I’ll side with George here. Your inner ear does a very poor job of determining “up”. Especially when being tossed about without a physical feet-on-firmament reference point.
Example. In pilot training one of the first thing you are shown is that without visual cues you will not be able to determine your orientation. Even worse, trusting your senses and inner ear will point you incorrectly and result in lawn darting into the ground. It takes quite a bit of practice when flying without external vision that, even when every sense in your body is screaming at you that ‘up’ is not where you think it is and you are most likely upside down and about to crash, you have to trust the instruments. Your senses lie.
I had my BFR on Sunday. I was told to close my eyes, and the check pilot threw the plane around the sky. Then, ‘Open your eyes and recover’. Easy-peasy… but I didn’t have vertigo. I remember a trip where dad was giving me informal IFR training on a trip from Southern California to Southern Oregon in actual IFR conditions. (I was flying left seat.) I knew I was in a left bank, but the artificial horizon said otherwise. It was hard making my body to do what the instrument said, and I was glad when I could start seeing some stars above.
I thank you for the information. However, the fact that Martin didn’t start it, and that it is perhaps even in common use, doesn’t make it any less stupid.
Real-a-tor, jewel-ery, mason-ary… In my data, it bugs me when whoever entered the record puts ‘cemetary’, ‘masonary’, ‘Westminister’, apostrophy-esses for plurals "e.g., SUPPLY’S, MATERIAL’S)… Actually, there are a lot of things that bug me in the data. I want to send them a dictionary and/or suggest their employees attend a semester of remedial English.
This was going to be mine. It seems you see it more in Sci Fi (I can hear Bones McCoy doings it as I write, just can’t remember what the word/name was) because of the ‘alien’ names, but it is not, as you note, unique to Sci Fi…
That would be morally rotten, or behaviorally so, but you have a point. I’d say that that works because it’s metaphorical- but then, this might be too. Of course, any metaphorical use of the term is mostly going to be centered around something that has nonliteral aspects, but if it’s an established meteorological term, it’s a moot point. And further, within the book’s world, that might actually make sense; though that’s hard to say without knowing the weather patterns of the place these people evolved- damn, this series just brings out the nerd in you, doesn’t it?