I think I could have forgiven him his “goddamns” if only he had known how to spell “crummy.” Every time I encountered it, I had a momentary hiccup where I had to remind myself that he wasn’t saying “crumbly.”
And Steven R. Donaldson! I got so sick of the words chthonic and preternatural that by the third book I was rooting for Lord Foul.
I simply refused to pick up the Second Chronicles.
Ha, when I saw this thread, I thought, didn’t I start a thread like this? I was going to look it up when I saw this post. Thanks for doing the homework for me, AHunter3!
And coruscating…
Shout out to Kurt Vonnegut? I actually thing he makes it work.
I reread Foundation recently and I’m hard-pressed to think of a character that Asimov didn’t have sardonically smiling every couple of pages.
I’ve had Peter F. Hamilton’s work recommended to me many times, and I’ve tried to read Pandora’s Star a couple times, but in the opening chapter, he uses the word “sniggered” far too many times for me to get through.
Vonnegut used it in Slaughterhouse-Five whenever someone died. A lot of people died in the book, appropriately since the book was about war and death, so the phrase appeared often.
Using a mild phrase of acceptance to indicate the death of a character in a world where so many die that the sorrow is bleed from the action is probably the best literary device of all time. “So it goes” is not mere repetition; it is distilled brilliance.
Yes, Kurt Vonnegut repeated that phrase deliberately, and made it work.
On the flip side, Richard Adams in, “Watership Down,” didn’t repeat a plant name once and I think he named 200+ plants.
I tried to read “Watership Down” and thought it was gibberish. The movie was, however, in plain English, and very good.
Tom Wolfe was also fond of the phrase “loamy loins”, in reference to hot young women.
ISWYDT
Stan Lee was overly fond of the word “distaff” to describe female superheroes. If I ever met him face to face I was determined to ask him how the distaff member of his marriage was doing.
Well, in all fairness he’s not the only person to repeat stuff…
I’m going to need to be careful in my own writing to avoid certain phrases that I use when I’m speaking that my friends keep informing me are not phrases they hear from anyone else. Like “have ever”. I use that a lot. For example someone asks me “Do you put horseradish in any of your vegetables as a seasoning?” and I answer “Well, I have ever put horseradish in my butternut squash, but it was awful so I never did that again”.
My friends say nobody else has that speech pattern. They’d say "I haven’t ever — where applicable — but not the other way around.
Which was exactly my point in using it.
Of late, I’ve been reading trashy bodice-rippers set in early 19th century England. One of the authors (don’t recall which one) LOVES the word rusticate. Also she, or one of the other authors, used the word fisting to refer to grabbing a fistful of something - hair, silk, crinolines… I found that disturbing for a number of reasons.
For the use you’re describing, dictionaries define “ever” as “at any time,” and the way you’re using the word (correct me if I’m wrong), the definition would be “at some time” or “on one occasion.”
I’m a fan of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone series, but in the later books she’s guilty of unnecessarily repeating phrases. I had to grit my teeth to get to the end of W is for Wasted, where many times she described a particular character as “the good doctor”.
In this kind of construction, I’m not seeing a distinction. If I have ever done something, the doing of that thing took place within the range of all time. I considered whether, at any time, I had done that thing and replied in the affirmative, “yes, I have ever”. But whenever it was that it turns out that I did so, it was of course on a specific occasion.