Regarding the OP’s example of “incongruously:” I came to this thread to mention the very same word, or a variation thereof, in The Poseidon Adventure. (The author’s name escapes me at the moment.)
Neal Stephenson uses the word “Nippon” far too much. It would be OK if he was consistent and called, for example, Germany “Deutschland”, but he doesn’t.
Another Trollope favourite: “cross-questioned”. Many people say something like “I do not choose to be cross-questioned on such a subject”, etc.
Jorge Luis Borges is associated with the word “vertiginous,” but he doesn’t overuse it.
“Excoriate” is my one vocab take-away from his series.
And this reminds me of the really jarring product placement in Cross by James Patterson. This is Alex Cross going with his family to buy a new car.
[QUOTE=Cross]
So we stopped at the Mercedes dealer…Jannie and Damon ogled a silver CLK500 Cabriolet convertible, while Ali and I tested out the spacious front seat of an R350. I was thinking family car — safety, beauty, resale value. Intellect and emotion.
[/QUOTE]
And this is him driving the car later.
[QUOTE=Cross]
I liked the vehicle’s zip and also the dual-dash zone climate control, which would keep everybody happy, even Nana Mama.
[/QUOTE]
I think this is when I finally gave up on the Alex Cross series.
For overused words, I’m going to go with Fifty Shades of Gray. Besides her subconscious peering at her disapprovingly and her “inner goddess” doing various gymnastics and ice skating moves throughout the series (don’t judge me), there’s “crap.” Crap, oh crap, holy crap, double crap, triple crap. She says crap 163 times in the whole series (I said, don’t judge me!)
I’ve been listening to the audiobooks and, to be fair, it’s mostly the armored gloves. And when you’re wearing armored gloves, the lobstered kind give a lot more protections even though they’re a lot more expensive than the ones with studs or fixed plates.
I’m an author, and “suddenly” is in practically every story I write.
Suddenly, I realized I had to post this.
Kenneth Robeson, “piano wire chest.” I don’t think he ever used it more than once in a novel, but it sure feels like he never used it less than once per-.
Shelby Foote uses “However” a lot to begin sentences in his The Civil War: A Narrative, though I may have noticed it because I was taking a class from someone with a bugaboo agains the (perfectly fine) usage and was more alert for it.
Another Anthony Trollope special: exigeant. Just an alternate spelling of exigent, I guess, but it jumps off the page whenever it shows up.
The opposite is Tom Swifting the writing with ridiculous variation of ways to modify the phrase ‘Tom said’.
Repition would need to be pretty frequent to bother me.
More Dean Koontz.
I really enjoyed his earlier stuff like “Lightning”, “Watchers” and even “Intensity”. However, according to him, there are no simple parking lots or roads. Just acres of “macadam” that glisten from the rain under thousands of “sodium vapor lights”.
Ejaculated is NOT a synonym for “said.” It’s a synonym for “exclaimed.”