Tag: peeves

Peeves of the Day

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Because deadlines make me peevish.

One:  The past tense of tread is trod.  Not treaded — trod.

Two:  Even in its extended sense of “to inflict great damage,” decimate applies to countable things, like people, not to solid and singular things, like buildings.  (In the strict sense, decimate refers to the old Roman punishment meted out when an entire military unit had done something disgraceful, like mutiny — lots were drawn, and one man in every ten was clubbed or stoned to death by his fellow-soldiers.)

Three:  And the past tense of shine is shone.

So there.

Peeve of the Day

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If you’re writing a story in the past tense — as most of us do — then events and actions that took place in the past of the story go into the past perfect tense.  You know, the one with all the “haves” and “hads” in it.

If you’re writing a story in the present tense — not so common, but it happens sometimes — then you can put past events and actions into the simple past tense.

(What about all the verbs with all the “mights” and “shoulds” and “oughts” and stuff in them?  Those are the so-called modal verbs, the ones that are principally responsible for the observation that looked at one way, English only has two verb tenses, but looked at another way, it has roughly thirty-odd.  If you feel uncertain about dealing with them, your best bet is probably to find yourself a beta reader with a really good feel for language and prose style and run everything past him or her.)

The Fire in Fantasy Rant

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In honor of the first day of December, a few words on a subject near to my heart (or to my chilly feet and fingers, anyhow):

One of the persistent errors of cheap genre fantasy (along with horses that are really motorcycles and ships that have late 19th-century rigging and construction in an early-medieval environment) is a complete unawareness of how complicated a process heating with wood actually is.  The way fantasy characters build and light fires in the mere blink of a subordinate clause, you’d think they were using gas logs or an electric space heater.  What’s worse, once the fire is going nobody pays it a bit of attention thereafter.

Well, the first twelve years we lived in our current house, we heated it by means of a wood-burning furnace lurking like Moloch down in the basement, and I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work that way.  Even with the aid of matches and butane-powered firestarters and similar modern innovations, building a fire is still a fiddly process, involving a lot of messing around with tinder and kindling and carefully putting two or three bigger sticks on top of the resulting tiny blaze — which just went out, so you have to start over with the tinder and kindling and then the two or three bigger sticks again — and then you have to keep the smaller sticks going until the bigger ones catch fire, and then you can start putting on some serious logs and if you’re careful and put the structure together right the first time the logs won’t crush the whole thing and snuff it out — and God help you if you’ve got wet or green wood, because then the whole process is going to take twice as long and put out only half as much heat.

And once the fire’s actually going you have to keep feeding it more logs at regular intervals, and — especially in an open fireplace — keep rearranging the logs so that they’ll burn better, not to mention periodically clearing out the ashes. (Which in a pre-modern society would be saved for soapmaking and other uses, but which these days are a pure nuisance to get rid of.)

A wizard with a reliable fire-starting spell could probably eat for free at any kitchen table in the kingdom.  Especially if he had a reliable flea-and-bedbug-eradicator in his other pocket.

Peeve of the Day

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“What’s today’s peeve, Dr. Doyle?” asks the Useful Sockpuppet.

“Proper dialogue punctuation,” I reply.  “You will have noted, I presume, that your line just now ended in a question mark, followed by a quotation mark, followed by the verb — in this case, ‘asks’ — in lower case?”

“Um . . . yeah,” says the Useful Sockpuppet.

“And you will have further noticed that your next line of dialogue does not end with a period, but with a comma?”

“I guess so.”

“Sockpuppet, you have eyes — I sewed the buttons on myself.  It ends with a comma, followed by a quotation mark, followed by the verb in lower case.  Capisce?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the Useful Sockpuppet.

“Then for the love of literacy, Sockpuppet — next time, get it right.“

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

I know you’ve heard this one before.  And I concede right now that there’s no logical reason why “already” should be spelled as one word with a single “l”, while “all right” is two words and a double “l”.

Language isn’t consistent, okay?  It’s in a constant state of change, and not all the bits of it change at the same rate.  At some time in the future, “all right” may well have finished mutating into the single-word, single-“l” form — but that time is not now.

There.  I’ve got that off my chest, so it’s back to the word mines.

Word Peeve of the Day

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Today’s word peeve (I can’t help it; deadlines make me peevish): a couple of not-exactly-homonyms, affect and effect.

People mix these up a lot, and it’s not really surprising.  They look exactly alike except for that initial vowel, and in spoken English the difference between those unstressed vowels becomes even more obscured.  Just to add another layer of confusion to the vocabulary cake, each of them can function both as a verb and as a noun.

It works like this:

Effect has its ancestry in the Latin verb facere, meaning to make or do or bring about (plus a host of related extended meanings), plus the Latin prefix ex-, meaning from or out of (among other related things.)

Effect-the-noun, accordingly, is something that is made or done or brought about:  One effect of the hurricane was a prolonged power outage.

Effect-the-verb is less common; it means to cause or bring about something:  The new mayor hopes to effect some changes in local disaster response policy.

Affect also goes back to that same Latin verb facere, this time with the prefix ad-, meaning to or toward.

Affect-the-verb is the more common one here; it means to do something or cause something to happen to someone or something else:  The hurricane will affect the east coast from Maine to the Carolinas.

Affect-the-noun is the least common of the lot; it’s mostly used in psychiatry and related disciplines, and refers to the outward manifestation of someone’s inward state.  A person who isn’t showing much by way of such outward manifestation has a flat affect — his/her affect, in this case, is the behavior that he/she is turning toward the world/the observer.  Most of the time you won’t need to worry about this one.

(As you probably have guessed, I’ve got hurricanes on the mind right now.  I’m not in the storm’s current path, but I know people who are.)

Fatal Verbs

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There are a couple of verbs — both of them used at times for dialogue attribution — which might as well be specialists in character assassination.

One (and I have Teresa Nielsen Hayden to thank for the tip) is “whined.”  As soon as a character whines something, he or she loses the respect of the reader.  Heroes don’t whine.  Strong villains don’t whine, either.  If you want your readers to dislike some character, all you need to do is hint that the person might have whined at some point.

The other verb is “to smirk.”  Only smug, self-satisfied characters smirk.  Likeable characters don’t. A smirk is not a smile; nor is it a grimace; and it doesn’t substitute for either one of them.

(I’ve been fighting that fight for going on four decades now.  I’m nothing if not persevering about these things.)

Cranky Thought for the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Most science fiction and fantasy authors aren’t interested in writing what used to be called (and may still be called, for all I know) “teen problem novels.” It’s okay, apparently, to have a young adult protagonist who is in some way different, provided that the difference is what the book is about. There has to be angst, and discrimination, and Dealing With Issues† — the non-default protagonist is not allowed to have a story that isn’t all about his or her non-default qualities.

Or, to put it a bit more snarkily, the non-default character is not allowed to enjoy his or her life, or go on adventures, or have fun. If science fiction and fantasy are part of the literature of escape, then readers who are in one way or another not default-normal are constantly being told by the gatekeepers of young adult fiction that freedom is for other people, not for them.

Which is — just in case anybody was in any doubt as to my opinion on the matter — bad.

†Like Dancing With Wolves, only not as much fun.

Homonym of the Week

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Because I’ve been bumping into this one all over the place lately.

Things that are discreet are quiet, unobtrusive, not-noticed, and don’t draw attention to themselves.  “Smith made discreet inquiries into Jones’s financial history.”

Things that are discrete are separate and distinct from each other.  “Jones set up discrete budgetary categories for his various expenditures.”

Got that?

Good.

 

The Floating Eyeball Problem

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Actually, it’s not just floating eyeballs.  It’s disassociated body parts in general.  Eyes are possibly the most common offenders — “her eyes darted around the room,” “his eyes fell to the floor,” and so on — but just about any part of the external anatomy can suddenly start wandering around and acting on its own.  (When this happens in the romance and erotica genres, the results can be . . . disconcerting, to say the least.)  At least in my opinion, if the word “eyes” can be replaced by “gaze” without changing the meaning of the sentence, then it damned well should be.

Likewise, if the whole sentence could just as easily be phrased, “he/she looked at whatever-it-was”, then for heaven’s sake, write it that way.

Disassociated body parts turn up in all sorts of writing, but the problem is most acute, and most dangerous, in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  Why?  Because those are the genres in which metaphor becomes reified, and in which — for example — detachable and/or self-propelled eyeballs are not outside the realm of possibility.

(I can think of at least three fantasy/science fiction examples right off the top of my head, and I’ll bet you can, too.)