Well, I don’t want to debate it, and you seem to know already that it’s incorrect usage (right?), but the “within the range of all time” quality comes from the present perfect verb tense (have + past participle), not from “ever.” It might be better described as “at an indefinite point in time.” The same questions and answers can be formulated without using “ever.”
“Have you put horseradish in…?”
“I have (not) put it in…”
When I taught English, I used to tell students that the use of “ever” in this sense is limited to questions and negatives. Thankfully, they didn’t challenge that explanation.
My cousin told me he could not get past the first page of A Clockwork Orange. A few years after that, I picked it up and started reading. I just about failed to notice “moloko”, but then the word “mesto” popped up in exactly the right place, and that sure got my attention. Turned out to be pretty easy for me (although “horrorshow” took a time or two before I cottoned onto what it was suppoaed to be rendering).
By contrast, I picked up Kidnapped three different times and was never able to get to the end of the first page. It was just too painful, the odd vernacular combined with the classical dense 19th century writing style.
Oh, and he loved the word limned. Any character entering a room was limned, so presumably they were always moving from a brighter room to a darker one.
I’ve noticed that she uses “tucked” a lot. But I’ve wondered if a book is written in first person, like her books, it does make sense that a person may use certain words frequently. I guess it’s a character trait to use the word.
Someone feckless is lacking in feck. And what, you may ask, is feck? In Scots—our source of feckless—feck means “majority” or “effect.” The term is ultimately an alteration of the Middle English effect. So something without feck is without effect, or ineffective. In the past, feckful (meaning “efficient, effective,” “sturdy,” or “powerful”) made an occasional appearance. But in this case, the weak has outlived the strong: feckless is a commonly used English word, but feckful has fallen out of use.
A few decades ago, I had a word processor that included a grammar checker, but it was not running in the background. You can write a tome first and then run the grammar checker over it, which I suspect is what most people (who use them) would do.
I wonder what The Eye of Argon would look like if you ran it through a grammar checker. Of course, Theis’s style (such as it is) suggests that he himself had an aversion to repeating commonplace words. In that story, no one ever says anything. They croak, they hiss, they opine. One guy even gurgled, IIRC (to be fair, Grignr had just stabbed him through the throat).
The first Harry Turtledove novel I ever read was “Guns of the South.” Harry about drove me round the proverbial bend with his incessant description of the Confederate’s uniforms as “butternut.”
Kinsey is a fun narrator, but “the good doctor” phrase is in the omniscient narrative which makes up at least 1/4 of the book. It’s one reason that people say that the end of the series has gone downhill–too much of it isn’t in Kinsey’s smart, distinctive voice.
Yes, really. I bought it in the early 90s. I think it is possible for me to boot one of my computers into an OS that can run it in emulation mode. Mostly I do not use them fancy monster WPs that have it built in/bundled, so decades is how long it has been since I particularly noticed their presence (the one time I did run it, I found it annoying and not all that worthwhile, as I have pretty good grammar myself).
I can understand fantasy authors using completely new words, especially for names. I can even understand fantasy authors using names that are exact copies of real world names, if they get uncreative.
But I saw the Game of Thrones series way before I read any of the characters’ names or titles in text. I am now determined to never read the books at all. Far too many names and titles that sound exactly like real world words but cutesily spelled. It was only last week that I found out that there wasn’t a character named “Egret”.
Not a book, but one thing I noticed while someone else was watching X-Files was that the two central characters address each other by (sur-)name with what seems to me to be unusual frequency. On the order of every third or fourth line of dialog, sometimes more, when there is no one else around or no doubt about who is being spoken to. In my personal experience, address appears scantly in conversation, and its abundance makes conversation seem wooden.
It never crossed my threshold but it was noticeable: the amazing and wonderful author Terry Pratchett had a great fondness for “susurration”. Great word. But his regular use of it took me out of the flow after seeing it show up so regularly.
