I suggest you check out Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel, or: My Provence Vacation Write-Off. A wretched book, and I say that as a Kay fan.
True. But in this case, the author obviously thinks that you can see the Pacific Ocean from Seattle. She didn’t fail to pick up on a localism – she doesn’t know where Seattle is.
I hate choppy exposition in general, but it’s especially bad when an author tries to use conversation for exposition.
Dan Brown’s probably the world’s worst of known authors.
If for some reason you want the exposition to be in a narration then have it as, say, a tour guide, or an audio guidebook, or reading aloud from a guidebook. Personally I’d just go (and this is wiki’s words not mine I should perhaps mention):
James Michener was one of several authors who would just dump it in as if he were writing a guidebook, and then he’d go into the story. When it’s a lot of info I think this works best.
*courtesy of Wikipedia
They taught at Dartmouth College** in Vermont**. Where they lived didn’t come up.
I once read a book by a Canadian author who set a book in Maryland. The main character kept referring to his “mum.” Took me out of the book every single time. There is nowhere in the US where a Mom is called a Mum. You’d think a Canadian author with several books under her belt would know that.
Of course, I cut my adult book teeth on Victoria Holt, so what do I know. 
Ha. I know a Canadian author who set a book in Montana. She has kids eating french fries with gravy in one scene. “Oh, Americans don’t do that?” she said when I mentioned it. I don’t know why the American publisher didn’t ask about that. Maybe they figure it’s something kids do in Montana.
I know individuals who say ‘mum’. It’s not a regional so much as an individual thing. I always disliked books where they say ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’; I know it’s done but it’s not a lot more common than calling your parents by their first names.
Though that said I called my grandmother “Grandmother” (she was not a Granny or a Grandma, and ‘Livia Augusta’ was already taken); my father called her Muh and his father Da, which is Irish, though with him it was more because that’s what he called them as a baby and he was never corrected.
A regional word that I’ve read in books though I can’t remember which (IIRC Green Mile, set in a southern prison, may have used it) is a reference to characters drinking “pop”. I have never heard a southerner call a soft drink a pop, and the first time i heard a non-southerner reference it I honestly didn’t know what they were talking about. Usually we refer to brand name (“juwanna Coke?” or for the older set “Co-cola?”) but the generic terms are soda, soft drink, or just “cold drink” (often pronounced ‘coal drank’).
And American Indians- bad historical fiction writers and bad westerns have a field day with what they imagine to be the Indian patois. For starters not all Indians who talked with whites spoke in broken English; east of the Mississippi especially many of the chiefs were well educated and some (especially the mestizo) spoke English more fluently than their tribal language. Indians who couldn’t speak English rarely tried- they tended to communicate through interpreters; there’s records of one who came to the Continental Congress in 1776 who spoke no English but whose interpreter, a full blooded Algonquin, stunned the Congress by speaking in a perfect upper crust Oxbridge accent. In parts of the south and the midwest many Indians spoke fluent French as well as their own language. The Pilgrims communicated with Squanto [Esquantum] in Portuguese, at Jamestown there were some Indians who spoke a few words of Spanish and Powhatan dispatched some women from his village to live with the whites strictly to gain fluency in their language (Pocahontas became fluent in English in an amazingly short time when she was kidnapped), while Lewis & Clark would speak English to a party member who would translate into French for Toussaint Charbonneau who would translate into Hidatsa for his wife Sacagawea who would translate into Shoshone or the other dialects she spoke- sometimes there would be a line of interpreters and God knows how accurate the relayed message ultimately arrived.
What you very rarely had post-contact was the “White man come in great canoe like mountain with log that make lightning and stick that make thunder and knives long as arm”- they’d more likely say “White men just unloaded cannons, guns and swords from their ship”.
I don’t know about Montana, but some people in Texas do eat French fries and other sorts of fried potatoes (hash browns, cottage fries, etc.) with gravy. In some local diners, if you order hash browns, you get a side of sausage gravy automatically, which my husband and daughter regard as one of the most delightful dishes ever. In those places where they don’t give a bowl of gravy automatically, nobody blinks an eye if we ask for one.
Our national dish is chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and cream gravy.
I don’t understand the confusion on this point. Y’all = You All. You wouldn’t go up to your (lone) friend and say, “How are you all doing?”, would you? And I’m not even from Texas; I’m New Jersey born and bred.
Sorry. Carry on with the book dissing.
It’s not just *connected *to the Pacific, it’s part of the Pacific. (The river is not part of the ocean)
Sure, I agree you wouldn’t say “I can see the Pacific Ocean from Seattle” but I don;t say that even from parts of coastal CA. I will either name the beach, bay or other subset of the Pacific, or just say “the ocean”.
It’s like living on the northern border of Washington state and being able to see over the border. You’d say you can see Canada, but you would not say you could see the uSA, even though of course you can. You’d say you can see whatever county or city or maybe even state.
But you can see the Pacific Ocean from Seattle. She just didn’t know that the locals always *say *Puget Sound (or just “the Sound”), not “the Pacific Ocean”. That’s why she got the facts right, the localism wrong.
Sigh.
But that would be wrong. Just like calling the Puget Sound ‘The Pacific’ is wrong. Sure, both bodies of water connect to an ocean, but they’re **not **the ocean.
It’s not a regionalism, it’s what they’re called.
They do not just connect, they are part of.
Just like the famous Palin line- yes, from some parts of AK you can see a part of Russia. But you could also say one can only see Kamchatka, not Russia. :rolleyes:
Well hell, technically, there’s really no reason to call it the “Pacific” when it’s all part of the interconnected world ocean. You see a border carved on the water on satellite maps?
Those of you who say that Pugent Sound isn’t a part of the Pacific Ocean may want to consider the definition of sound
To emphasize: a sound is a large sea or ocean inlet. Ocean inlet. Ocean. In the case of Puget Sound, I wonder which ocean that would be?
Where I lived in Virginia (a small town outside of Charlottesville) it was both singular and plural, depending on how you pronounced it. “Ya’ll” was singular and “Y’all” was plural. Yes, the difference was delicate, but it was similar to “pen” vs “pin.” The former was “pin” while the latter was “pin.”
IOW, context helped, but it wasn’t a cure-all.
ETA: As I as a Virginian, even an Adopted one, what I describe as factual outweighs ANYTHING from the (look of distaste) other “Southern” states.
Nobody’s arguing that Puget Sound isn’t connected to the Pacific Ocean. What we’re arguing is that nobody calls it the Pacific Ocean and that Puget Sound (its name) is not a localism.
Calling it “Ivar’s Mud Puddle” – that’d be a localism.
Aw, what a shame. Thank you for asking her, appreciated.
To deliver my own, Alan Moore is generally pretty hot on his local research and boasted about for instance reading all up on the Louisiana locale for Swamp Thing. Making it all the more startling that when that series followed a nun’s gruesome fate in London at the hands of a South American creature, she does so after getting a Northern Line train at Leicester square, going past Camden Town and then to Mornington Crescent to her demise. Nope - Mornington Crescent is before Camden Town if you are getting on at Leicester Square. The station was indeed often closed at that time as the story showed though.
Also, feel free to insert your own “I’m Sorry I haven’t A Clue” gag if wanted too.