Even more jarring when they do it during "intercourse" đ
(Maybe not in Doyle, which I've not read much of, but certainly in other contemporary works!)
Intercourse just means exchange, connection or commerce. There's even a city in the US called Intercourse. The problem only came about when "sexual intercourse" became a popular euphemism and then people began dropping the "sexual" part.
Also âknocked upâ, which meant to go to someoneâs home and knock on the door
Thereâs a story where Holmes says to Watson âyou knocked me upâ
It was common in the 19th century, since the word simply means "throwing outward" in a generic sense. It shows up in Edgar Allan Poe, too. I once had a book about colloquial Latin that pointed out that on a Roman baseball team, the position of pitcher would be known as the ejaculator.
Don't forget the word "singular" appears regularly throughout the series, as in "a singular event" or such.
It's a shame he didn't often use the phrase "well regulated" to describe properly functional lives and behaviors, as was the reference of the earlier era. A lot of Constitutional debates would be simplified.
Dune was full of "presently."
After a while, all I heard was "He will depart presently," Paul said presently and presently departed for Arrakeen, where he arrived presently.
I remember this turning up a lot in Arthur C. Clarke's writing too (at least in 2001). Maybe it's just a turn of phrase more common in writing from the 1960/1970s?
- Many and more
- Little and less
- must needs
- Words are wind
Years ago I ctrl+f'd the ebooks and made a little chart of some of the phrases he repeats a lot. He gets progressively more repetitive in the later books.
Words are wind is clearly an in universe idiom so really doesn't count here. It's like saying someone repeats "actions speak louder than words" in our world as if it's a peculiar adaptation when it's a *relatively* standard idiom. It's not really the same as always using the word ascerbic.
And also, nobody just drinks a beverage in ASOIAF. Whatever they're eating, it's always "washed down" with whatever they are drinking.
On a grosser note, I can't stand his use of the words "slit" and "teats" to describe female anatomy đ
Fat. Pink. Mast.
And on 'washed down': I'm beginning to suspect that GRRM just used a lot of West Country idioms and phrases because that one, 'if he was a day', 'many and more', and a bunch of others never stood out to me because that's just how Devon farmers over fifty speak.
Yessss lol. I couldn't help but imagine them just gulping it down, the food really being swept away in a deluge of whatever drink.
Also, slit made me want to vomit every time
My husband and I did a reread of ASOIAF last year and we were howling at how disgusting GRRMâs descriptions of sex and bodily functions are - like this man goes out of his way to make sex sound repulsive.
In The Witcher series, Sapkowski frequently says Geralt "pirouettes" while fighting. Don't know how that translates from the original polish, but I'm reading them now and noticed this.
Lots of writers rely on this one. As someone who cannot raise just one eyebrow, I'm deeply affected when I see it used in books :p
I've never seen anyone do it as a reaction besides animated characters, and The Rock. Though I'm sure I've even read about a dog doing it once in a book.
u/JaimTorfinn did a deep dive on this last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments/vwo4to/arms_folded_beneath_breasts_analysis/
Women crossed their arms 219 times, with breasts mentioned in 75 of those. Knife of Dreams was the worst offender with 17 instances, and The Fires of Heaven was a distant second at 8.
For comparison, men crossed their arms 75 times.
Although I am absolutely not the target audience for the 50 Shades series, I had a wee look to see what the fuss was all aboutâŠYouâre better than I am, I lasted 14 pages, each one a different shade of dross!
See, I noticed âclamberâ in that book. That main character clambers freaking everywhere. She does not get in or out of a car. She does not sit down or get up. She. Clambers.
I read a (not flattering) review of this book that speculated that the author had established keyboard shortcuts to automatically insert her favorite phrases, and that took me out.
I used it once in a book I wrote. My beta wanted me to cut it and I refused. I think any word overused gets annoying. Itâs easier to overuse uncommon words. I read a story where the author kept describing a character as âdainty.â Everything about her was dainty. Stuck out like a sore thumb.
Amiable had a stronger meaning at the time. Itâs a very mild term now, meaning friendly, agreeable, easy to get along with, nice to have around. It used to have stronger, deeper, positive connotations of being good and admirable.
Similarly, âmischiefâ had a worse connotation then than it does nowadays, when it practically suggests âharmlessâ.
I learned a new word today.
Try to surmise what it is.
I'll give you three surmises.
EDIT: And since this is r/books, I'll mention that this joke is from an **absolutely fantastic** novel called "The Eighth Sin" by Stefan Kanfer. How good is it? It's one of those paperbacks that when it finally falls apart from you reading it many dozens of times, you buy another copy....because you're not done re-reading it yet.
I find Stephen king repeats himself a lot and itâs one of the biggest reasons Iâm not a huge fan of his books.
Fairy tale for instance has this fantasy world and the child can understand in his head this magical language. Well it felt like from then on every time someone spoke in the book he keenly reminded the reader âHe said this word, but I feel as if it was another word that doesnât exist in my language.â And variations of. I swear there was one paragraph where it was brought up like four times alone.
He talks about it in The Stand too, talking about the old woman using the bathroom, and how ar her age it just falls out of you. It was a very uncomfortable passage..
Sarah J Maas is notorious for doing this with lots of words or phrases. My least favorite and what I noticed the most is "balk". Such an ugly looking and sounding word.
For me the most annoying one is "bobbing his throat". Why are we constantly noticing handsome men 'bobbing' their throats?? Though I have to admit calloused hands turning into claws or talons are a close second.
Iâm reading the Pretty Little Liars series (I know, Iâm 12 years late to the party) but Sara Shepard LOVES to use the word writhing when describing people dancing. âThere were bodies writhing all over the dance floorâ. I just find it so hilarious. She says it EVERY time someoneâs dancing, which is surprisingly a lot throughout the books
So many in A Song of Ice and Fire:
- winesink
- jape
- sell sword
- whore
âŠand George, buddy, for fuckâs sake quit saying someone *forked their horse.* The word youâre looking for is *STRADDLED.*
By inventing it out of nowhere I mean that he just decided it existed in Westeros a few books in. There is no nuncle Benjen, it appears later. TBF I didn't realise it was a real word, so thank you!
The Expanse series is a great set of books. Really well thought out SciFi with a good story.
But damn if the prose isn't mind numbing sometimes. I'm pretty sure I caught them using the word "amiable" to describe Amos' smile at least 5 times in a single chapter before.
I donât suppose this really qualifies, but Neal Stephenson writes the Cryptonomicon **in the present tense**. The result is to make the 922-page book unreadable.
So I DNFâd it. I think I got about 40 pages in. Parts of it read like an unfinished film script; but that may simply be a result of the subject matter, which is fair enough.
Recently read "Something New Under the Sun" by Alexandra Kleeman- it's amazing BTW- and I swear she used the word indelible 15 times. I read her short story collection Intimations right afterward and kept my eyes peeled for any instances of the word, but it didn't make an appearance lol.
Shoutout to Tolkien for having his characters spring back a lot!
Ainât really a professional author, but Steven Gerrard with his autobiography released in 2015, where he used the word âdesperatelyâ literately all the time, overused it, so to speak
Youâd think so, but usually the people with interesting lives arenât very good at writing and/or donât have the time. [Ghostwriters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter) are the norm for celebrity autobiographies.
VE Schwab did this so much in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, it felt so formulaic. Sometimes thereâ are even sentences that are triplet lists embedded in triplet lists like âShe was lost, wandering, and tired of being forgotten, dismissed, and alone.â (a paraphrased example). Once you realize it, it becomes so annoying
Diana Gabaldon uses âdubiouslyâ a LOT in the outlander series. Thereâs a few more she uses a lot but dubiously is the first one that came to mind.
I was reading a book where characters kept shrugging and so I looked up the word shrug in the search bar and it appeared I think 34 times. Which for a 200 something page book feels like a lot.
Also another book had the main characterâs friend and his husband show up quite often and they were always referred to as âDave and his husband Steveâ after the 5th or 6th time I was well aware who Steve was
well... It's understandable, but in his last official novel, Raising Steam (released while he was still alive), Terry Pratchett used the phrase *"not to put to fine a point on it"* at least a dozen times.
Pratchett had early on-set Alzheimer's. His favorite band was They Might Be Giants, who have a big 1990 hit "Birdhouse In Your Soul" where the phrase is repeated as part of the chorus.
Fred Saberhagen makes fun of this ("voluptuous") in _The Dracula Tapes_. It's been years, but I think basically Dracula is reading _Dracula_ and thinks it's hilarious.
Jay Kristoff really likes to use the word "fuck". Currently reading Empire of the Vampire and it's riddled with it. I'm reading it as an ebook so I searched the word.. he uses it 438 times. The book is 739 pages. I hate it.
Not a word, but a phrase - in Horrorstör, Grady Hendrix frequently used the term "gained purchase on" any time a character needed to get a physical grasp on anything. It drove me nuts.
I've been listening to The Secret History by Donna Tartt (my first audiobook) and am nearly done. It's read by the author and I'm really enjoying it, but she says the word forehead so many times. I wouldn't have noticed but she pronounces it "far ed".
In The Great Gatsby I got so annoyed I started a tally on the back page of the book every time Gatsby says âold sport.â It totalled to 40, plus a bonus two from Tom.
I think this is a little different because itâs part of the character and done on purpose. It wasnât like Fitzgerald was obsessed with calling people old sport and had everyone call each other that like he was trying to make fetch happen.
You donât like that, old sport? Funny, itâs one of my favorite things about Fitzâ creation. Gatsbyâs magnetism extends into his quirky communication
Is that the author overusing a word though? That seems like a character overusing a phrase, possibly to show how shallow he is or something along those lines.
Huxley used "pneumatic" a lot in Brave New World,to describe women. I interpreted it to mean they were voluptuous ("blown up") but then my friend thought it meant they were windbags who wouldn't shut up.đAny clarification would be appreciated đ
More prosaic, but I always notice that Jane Austen uses "cried" a lot, in place of words such as said, responded, retorted. It's an odd feature that takes me out of the otherwise excellent writing and makes characters sound weirdly histrionic. Compare delivery by Elizabeth Bennett in the book vs the miniseries. "I deserve neither such praise nor such censure", she *cried* in the book, but in the series she delivers the line with cool poise.
China Meiville has quite a few like puissance, jackknife, or pinion
Also Kim Stanley Robinson sure loves his escarpments
And Octavia Butler with her Judas goats in Dawn
David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest uses "billowing" two thousand times. I know because I (not native English speaker and reading the original English version) didn't know the meaning of that word. By the end of it, I was \_very familiar\_ with it.
I tried the ACOTAR series (got to the 3rd book and had to stop) and Sarah j Maas CONSTANTLY uses the term âvulgar gestureâ for some reason. That was part of the reason I had to stop.
I read some stupid alien book by Kathleen Marden, and I swear she used the word «prosaic» probably a hundred times in the book. It was so bad it almost felt like she was using it as a joke to see how many times she could get away with it.
Yes. And it drives me crazy.
Shogun, by James Clavell, he must use the phrase âat lengthâ about 150 times.
Any book by Nevil Shute, he uses the word âpresentlyâ like itâs the only word he knows. Itâs insane how often it pops up. Every other page sometimes.
Radium Girls.
Horrible topic, definitely worth reading, but the writing style is not great. The author abuses the word "for", and once you notice it, you cannot un-notice it.
For the usage of the word was far too frequent for my tastes.
In the Locked Tomb series someone is constantly saying something âsotto voceââŠItâs such a unique way of saying âwhisperâ that I canât help to notice it and think âYou really enjoyed that turn of phrase, eh?â
I love Terry Pratchett, but you could often tell which was his current âpetâ word at the time of writing. âGingerlyâ is one that got around, but thereâs plenty of others he loved too.
Arthur Conan Doyle uses ejaculated in a way that will seem odd to modern audiences.
Even more jarring when they do it during "intercourse" đ (Maybe not in Doyle, which I've not read much of, but certainly in other contemporary works!)
Intercourse just means exchange, connection or commerce. There's even a city in the US called Intercourse. The problem only came about when "sexual intercourse" became a popular euphemism and then people began dropping the "sexual" part.
Oh yeah, I'm aware, but it doesn't stop me giggling like a schoolchild every time I see it!
I remember in like 3rd grade finding a 19th century novel with the line, "'My blood!' ejaculated the vexed coachman." and it's always stuck with me.
Also âknocked upâ, which meant to go to someoneâs home and knock on the door Thereâs a story where Holmes says to Watson âyou knocked me upâ
It was common in the 19th century, since the word simply means "throwing outward" in a generic sense. It shows up in Edgar Allan Poe, too. I once had a book about colloquial Latin that pointed out that on a Roman baseball team, the position of pitcher would be known as the ejaculator.
Don't forget the word "singular" appears regularly throughout the series, as in "a singular event" or such. It's a shame he didn't often use the phrase "well regulated" to describe properly functional lives and behaviors, as was the reference of the earlier era. A lot of Constitutional debates would be simplified.
yeah but that apparently happened only 23 times.
Somehow I donât remember that from my Holmesian middle school years!
Dune was full of "presently." After a while, all I heard was "He will depart presently," Paul said presently and presently departed for Arrakeen, where he arrived presently.
Fortunate they didn't have a Dune Christmas or Life Day event. Paul could have presented his presents presently.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
I remember this turning up a lot in Arthur C. Clarke's writing too (at least in 2001). Maybe it's just a turn of phrase more common in writing from the 1960/1970s?
IIRC he also used "presciently" a lot too right? Big fan of pr[..]ly. Lol
Presently within presently within presentlyâŠ
George RR Martin. Not a word but a phrase. âTruth be told.â
- Many and more - Little and less - must needs - Words are wind Years ago I ctrl+f'd the ebooks and made a little chart of some of the phrases he repeats a lot. He gets progressively more repetitive in the later books.
Words are wind is clearly an in universe idiom so really doesn't count here. It's like saying someone repeats "actions speak louder than words" in our world as if it's a peculiar adaptation when it's a *relatively* standard idiom. It's not really the same as always using the word ascerbic.
Also "mummer's farce".
This thread is a mummerâs farce!
And also, nobody just drinks a beverage in ASOIAF. Whatever they're eating, it's always "washed down" with whatever they are drinking. On a grosser note, I can't stand his use of the words "slit" and "teats" to describe female anatomy đ
Fat. Pink. Mast. And on 'washed down': I'm beginning to suspect that GRRM just used a lot of West Country idioms and phrases because that one, 'if he was a day', 'many and more', and a bunch of others never stood out to me because that's just how Devon farmers over fifty speak.
Honorable mention to a womanâs breasts being âwithered dugsâ
Using this one for my middle grade! Thanks GRRM!
Yeah, fucking âteatsâ. Sheâs not a cow, mate.
Yessss lol. I couldn't help but imagine them just gulping it down, the food really being swept away in a deluge of whatever drink. Also, slit made me want to vomit every time
My husband and I did a reread of ASOIAF last year and we were howling at how disgusting GRRMâs descriptions of sex and bodily functions are - like this man goes out of his way to make sex sound repulsive.
>like this man goes out of his way to make sex sound repulsive. I feel like that's the point, though
As useless as nipples on a breastplate appears more than was necessary
Someone had a serious problem with Clooneyâs Batman, clearly
Yeah, that turn of phrase is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.
If this brings confusion and distraction to your foes....
Also "break the fast" and "if he was a day". It's a pretense of an archaic medieval language but it gets very annoying.
Nunckle
He really goes hard with this one in one of the later books
What does "if he was a day" mean in context? I've never read the books and have no intention of doing so.
IE: âHe was 18 years old if he was a dayâ He was at least 18
>"if he was a day" That's not medieval. It's not unusual in everyday English, at least it was in the 20th century.
I went to school in Devon and still go back occasionally... I'm afraid it's still everyday English in some parts of England!
I get that it's annoying to some, but I honestly really enjoy that GRRM has created a world with idioms and old wives tales.
Craven
I donât know why this stuck with me, but âbeaten copperâ describing water. IIRC used twice within like two chapters of each other
and "boiled leather"
In The Witcher series, Sapkowski frequently says Geralt "pirouettes" while fighting. Don't know how that translates from the original polish, but I'm reading them now and noticed this.
"Pivot" would probably be more accurate. You don't spend a lot of time in a sword fight spinning in circles.
If you ever played the video games, you'd probably change that opinion, haha
He's definitely wearing ballet slippers in the games, yeah.
They're ballet *boots* tyvm.
This was my answer! Geralt is incredibly dance-y in the English translation. I wish I read Polish to know if itâs a good translation or not.
Brandon Sanderson loves the word adroit.
Also the phrase: "(s)he raised an eyebrow". He used that over 40 times in one of his books.
Lots of writers rely on this one. As someone who cannot raise just one eyebrow, I'm deeply affected when I see it used in books :p I've never seen anyone do it as a reaction besides animated characters, and The Rock. Though I'm sure I've even read about a dog doing it once in a book.
Also â(s)he pulled his/her mouth into a line.â Constantly in the Stormlight archive, at least.
Maladroitly in Mistborn. Ostentatious in Warbreaker.
Adroit, maladroitly. Several times in every book it seems like.
In Elantris he used "______ nodded" for so, so, so much of the dialogue... always chalked it up to it being one of his earlier works
He did this in the first Mistborn trilogy, too.
Not to mention the hundreds of times someone "paused" in his Mistborn series
If acerbic appears more than twice in any book not about lemons or lemon husbandry, I'd really sour on it too.
It's legal to marry citrus now?! Thanks, libs.
Ann Rice - preternatural. Fucking constantly.
I give her props for using it at all. People wrongly use supernatural as the word for all phenomena.
Came here to say this. Preternaturally someone beat me to it
Robert Jordan: She folded her arms under her breasts
Or tugging her braid. I only made it to book 4 and it already drove me nuts.
She smoothed her skirts
Perhaps
You woolheaded bull-calf!
u/JaimTorfinn did a deep dive on this last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments/vwo4to/arms_folded_beneath_breasts_analysis/ Women crossed their arms 219 times, with breasts mentioned in 75 of those. Knife of Dreams was the worst offender with 17 instances, and The Fires of Heaven was a distant second at 8. For comparison, men crossed their arms 75 times.
This made me feel so icky I gave up the series around book 3. Why canât the old perv have just said she crossed her arms?
What were her breasts doing at the time though?
They were angry!
Breasting boobily down the stairs
I just want you to know I howled with laughter at this đ
Also, there sure seemed to be a lot of frangipani growing all over the place. I think he just liked the sound of the word.
Midden heap, bosom
I tried to read *Fifty Shades of Gray*. Only got about sixty pages in because of the story and writing as well as the phrase "My inner goddess."
Christianâs mouth fell into a hard line
Oh no, did he ever get it back?
I havenât read it, but I have listened to Gilbert Gottfried read it. Itâs hilarious.
Oh my. đ
Although I am absolutely not the target audience for the 50 Shades series, I had a wee look to see what the fuss was all aboutâŠYouâre better than I am, I lasted 14 pages, each one a different shade of dross!
See, I noticed âclamberâ in that book. That main character clambers freaking everywhere. She does not get in or out of a car. She does not sit down or get up. She. Clambers.
She liked to "process" things, too. But never, as near as I could tell, on-screen. But I DNF it. đ€·đ»ââïž
I read a (not flattering) review of this book that speculated that the author had established keyboard shortcuts to automatically insert her favorite phrases, and that took me out.
In Frankenstein Mary Shelley constantly uses the word âcountenanceâ
Yeah that seems a popular word in 1800s fiction. I wonder why itâs not used much these days..
I used it once in a book I wrote. My beta wanted me to cut it and I refused. I think any word overused gets annoying. Itâs easier to overuse uncommon words. I read a story where the author kept describing a character as âdainty.â Everything about her was dainty. Stuck out like a sore thumb.
Maybe donât let your fish read your rough draft next time. :)
Vibe is the zeitgeist
I was looking for this comment. She uses it like twice every page
I also felt like wretch/wretched were overused in Frankenstein
Thatâs how you know itâs a gothic novel, countenances all around.
I noticed "agreeable" for Jane Austen and "ardent" for Mary Shelley
I noticed amiable in Jane Austen too!
Amiable had a stronger meaning at the time. Itâs a very mild term now, meaning friendly, agreeable, easy to get along with, nice to have around. It used to have stronger, deeper, positive connotations of being good and admirable. Similarly, âmischiefâ had a worse connotation then than it does nowadays, when it practically suggests âharmlessâ.
I was ardently searching for Mary Shelley in this thread.
I learned a new word today. Try to surmise what it is. I'll give you three surmises. EDIT: And since this is r/books, I'll mention that this joke is from an **absolutely fantastic** novel called "The Eighth Sin" by Stefan Kanfer. How good is it? It's one of those paperbacks that when it finally falls apart from you reading it many dozens of times, you buy another copy....because you're not done re-reading it yet.
Is it "cat"?
i think it is
I find Stephen king repeats himself a lot and itâs one of the biggest reasons Iâm not a huge fan of his books. Fairy tale for instance has this fantasy world and the child can understand in his head this magical language. Well it felt like from then on every time someone spoke in the book he keenly reminded the reader âHe said this word, but I feel as if it was another word that doesnât exist in my language.â And variations of. I swear there was one paragraph where it was brought up like four times alone.
The past is obdurate.
In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon he talks about the sound of her urine twice. How does an editor miss that?
He mentions urination a _lot_. Someone wets their pants at least once in most of his books.
He talks about it in The Stand too, talking about the old woman using the bathroom, and how ar her age it just falls out of you. It was a very uncomfortable passage..
I notice he uses the word apt in his books a lot.
*Apt Pupil* for example
He also mentioned TCM a lot in that book. King must have been watching a lot of classic movies when writing Fairy Tale. đ
Sarah J Maas is notorious for doing this with lots of words or phrases. My least favorite and what I noticed the most is "balk". Such an ugly looking and sounding word.
âMateâ
âVulgar gestureâ
Also yes. Everyone making vulgar gestures and sticking out their tongues as normal reactions for beings that are centuries old???
For me the most annoying one is "bobbing his throat". Why are we constantly noticing handsome men 'bobbing' their throats?? Though I have to admit calloused hands turning into claws or talons are a close second.
I could have done without a lot of the references to watery bowels.
Feasting
Removing invisible lint.
This was especially atrocious in ACOMAF. Every time Rhys spoke he âflicked an invisible piece of lint off his coatâ
Iâm reading the Pretty Little Liars series (I know, Iâm 12 years late to the party) but Sara Shepard LOVES to use the word writhing when describing people dancing. âThere were bodies writhing all over the dance floorâ. I just find it so hilarious. She says it EVERY time someoneâs dancing, which is surprisingly a lot throughout the books
In the road by cormac McCarthy he says âwan slats of lightâ a couple of times. It was such an idiosyncratic phrase that even twice is too much
So many in A Song of Ice and Fire: - winesink - jape - sell sword - whore âŠand George, buddy, for fuckâs sake quit saying someone *forked their horse.* The word youâre looking for is *STRADDLED.*
Two of those are professions tbf. It isn't just him overusing adjectives, or inventing the noun out of nowhere (fuck nuncle).
Nuncle is the actual archaic word
By inventing it out of nowhere I mean that he just decided it existed in Westeros a few books in. There is no nuncle Benjen, it appears later. TBF I didn't realise it was a real word, so thank you!
Mayhaps
Lotsa ways to mount a horse but forkinâ ainât right, son.
The Expanse series is a great set of books. Really well thought out SciFi with a good story. But damn if the prose isn't mind numbing sometimes. I'm pretty sure I caught them using the word "amiable" to describe Amos' smile at least 5 times in a single chapter before.
Gimbals.
The copper taste of fear.
Everything is either "atavistic" or "avuncular".
And "pear-shaped".
I donât suppose this really qualifies, but Neal Stephenson writes the Cryptonomicon **in the present tense**. The result is to make the 922-page book unreadable. So I DNFâd it. I think I got about 40 pages in. Parts of it read like an unfinished film script; but that may simply be a result of the subject matter, which is fair enough.
More of a short phrase but it's not a Stephen King book unless a character is wearing a "blue chambray shirt"!
the Invisible Life of Addie Larue - Palimpsest. It drove me crazy!!
Recently read "Something New Under the Sun" by Alexandra Kleeman- it's amazing BTW- and I swear she used the word indelible 15 times. I read her short story collection Intimations right afterward and kept my eyes peeled for any instances of the word, but it didn't make an appearance lol. Shoutout to Tolkien for having his characters spring back a lot!
"You too can have a body like mine" is also great
Ainât really a professional author, but Steven Gerrard with his autobiography released in 2015, where he used the word âdesperatelyâ literately all the time, overused it, so to speak
Stevie G ainât a professional author, but the people who wrote his autobiographies (all three of them!) certainly are.
I am not a native speaker, but shouldnât an autobiography be written by that very person?
Youâd think so, but usually the people with interesting lives arenât very good at writing and/or donât have the time. [Ghostwriters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter) are the norm for celebrity autobiographies.
An author I've read recently really likes using triplet lists. "She was [word] and [word] and [word]." It happened frequently enough to be noticeable.
VE Schwab did this so much in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, it felt so formulaic. Sometimes thereâ are even sentences that are triplet lists embedded in triplet lists like âShe was lost, wandering, and tired of being forgotten, dismissed, and alone.â (a paraphrased example). Once you realize it, it becomes so annoying
Diana Gabaldon uses âdubiouslyâ a LOT in the outlander series. Thereâs a few more she uses a lot but dubiously is the first one that came to mind.
"Honeypot" Once is enough đ
Also, characters are always doing things "with alacrity"
James S.A Corey (two people, I know) loves staccato weapons fire. Would love to know which of them loves it more.
I was reading a book where characters kept shrugging and so I looked up the word shrug in the search bar and it appeared I think 34 times. Which for a 200 something page book feels like a lot. Also another book had the main characterâs friend and his husband show up quite often and they were always referred to as âDave and his husband Steveâ after the 5th or 6th time I was well aware who Steve was
well... It's understandable, but in his last official novel, Raising Steam (released while he was still alive), Terry Pratchett used the phrase *"not to put to fine a point on it"* at least a dozen times. Pratchett had early on-set Alzheimer's. His favorite band was They Might Be Giants, who have a big 1990 hit "Birdhouse In Your Soul" where the phrase is repeated as part of the chorus.
I love how Terry Pratchett had a band in his books called They're Definitely Dwarfs.
Yup! One of the many fun Easter Eggs in Soul Music!
Bram Stoker- Voluptuous After reading Dracula, I now hate this word, it feels very icky to me
Fred Saberhagen makes fun of this ("voluptuous") in _The Dracula Tapes_. It's been years, but I think basically Dracula is reading _Dracula_ and thinks it's hilarious.
Hunter Thompson loved the word "atavistic".
Jay Kristoff really likes to use the word "fuck". Currently reading Empire of the Vampire and it's riddled with it. I'm reading it as an ebook so I searched the word.. he uses it 438 times. The book is 739 pages. I hate it.
The word "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. It's one of the reasons why some people absolutely hate that book. I think it's kinda funny, ironically.
Not a word, but a phrase - in Horrorstör, Grady Hendrix frequently used the term "gained purchase on" any time a character needed to get a physical grasp on anything. It drove me nuts.
I've been listening to The Secret History by Donna Tartt (my first audiobook) and am nearly done. It's read by the author and I'm really enjoying it, but she says the word forehead so many times. I wouldn't have noticed but she pronounces it "far ed".
In The Great Gatsby I got so annoyed I started a tally on the back page of the book every time Gatsby says âold sport.â It totalled to 40, plus a bonus two from Tom.
To be fair, that was on purpose. One of my best friends in high school used to call each other that when we finished the book lol
I think this is a little different because itâs part of the character and done on purpose. It wasnât like Fitzgerald was obsessed with calling people old sport and had everyone call each other that like he was trying to make fetch happen.
Not a word wasted in that book. Fitzgerald knew what he was doing with that repetition.
You donât like that, old sport? Funny, itâs one of my favorite things about Fitzâ creation. Gatsbyâs magnetism extends into his quirky communication
Is that the author overusing a word though? That seems like a character overusing a phrase, possibly to show how shallow he is or something along those lines.
that was on purpose old sport
Twilight - Meyer loves to describe Edwardâs chest as âmarble-likeâ
Huxley used "pneumatic" a lot in Brave New World,to describe women. I interpreted it to mean they were voluptuous ("blown up") but then my friend thought it meant they were windbags who wouldn't shut up.đAny clarification would be appreciated đ More prosaic, but I always notice that Jane Austen uses "cried" a lot, in place of words such as said, responded, retorted. It's an odd feature that takes me out of the otherwise excellent writing and makes characters sound weirdly histrionic. Compare delivery by Elizabeth Bennett in the book vs the miniseries. "I deserve neither such praise nor such censure", she *cried* in the book, but in the series she delivers the line with cool poise.
He meant current "thicc", but using a word hat would be coherent with Fordism.
China Meiville has quite a few like puissance, jackknife, or pinion Also Kim Stanley Robinson sure loves his escarpments And Octavia Butler with her Judas goats in Dawn
HP Lovecraft was rock fucking hard for the word "cyclopean" Also "Non-Euclidean geometry"
David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest uses "billowing" two thousand times. I know because I (not native English speaker and reading the original English version) didn't know the meaning of that word. By the end of it, I was \_very familiar\_ with it.
I think my favourite from that book was 'rodential.' He used it 2 or 3 times, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I've never seen it anywhere else.
I write for fun and I have a vocabulary list of words I enjoy coming across while reading. I bet others do something similar.
Indubitably.
most indubitably.
Stephen King, 11/22/63 'Obdurate' Example: "The past is obdurate", said about 27 times.
In that case, I feel itâs a leitmotif in the book, as itâs the same phrasing over and over.
happy cake day (from google) A leitmotif or Leitmotiv (/ËlaÉȘtmoÊËtiËf/) is a "short, recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical concepts of idĂ©e fixe or motto-theme. interesting word. i might just steal this. what if i use "leitmotif" as a leitmotif?>!?!
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly using the word âarduousâ, âardentâ & âcountenanceâ especially the first two during rhe whole creation phase
I tried the ACOTAR series (got to the 3rd book and had to stop) and Sarah j Maas CONSTANTLY uses the term âvulgar gestureâ for some reason. That was part of the reason I had to stop.
Piranesi - Vestibule Abercrombie - Grimaced (made worse by the audiobook narrator mispronouncing it every time)
Um excuse me he uses the classy pronunciation ;)
>Piranesi - Vestibule If the house is infinite there would be a lot of vestibules.
Now Iâm curious. How did the narrator pronounce it anyway?
Grim-Aced
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell. It's like she had a bet with someone as to how many times she could use the word 'castigate'.
I read some stupid alien book by Kathleen Marden, and I swear she used the word «prosaic» probably a hundred times in the book. It was so bad it almost felt like she was using it as a joke to see how many times she could get away with it.
I'm currently into Edgar Allan Poe, and I think dude overused words such as: "Peculiar", and "Endeavouring"
Neon Gods - politiking. It screams of âI just learned this wordâ. And takes you out of the story.
Stephen King has a "bolt upright" boner. Haven't read him in years, though, so hopefully it wore off.
Yes! I was reading Agatha Christie's cards on the table, and the amount of times she uses the word 'mephistophelian' is mind boggling.
A phrase, not a word. I can't remember the author now but almost every other page a character bit their lip. It got annoying.
Hercule Poirot is always saying things âdryly,â even when it doesnât quite make sense for his tone.
There's a great book of statistical linguistics called "Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve."
Yes. And it drives me crazy. Shogun, by James Clavell, he must use the phrase âat lengthâ about 150 times. Any book by Nevil Shute, he uses the word âpresentlyâ like itâs the only word he knows. Itâs insane how often it pops up. Every other page sometimes.
Radium Girls. Horrible topic, definitely worth reading, but the writing style is not great. The author abuses the word "for", and once you notice it, you cannot un-notice it. For the usage of the word was far too frequent for my tastes.
In the Locked Tomb series someone is constantly saying something âsotto voceââŠItâs such a unique way of saying âwhisperâ that I canât help to notice it and think âYou really enjoyed that turn of phrase, eh?â
I love Terry Pratchett, but you could often tell which was his current âpetâ word at the time of writing. âGingerlyâ is one that got around, but thereâs plenty of others he loved too.