Borges liked to use “vertiginous” (veriginoso/a in the original Spanish, I assume). Fun to see it in different contexts.
P. D. James liked to use “minatory”, appropriate considering the nature of her plots
This thread has made me think of a series of paranormal cozy mysteries that I’m reading, by an author named Alyn Troy. No pretense at being great literature, but entertaining enough.
He constantly uses the word “fellow”. Like this:
“That detective fellow was looking for you.”
“I want to talk to that Sinclair fellow.”
“Yes, that’s the fellow I meant.”
“No one noticed when the fellow left the party.”
It’s constant! And it’s not just a quirk of one particular character; everybody talks like that. And they almost never use any other synonym. Never “guy” or “dude,” or even “man.” Just “fellow.” It’s really distracting.
? What about James’s plots was particularly admonitory, threatening or ominous? I mean, I guess all murder mysteries are full of ominous events but I wouldn’t necessarily describe the plot itself that way.
(Wait a minute, if that was actually meant as an allusion to the labyrinthine nature of her plots with a pun on “Minotaur”, then Hats OFF, Sir. 
)
LOL, good one, but that Minotaur pun isn’t what I meant.
And I misspoke; it’s not James’s plots that are minatory, it’s her characters. There’s a good number of them, especially women, whom she describes as speaking in minatory tones or giving minatory looks, and for some of them, even when she doesn’t use the word, that’s how they act.
Ian Toll’s excellent three-volume history of the Pacific campaign in WWII does have a bit of a problem with overused words and phrases.
Ships repeatedly “drank” fuel (sometimes they were “thirsty” and “drank their fill”, though without colossal burps afterwards). Planes continually “trade altitude for speed”. Ships which are torpedoed or bombed do not just sink, they descend into “the abyss”.
It must be difficult not to repeat oneself over thousands of words, but you’d think his editors might have advised a little more variety.
I just finished Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton. Verily.
Speaking of Holden, there’s a line in Chasing Amy where Hooper X says: “How do you begin and end a question with the same word like that? You got skill.”
Things like this make be aware that others find repetition “wrong”, but mostly I just don’t see it. So I guess I have a really high threshold.
I was reading South by Shackleton, learning some thousand different words for ice, and it was a nice smooth, easy read, when suddenly, while crossing Antarctica, they encountered sastrugi. What? I had to look that up, and just after I put the dictionary back on the shelf, just a few short paragraphs later, they had to do something with their finneskoe. Luckily, that was it for obscure words in the book.
I tried once to read The Book of Mormon. Made it about 50 pages in.
It came to pass that I couldn’t bear it any longer.
My cousin tried to read it out loud. He would get through five or six sentences and abruptly descend into some fragment of “… And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and fruit bats and breakfast cereals …”
I thought stoats were in there somewhere? I may have just heard that because I wanted it to be true.
There needs to be some measure in everything.
I’m now reading a novel published by a friend, in order to give her my honest opinion of her writing. After having read about a fifth or a quarter of the rather long novel, I met her and told her that on the whole I like her writing quite a bit.
My only complaint: there’s one word that she uses ALL THE TIME. The book is in Czech, and her characters are constantly stated as “vyhrkl(a)” = I / he / she blurted out. The novel is chock full of this word, and it seems like her protagonist and other characters can’t speak any other way than by blurting out things.
I told her this, and her comment was that she wasn’t thinking about it, that it just came naturally to her. I must say that I don’t like it. I would use that expression very little in writing, only when the context really required it.
I have heard it numerous times, on the soundtrack album, so I am certain it is “sloths”, but your confusion is understandable, because normal people say “slaughths” but in the reading, it is pronounced “sloeths”.
Also, no reasonable person would feast on a stoat. They are disgusting. No amount of chennai curry mixed with peruvian ghost peppers is enough. Trust me.
I just read Slaughterhouse Five yesterday, and finally got the reference. It was on my list of books to read when I retired. As I was reading, I said to myself that that phrase had to show up in this thread. I didn’t notice the phrase the first few times it showed up, and then it was annoying, but eventually I got the joke. It killed me!
And so it goes.
My very old paperback of the novel included an unofficial nadsat language dictionary. It made the book (and the movie) much more enjoyable.
I’d be happy for “sloeths” to be the pronunciation, because I once, just for fun, wrote an additional verse to “Swinging on a Star” that went
A sloth is an animal that hangs from a tree,
A hanger-on is all he’ll ever be.
He won’t be a rival for the lion’s crown
He’ll only be the leader of the upside-down
But if you pledge to indolence your troth*
You might grow up to be a sloth
- (pronounced “troeth”)
Joseph Skvorecki, “Dvorak in Love” - one of the characters is described as Dvorak’s “amanuensis”, without explanation, and the word is used constantly from the first mention onward.
It is nowhere near as common a word as Mr. Skvorecki seems to think it is, even in musical circles. It apparently means ‘person who takes musical dictation’…
What about "dassent?”
As in:
Dassnt in American English (ˈdæsənt)
chiefly Northern U.S.contaction of
Dare not" ?
If so, where did the 'S’s frome from?