Tag: peeves

Today’s Peeve

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I thought for sure I’d mentioned this one before, but a quick search informs me that in fact, I haven’t:

People, be aware that you don’t “fire” arrows.  “Fire” is a term from gunpowder tech, and the days when the person in charge of making a bullet or other projectile come out of the business end of the weapon had to apply literal flame to the powder at the other end.

The proper verb for arrows is “loose” – as in, the arrow is set free from the drawn bowstring.

“Shoot” also works. The verb goes back to Anglo-Saxon scēotan, meaning “to shoot” (it was also applied to the action of throwing a spear, but mostly to bows and arrows – sceotend, literally “shooter”, usually referred to an archer.)  When firearms came along, the old verb carried over to the newest entry in the category of “weapons that work by propelling something through the air towards a target.”

But talking about “firing” arrows will lose you credibility points with every medieval-weaponry geek and archery purist out there – and there are more of them out there than you’d think.

Peeve of the Day

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‘Tis a great day for the peevish . . . grey and clammy and chilly from dawn until dusk.

Perhaps it is the general greyness of the weather that moves me to say the following:

Gentle writer, if you’ve described a character as wearing “a colorful t-shirt”, pray employ your eraser or your delete key, as appropriate, and instead tell the reader what color that t-shirt actually is.

A “colorful” t-shirt is just a vaguely-tinted smudge in the reader’s mental vision.  A red t-shirt, now, or a black t-shirt, or a red-green-yellow-and-purple tie-dyed t-shirt . . . all of those different t-shirts don’t just make specific images in the reader’s head, they also carry information about the person wearing them, and a lot of other cultural data as well.  (We’ve got the vintage hippie, and the emo kid, and the guy who – depending upon his t-shirt’s hastily-glimpsed logo  – is a fan of either the Communist International or the University of Arkansas Razorbacks.  All that, from a t-shirt.)

Specificity is your friend.

Peeve of the Day

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“Glimpse” and “glance” are not the same thing.  Don’t use one when you mean the other.

If you glimpse something, you get a quick look at it:  Jane glimpsed something moving outside the window.

The noun indicates the product of  a quick look at something:  Jane caught a glimpse of something moving outside the window.

If you glance at something, on the other hand, you look at it briefly:  Joe glanced at the window.

Likewise, the noun form refers to the action of looking:  Joe and Jane exchanged meaningful glances.

(What’s lurking outside that window?  I don’t know.  But Jane and Joe don’t seem terribly surprised to find out that it’s there.)

Peeve of the Day

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Look.  Look there.  See that?

Don’t tell me your character “noticed” it.  Not unless it was something already present that he or she picked up upon in passing, or after a casual glance, or after letting an awareness of their surroundings percolate for a while in the back of their mind.

Which is to say, people don’t “notice” boulders rolling downhill towards them, or the sound of massed gunfire just over the next hill (though they might “notice” the sound of an isolated gunshot, provided that they aren’t in one of the lines of work where that particular sound is going to bring them at once to full adrenaline-charged awareness), or a mob of villagers waving torches and pitchforks.

They’re going to notice other, more subtle things: The envelope lying on the desk in front of them is addressed in a familiar hand; the object of their affections is wearing a new perfume; the gnomon on the sundial is cast in bronze in the form of an antique drop-spindle.

Most of the time, though, “saw” is a perfectly good and serviceable word.

Peeve of the Day

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Listen up, people.

A tic is a small involuntary or habitual motion:  Only the nervous tic in his left eyelid betrayed his agitation.

A tick is a bloodsucking arachnid:  After his walk in the woods, he found a deer tick just above the top edge of his right sock.

They mean two different things, and they have two different spellings.

Got it?

Good.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s double-barreled peeve:

It’s not “making due”, it’s “making do,” as in “I don’t have any heavy cream so I’ll just have to make do with half-and-half.”

And it’s not “tow the line”, it’s “toe the line.”  The line in question is not a length of rope that’s being used to pull something along; it’s a line drawn in the sand, or on the sidewalk, or any place else where people are expected to arrange themselves along it in conformation with the wishes of some outside authority.  “In this office, you don’t complain if you want to keep your job; you shut up and you toe the line.”

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve, gentlebeings and fellow wordsmiths, is that pair of weasel words, “somehow” and “something.”

We’ve all used them, at least in our first drafts.  Our hero is engaged in breakneck pursuit of the villain, and his energy is flagging while the villain has wings on his heels (possibly literally, if we’re writing fantasy) . . . but somehow, our hero finds within himself a last reserve of speed and collars the miscreant.  Or possibly our hero is fast overtaking the bad guy, but somehow the bad guy pulls ahead by just enough to swing aboard a passing garbage truck and make his escape.

Later in the same epic, our hero is about to enter his home through the front door after a hard day’s work . . . but something prompts him to go around back and enter through the kitchen door instead, thus allowing him to get the drop on the waiting villain.

This is lazy writing.  It implies causation (thus taking the curse of random coincidence off the turn of events), but it does so without bothering to be specific about anything.  The alert reader — and it never pays to assume your reader is anything but alert — will notice that an actual cause or agent is missing, and will lose a certain amount of faith in the writer because of the omission.

Most of the time, you can jettison the “somehow” and no one will miss it.  The hero puts on a burst of speed and catches the bad guy, or the bad guy pulls ahead and makes his getaway — state it with confidence and your reader will believe you.

As for that stealthy entrance through the kitchen door . . . ditching the “something” isn’t enough to help you there.  For that one, you also need to come up with a reason.  If your hero goes round to the back based on the promptings of his intuition, you had better have established already that he’s an intuitive sort and that his intuition works in his favor more often than not.  Otherwise, you’d better have him noticing that the doormat is no longer lined up squarely with the edges of the front step, or that his cat is not dozing on her favored late-afternoon spot on the living-room window-sill, or that the burnt-out match stub he normally shuts between the door and the doorjamb when he leaves in the morning isn’t there any more (depending upon whether your hero is obsessively tidy, or a cat person, or professionally paranoid.)

The two general rules that apply here:  one, don’t dither; and two, specificity is your friend.

A Couple of Notes on Dialogue

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Note the first:

When you change speakers, you start a new paragraph.  Seriously, they should have taught you this one in grade school, or high school at least.  I’m starting to suspect that it gets neglected because nobody expects most students to ever need to write dialogue.  O tempora, O mores, what is the world coming to, and all that jazz.

Note the second:

When you’re writing a scene with a lot of dialogue, and feel the need to throw in small bits of action and stage business to break up the steady back-and-forth, or to show one speaker’s reaction to something the other person has said, the action bit goes with the dialogue belonging to the speaker who’s doing it.  To illustrate:

Not like this:

“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.  Jane looked at him with disbelief.

“Sure, you do.”

But like this:

“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.

Jane looked at him with disbelief.  “Sure, you do.”

Don’t make your readers have to go through a scene’s dialogue twice in order to be sure of who is doing and saying what. Accidentally confusing your readers is bad.

Confusing your readers on purpose is a different kettle of fish.  I personally don’t know why anyone would want to do it, but some writers do, and those writers have audiences, so if that’s your style, then go for it.  But if you’re going down that path, not confusing anyone by accident becomes more important, rather than less.

Peeve of the Day

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I can’t decide whether this article in the New York Times is more insulting to Mormons (which I am not one of) or to writers of genre fiction (which I am):

Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness

But I do know that after a while, the unquestioned assumption that science fiction, fantasy, and young adult/children’s fiction are inherently lesser literary forms gets really, really old.

It has gotten better over the years, at least a little bit.  With science fiction and fantasy having taken over so much of popular culture, at least it’s no longer the case that reading and writing the stuff is grounds for labeling someone a dangerous weirdo, or a pathetic basement-dweller, or a member of the tinfoil-hat brigade.

No, these days it merely labels us as not serious.

(It’s worse if you’re female.  Being a girl means you start out with negative seriousness points.)

Granted, it’s good to be no longer reflexively sneered at by the likes of the New York Times.  But being reflexively patronized isn’t all that much better.

Peeve of the Day

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Today I am made peevish by people who say things like, “This begs the question…”, when what they actually mean is, “This raises the question….”

Begging the question is one of the logical fallacies; it’s what you get when you start out by assuming as true the thing that you’re trying to prove.  (It’s called petitio principii in Latin; or more informally, in English, circular reasoning.)

An amusing page on logical fallacies can be found here; a more detailed, if less amusing, page is here.