Haven: They make reference to something called ‘ay-ther’, which is obviously (I think they even spelled it) ‘aether’ – which is pronounced ‘ee-ther’; not ‘ay-ther’.
A Dance With Dragons: G.R.R. Martin refers a couple/few times to a ‘murder’ of ravens. Crows congregate in a ‘murder’ (or ‘hoard’). All Martin would have had to do is check the U.S. Geological Survey site
He also talks about someone trying to ‘staunch’ a flow of blood. I don’t know how anyone would do anything to a flow of blood with an adjective. Personally, I’d stanch the flow of blood.
It’s not necessarily an error. The collective nouns come from James (Inside the Actor’s Studio) Lipton’s An Exultation of Larks. Lipton did extensive research, but there’s no evidence that many of his collective nouns ever had wide use. He would go over medieval lists of these terms, but did not investigate if anyone ever used any of the terms on the lists, and also left off terms that may have been more widely used but which didn’t appear on his sources.
So you can’t really say any collective noun like that is right or wrong. No one really knows.
Another thing GRRM does is perpetuate the idiotic “OMG, I’m underwater; which way is up?!” myth. Ser Duncan in the stream, Sam in the canal, Ser Davos in Blackwater Bay…
Buoyance is not freefall, George! Your inner ear balance mechanisms are still subject to gravity! There is no way you can’t tell which way is up underwater, unless you’ve been brain-damaged!
Also, even in Harrenhal, when you want butter, you go to the dairy. You DON’T go to the buttery. The buttery is where you keep all the kegs, barrels, casks and wine BUTTS.
Otherwise he can call it a murder of ravens all he wants.
It’s very common for people’s names to be pronounced differently by different people. The idea that there’s only one correct pronunciation of a particular person’s name is a recent American conceit and an unrealistic one. The very fact that different speakers have different accents makes it impossible.
Even your casual phonetic rendering more often than not will cause someone to say “I never heard it said as Suh-PRAWN-o. It was Suh-PRAH-no!”
There was just a commercial on for Everest University Online (or Everest something-or-other). One person doing a testimonial says, ‘The reason I didn’t go to a community college is that I didn’t want to take classes I didn’t need.’
Oh, the pain. I understand that many people don’t need a well-rounded education. I know that many people don’t want to learn things that are not directly related to what they want to do. But I’m not one of those people, and I value education even if it is not immediately useful. It may come in handy someday. You never know what you need to know until you need to know it.
It’s easy to lose your bearings if the water is swiftly moving/churning. I’ve been knocked over in the ocean by waves/undertows a couple of times, and while I eventually surfaced I can assure you I didn’t know which way was up for a couple of seconds. It would be unsurprising for someone who is injured and/or panicking to start swimming down instead of up.
It was a TV show. They had control of how it was pronounced by all actors involved. That’s what bugs me. Not that it is “not inconsistent to real life” — that it was a show, and it was inconsistent. The end.
That’s kind of weird. People are always complaining about TV shows being unrealistic, and you’re complaining about something that’s actually realistic.
Basically you’re saying that different characters shouldn’t be allowed to speak with different accents, even though that’s exactly what different people do. Especially in a cosmopolitan place like New Jersey.
Well, there’s a subset of it that bugs me. Someone introduces another character to a term, a term brand new to the 2nd person, one they’ve only heard from the first character. Yet somehow first and second character each pronounce the word differently. :smack:
Clearly they’ve both memorized there lines, each coming up with a different choice on how to pronounce the word, with no thought given to making sure they both say it the same. Also probably they were filmed separately and possibly not even on set when the other person said it. But the director, or a continuity supervisor or someone should have caught it and made them do another take or loop it in adr or something.
Eh, I don’t consider those whimsical collective terms to be serious or definitive. Someone clearly sat down and wrote a series of mildly amusing jokes which people have picked up on.
Speaking of G.R.R. Martin, numerous times he refers to a character in a precarious position as ‘being on rotten ice’. Ice is frozen water! It doesn’t rot!
Also, in the tv series: I can overlook the weird phonetics; the man’s a Tolkien worshiper without his linguistic background. I can overlook the different groups of people, thousands of miles apart, speaking with the same specific English accent; it and Midwestern American are the only accents Hollywood acknowledges. I can even overlook characters charging into battle without helmets, because that’s how tv and movies work (regrettably). But so help me, if I see one more person who’s supposed to be a trained warrior sheathing a blood-covered sword without even trying to wipe it off, I’m going to start screaming at the television.
