaper", and so are large images intended to be used as backgrounds on your computer sometimes (get it? it's an analogy!). We would have called those images "wall" except when they were handing out terms, we discovered that one was already taken and meant something completely different!

More irritation than you can probably comprehend,
Cim

Dear non-native speakers,

Those prepositions can really be a bitch. I know, right? Different verbs take different ones with absolutely no logic to it, really! You just have to learn them by rote, basically. Your ear can't tell you shit. That's why you should get a beta reader - one who knows what they're doing. Oh, and you should probably get them to beta the headers too. I can't be the only one who back-buttons if the headers are full of mistakes.

Love,
Cim

Dear betas of non-native speakers:

Ha, ha. Very funny. Now tell them the RIGHT way.

No love,
Cim

Current Mood: grumpy

Dear Badthors,

Please remember that commas don't go between nouns and the adjectives describing them!

Thank You,
Cim

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Queen - Play the Game

Even if you're awesome, if you're a non-native speaker you need a beta. wax_jism is more fluent than probably 98% of native speakers of English - I probably wouldn't have shacked up with her otherwise! - but she still makes mistakes.

Which animal is cooler? No, there's no purpose to this.

[Poll #1290613]

hermit crab

Miami 1988: as a kid I preferred hermit crabs to alligators.

gotz hung up

A random bit of cooking advice for the day! If you like to use uncooked olive oil - for example, as a salad dressing, or when making sauces for use on pasta or anything that doesn't involve frying things in it - it is well worth the money to buy a more expensive bottle for dressings/sauces and a cheaper one for cooking. In fact, I don't use extra virgin for cooking because someone or other, probably isilya (who knows everything), told me you're not supposed to.

But anyway, sometimes wax_jism will buy store brand olive oil and if I have only a bottle of that in the house when I'm preparing uncooked pesto dressing for pasta, I use a teaspoon of lemon juice, a tablespoon or two of pesto paste and a few tablespoons of water to thin it out with only a few drips (half-teaspoon maybe?) of the cheap olive oil, because if you end up with a bite of pasta coated mostly in cheap olive oil, it will taste bitter and... kind of disgusting.

My mother says the best she can buy in the grocery store is Colavita, which is a step up from Bertolli according to her, and isilya recommends several yuppie brands that I've never even heard of, but Bertolli is the best you can get around here and it's easily good enough to make a difference. With Bertolli, the dressing has a few tablespoons of pesto paste, a few tablespoons of olive oil, a dribble of water and a teaspoon or two of lemon juice. It actually tastes good.

Current Music: Alanis Morissette - Hands Clean [Acoustic]

If you use a semi-colon incorrectly where there should have been a comma I will immediately back-button even if your story has been so far literate, even if it is not actually bad, and even though if in the same place you were meant to use a semi-colon and instead spliced a comma I would let it slide.

I can ride with the idea that semi-colons, belonging entirely to the realm of written language, are simply foreign to some people and that they are ignorant of them or have given up on them, and in a way I can respect that; after all, a brilliantly gifted storyteller and orator could (theoretically) be ignorant of semi-colons since they don't affect composition, which makes them, in a certain sense... decorative.

But if you're going to go for the semi-colon, okay, if you're going to attempt it, you'd better damn well have it down. If you're not sure, just forget it. Use a period or a comma or a rephrase or... you know. Get by. For the love of little green boxes, why would you make the semi-colon a regular part of your usage if you don't know how to use it? It's not like it's all that difficult. It shouldn't be possible to read and write it as a matter of course and remain ignorant or confused. This isn't Fizzbin. It isn't brain surgery. The rules don't change according to the time of month. They're actually somewhat flexible. They just don't allow, for example, a semi-colon to separate a noun from the gerund phrase (or any adjectival phrase) modifying it. As an orator, you'd lead people to believe you had forgotten your lines or had an itch in your throat if you added a semi-colon-weight pause in such a location, too.

Look at it this way: it's better to cannonball into the pool than to attempt a jack-knife dive and splat on your face.

It shouldn't have to be said, but unless you are a lolcat:

SINGULAR SUBJECT, SINGULAR VERB. PLURAL SUBJECT, PLURAL VERB.

...And if you are a lolcat, you should not be translatin at all.

Current Mood: stressed

Dear Mediocre Norwegian Translator (a step up from Norwegian Moron),

"Descry" and "describe" are not the same.

Thank you,
Cim

Current Mood: amused

Dear World,

"Happen to" and "occur to" are not the same thing.

Love,
Cim

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Alicia Keys - Superwoman

Nice. In the four sentences of plot summary on the back of the St Trinian's dvd, they manage a punctuation error. Proofreading: it is your friend.

Current Mood: jubilant

You know, any story that starts with a black man from LA in the 1970's uttering the phrase "You need a holiday"...

should be KILLED WITH FIRE.

Current Mood: aggravated

I've been mulling over what to write, despite the fact that I haven't written anything since last December, I think. I've got two half-finished novels on my hands, one unwritten novel, and one novel in desperate need of revision. I'm thinking of finishing up the SGA one or changing all the names in the other one, since it's pretty much an original novel anyway, but it's hard to see how to categorise the high fantasy gay teen romance it then turns into.

My dad wants me to try to revise the managerslash novel I wrote in 2004 and sell it because he operates from the theory that no sale is a bad sale (which is easy to say when you keep publishing in Asimov's, but although I had a lot of fun with the managerslash, I don't expect to gain a lot of acclaim or even, quite likely, any money from it; besides which it will take a near-total rewrite before I'm willing to risk it being put into print). I also actually have a somewhat developed YA idea that came to me a few months ago that doesn't have any gay sex whatsoever. The exciting part is that despite that fact, I'm still maintaining an intent to write it. We'll see about all that.

This leaves aside the other things I've been planning to get into, like another episode of the (Arashi) Just Like Verse, for one. That might make a good writing exercise to get back into the swing, since it's bound to be short. While I'm on the subject of the term "Verse", let me just add something. Let me add... ( A RANT ABOUT THE TERMS 'AU' AND 'VERSE'. )

Current Mood: annoyed

I was just going to rant and call you names but then I thought I'd let the Oxford English dictionary speak for me.

discreet

/diskreet/

• adjective (discreeter, discreetest) careful not to attract attention or give offence.

— DERIVATIVES discreetly adverb.

— USAGE The words discrete and discreet are often confused. Discrete means ‘separate’ (a discrete unit), while discreet means ‘careful and prudent’.

— ORIGIN Old French discret, from Latin discretus ‘separate’.

discrete

/diskreet/

• adjective individually separate and distinct.

— DERIVATIVES discretely adverb discreteness noun.

— ORIGIN Latin discretus ‘separate’: compare with DISCREET.

OKAY? OKAY.

Next person to use 'discrete' when they're talking about secrecy of love affairs gets deleted from the internet!

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: 5678s - The Barracuda

Dear pretentious teenies,

It's probably a good idea, when using the stylistic tricks with which you hope to awe your audience, to either draw said audience in first and then sneak up on them with your ground-breaking unorthodoxy, or to hammer them over the head at the very start and hope they'll be too stunned and confused to back-button. If you strike an intermediate quantity of pretension, the odds are you will succeed in passing the limits of what the reader will accept before the story has had a chance to rack up any brownie points without impressing them enough for curiosity or interest to overcome the negative effect of the pretentious styling. This could result in your audience being limited, as soon as the first paragraph, to those people who, through indiscriminate or backward taste, like pretension.

This isn't to suggest that you should entirely camouflage what you may consider an essential part of your personality, or a laudable genius for florid adjectives, ungrammatical or semantically confused constructions, or needlessly incoherent points of view. You might just consider toning it down (or up) right at the beginning, without reducing the stylistic peculiarites of the piece as a whole. Many readers may be willing or even eager to be sucked in to a piece of badfic and read all the way to the end, no matter how poor they judge it, and find themselves sadly excluded from perusal of yours merely through a slight slip-up in your handling of pretentiousness. A little sensitivity in those crucial opening sentences and scenes could go a long way.

Yours hopefully,
cim

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Joy Division - Heart and Soul

"~" is not a punctuation mark in English. Kill it. With fire.

Current Mood: aggravated

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Cimorene

May 2025

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with writing: style guide

Hyphen hyperactivity

Another vocabulary PSA illustrated by Wax

grammar peevishness: bug or feature or symptom of missing chocolate? (um, plus some music)

Wax and I got onto the subject of bad epithets...

>.@

I'll just say this, never get between these people when drink has been taken

Notes to People Who Posted Recently on a Certain Fic Community

rookie mistake

(no subject)

PSA

pardon the constant rage-addled spam but

purportedly competent adults type the darnedest things

i'd rather something exciting occurred to me than happened to me, personally.

maybe commas really are that hard

BURN

how not to write american english

writing waffling and a rant about aus and verses

DEAR FANDOM

without badfic, there's a lot less to read.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: