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

Cafe Society
141

I assumed that Elmer_J.Fudd was referring to the 19th-century novelist Jane Austen, but in that case I have no idea what he was talking about.

Jane Austen does routinely use the word “heart” to signify emotions or emotional potential in general (“warm heart”, “light-hearted”, “goodness of heart”, “a full heart”, etc.), but so does pretty much every other writer in the English language. AFAICT it makes no sense to say that Austen “overused” the word or that her use of it constitutes a particular “habit” or “tic”.

But maybe Elmer was referring to a different Jane Austin, and/or meant something else that I just failed to understand.

142

Pardon my spelling. The most annoying repeated use in Austen’s novels is the expression “with all my heart”.

143

Huh. “With all my heart” as Austen uses it in character dialogue, in the standard sense of “sincerely”, “wholeheartedly”, “willingly” etc., is still such a commonly used conversational phrase—and even more so in Austen’s time—that I never even noticed it as in any way specially characteristic of Austen’s novels. (Especially since it seems to occur only once in most of the novels, with maybe four to eight repetitions in the others).

And I would never have described that phrase as using “the word ‘heart’ as a synonym for ‘love’.” It would make no sense to say “with all my love” in the contexts where Austen’s characters say “with all my heart”, as in Tom Bertram’s remark about acting parts in amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park:

Just goes to show, as the saying is, that there are as many interpretations of any written work as there are readers of it.

144

There was a sort of tic in works by the early 20th century author William Sydney Porter. Having done a stretch in prison, many of his characters were thuggish types with a rough urban manner of speaking, but every now and then they would use an unexpected $5 word (back then, $5 bought one a lot of syllables). Not sure exactly why he did that. Probably to keep the reader a little off-balance.

145

Having read a lot of hardboiled pulp fiction, my impression is that $5 was the opposite of two-bit (25 cents).

146

I still can’t figure out what the fuck “Jimla” was supposed to mean in 11/22/63. Something about a quarterback?

147

Edgar Rice Burroughs often sent his heroes through “Stygian darkness” – and sometimes “Cimmerian darkness” – on their way to save damsels from a “Fate worse than death.”