Authors with particular linguistic habits or tics, like often repeated or misused words or phrases

Cafe Society
121

I think we’re getting pretty fair afield of Heinlein’s idiosyncratic usage of the word here. Aren’t you both describing the standard, common conjunctional use of the word “so” that we all use? “Our options are going out to eat, ordering a pizza, or eating leftovers. So, which one should we do?”

@CalMeacham brought up specifically Heinlein’s tendency to have a character begin a line of dialogue with “so?” Note the question mark.

I still have on my bookshelf copies of three Heinlein novels. I just leafed through each book to find an example of this, and it didn’t take long.

From The Cat Who Walks Through Walls:
"Tony, could you please have some female member of your staff check the ladies’ lounge for Mistress Novak? I think that it is possible that she may have become ill, or be in some difficulty.
“Your guest, Dr. Ames?”
“Yes.”
“But she left twenty minutes ago. I ushered her out myself.”
“So? I must have misunderstood her. Thank you, and good night.”

From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:
“Manuel, you may be. the oddest man I’ve ever met.” She took that print-out. “Say, is this computer paper?”
“Yes. Met a computer with a sense of humor.”
"So? Well, it was bound to come some day. Everything else has been mechanized. "

From Stranger in a Strange Land:
She stood up. “Is Doctor Nelson likely to come popping in?”
“Not likely, unless I send for him. He’s still sleeping off low-gee fatigue.”
“So? Then what’s the idea of being so duty struck?”

I also noticed plenty of instances of characters using the word in a more typical way, saying things like “so, what should we do?” Or asking “how so?” Or “But we don’t have any red paint.” “So paint it blue!”

Therefore I think the “tic,” as it were, is specifically the use of “so?” as a one-word question where, as the examples above demonstrate, it doesn’t really make sense to replace it with “so what?” or “therefore” but rather “is that so?” or “really?” And that is certainly unusual, because I’ve never heard anyone IRL use it that way, nor encountered it in any other author’s dialogue.

122

Reading through the excellent Star Trek: I.K.S. Gorkon series by Keith R.A. DeCandido, it’s a little weird hearing Klingons use the word “anyhow” so much. It’s very frequent, and a bit jarring.

Besides that, all the Klingons are very well-spoken for,… well, Klingons.

“We have a traitor in our midst, and thus, it behooves me to be parsimonious with our intelligence.”

“Behooves” me to be “parsimonious”. Those are 10-dollar words for a Klingon.

123

Neither have I. In modern conversation it might be rendered as “No kidding?”

124

They learn to speak that way by studying the great Klingon bard, Shakespeare.

125

You “leaf” much faster than I do, Arcite. Good examples. The one odd use of “so” that I could locate quickly is from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

“. . . and I am sorry to say that Shorty was lying across them, dying -”
“We knew.”
“So. Dulce et decorum.”

126

Yes, “no kidding?” would be another good way of expressing the sense in which Heinlein seemed to be using it.

I must have thrown out my copy of Starship Troopers at some point, but quick googling reveals the text is available online. Here’s a good example from that novel:
“I was nearby when it happened. It is Colonel Dubois? Right?”
“Yes, sir.” I added, “He was my high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy.”
I think that was the only time I ever impressed Sergeant Zim, even faintly. His eyebrows went up an
eighth of an inch and his eyes widened slightly. “So? You were extraordinarily fortunate.”

I don’t think that’s quite the same; the specific “tic” being discussed is “so?” as a question.

127

I am NOT a King fan, but I really liked this one. I’d give it another try.

128

I can’t remember who the author is, I am thinking it’s William C. Dietz, but definitely an American Science Fiction author who, in the spirit of futureness, would have his characters use clicks as a unit of measurement. :roll_eyes:
Obviously heard the term somewhere but wasn’t aware that klick is slang for kilometer, not click.

129

As an adjective, myriad means “innumerable,” and as a noun it means “a great number.” So “myriad stressors in todays world,” but “a myriad of stars in the galaxy.”

/pedant

130

In one of the post-Fleming novels, from the 80s or maybe 90s, whoever was writing them did this to an excessive degree. In one scene, Bond is being held captive in the infirmary at the villain’s hideout/estate/lair. He asks a nurse about the villain’s whereabouts. (I can’t look this up, so I’m improvising here. I assure you the actual dialogue was more accurate but no more believable.)

Nurse: “He’s leaving in an hour or so.”
Bond: “How? The roads are blocked.”
Nurse: “By air. He owns a Lockheed S140 jet with twin Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines and a Westar integrated navigation system.”

131

I thought The Myriad was that thing Homer wrote, using way more words than he needed.

132

That is some high-end product placement, right there.

133

Like something straight out of the

134

Nah, Myriad was Homer’s wife. Or was that Marge?

135

Lots of people used the “Babbit” allusion for a while. Even James Thurber: “By decent minds is he abhorred / who’d make a Babbit of the Lord.”

136

I know lots of people do. I was talking about specifically Sinclair Lewis doing it. Suppose Cervantes referred to someone as “quixotic,” or Kafka called something “Kafkaesque”?

137

First, the inevitable nitpick. The book and the character are named Babbitt, with two "t"s. Although some sources list babbitry, with one “t”, Lewis himself spelled the mental state of babbittry (“A narrow-minded, self-satisfied person with an unthinking attachment to middle-class values and materialism.”) with two "t"s.

Second, Lewis’ main satirical subject was babbittry. The name of his character inadvertently became the name for the subject. What was he supposed to do later, invent a different term from the one that everybody else was by then using?

138

I’m a big Stephen King fan, but I had a really hard time getting through Lisey’s Story due to the overuse of the word “smucking.” You can really tell when an author is in love with a word they made up, because they pepper it throughout the entire book.

I actually have a name for this phenomenon. I call it “Niflheim Syndrome,” because the first time I really encountered it enough to notice it was as a kid while reading H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy series (which I adore). Niflheim was a planet, and it got referred to far too much for a planet nobody in the books ever visited.

“That stinks to Niflheim!”
“That would stink on Niflheim!”

Ugh.

139

Did she spell out the word “heart”, or use a symbol?

The first (maybe; anyway it was quick) major posthumous Vonnegut biography was titled “AND (my caps) So It Goes”, which ought to have embarrassed the hell out of someone (I checked, and out of about 60 so it goeses in the text, not one was preceded by “and”). Vonnegut was fond of oft-repeated phrases (e.g. “Hi-Ho”, “goodbye, Blue Monday”, but I don’t remember any that jumped from one book to another.

John MacDonald was mentioned way upthread; I stopped picking up his books for a while the second time Travis McGee explained how planets sometimes are discovered exactly where we knew they must be, because otherwise there was a gravitational force at work that couldn’t be explained. It reminded me somewhat of Holmes explaining Moriarty’s influence to Watson, but mostly it reminded me of another McGee book I’d read previously.

140

I don’t know that it would count as a tic, but I’m reading American Gods right now.

For the most part, it sounds very American. I’ve read books by British authors that SOUND British, even if they’re writing American characters. If I didn’t know Neil Gaiman was British, I wouldn’t guess it by the writing…

except “put his head on one side.” It stuck out near the beginning of the book because it’s kind of a jarring turn of phrase and then it’s just KEPT POPPING UP. Everyone’s just constantly: