Author Habits That Annoy You

[David cgc]

With regards to Scotty, I'll cop to throwing in the occasional "cannae" -- as in "I cannae change the laws of physics!"

Can't remember if I got away with it or not.

I think I'll defer to Len Pennie's "Scots Word of the Day" when trying to distinguish specific words from regional pronounciations.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

 

[Greg Cox]

True story: I took a class on Dostoevsky in college. During one of our first sessions, discussion was hampered somewhat by the fact that none of us were sure how to pronounce the names, leading to awkward comments like:

"Um, I really liked the part where, um, the daughter confessed that she was in love with, er, the gambler, even though she was engaged to, um, the doctor . . . . "

After a few minutes of this, the professor took a time out to tell us how to pronounce the names.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Names with difficult-to-parse pronunciations are so rare in ADF's works that on at least one occasion (regarding the AAnn, the antagonist species in the HC milieu), I've even emailed him about it. And I was pleasantly shocked when he answered with an explanation of how to pronounce the species name (as I recall, he confirmed that it's roughly like the name of the actor who played Master Kan in Kung Fu), and that the string of capital letters that AAnn have instead of surnames is pronounced as a string of letters, rather than as a word.

Almost as shocked as I was, decades ago, when I emailed the head of the Harvard Organ Society about the possibility of sitting down with the Harvard Flentrop, and got a reply that yes, since the Music School was on Spring Break, I could have one of their practice slots on the instrument.