What’s Czech for “vouchsafed”? Or worse, “ejaculated”?
I run across “ejaculated” instead of “said” in conversations in older novels (including some of the Nero Wolfe mysteries), and it’s a distracting form of intercourse.
An unfortunately punctuated passage from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Oblong Box”:
“They sank as a matter of course,” replied the captain, “and that like a shot. They will soon rise again, however- but not till the salt melts.”
“The salt!” I ejaculated.
I see what you did there!
I noticed that HG Welles used “ejaculate” a lot in his novels.
I once slogged my way through Atlas Shrugged and found Rand’s repeated use of “astonished” to be particularly annoying. For all the preliminary work she claimed to do before actually writing the novel, she apparently couldn’t come up with a synonym. (A thesaurus would have made a good Christmas gift, if she ever celebrated Christmas.)
I never got very far into The Fountainhead, so I don’t know if this was a pattern of hers. (I just saw the movie instead.)
I reviewed a non-fiction manuscript for a university press and the author used the phrase, “the chickens came home to roost” five times. The published version cut most of them. It did remind me of Orwell on dead metaphors, and I wondered how many contemporary readers would have any idea what roosting chickens looked like.
I found all of the words in Atlas Shrugged annoying. I hold no specific animus towards “astonished”.
Yes, these words are synomyms. “ejaculate” in that old sense translates to “vyhrknout” or “vykřiknout”.
I read through all Ellis Peters’ Cadfael stories during lockdown, and got annoyed by her over use of “erect”, not in a sexual sense but just describing a person’s posture.
In the historical period known as the Anarchy when Cadfael is set, any person described as having an erect posture would probably be upper class (or a monk), as opposed to a lower-class toiler in the fields, worn down by hard work. So this gives some indication of the person’s socio-economic status.
But there are other ways of indicating this.
I think Stephen King uses “noisome” a bit too much.
Where exactly in “the Northern US”? I’m from Minnesota, and I’ve never heard anyone say that there. New England, perhaps?
It’s a contraction of the archaic verb ending -est.