Here's a compromise: A future book mentions that Klag is now suffering from progressive neck injuries.
Threw my head back and vomited
- Thread starter Ben Sisko
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Reading Ben Sisko's list, this is what I pictured, looping over and over and over...
EDIT: Weird, looks like my gif was removed.
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I dislike "____s jaw fell open", which I've noticed in a few DS9-R novels.
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On the issue of editting electronic novels, this is really interesting. I am currently reading Remediation: Understanding New Media, by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999). For them remediation is the system by which older media are repurposed in new media, and is both linked to hypermediacy and immediacy. In the second chapter, they present the idea that remediation can have several functions, implicitly and explictly. One of these is 'remediation as reform', though they do not condone the idea that reform of a media is automatically remediation. I'll quote them, and put in bold a line which is interesting for understanding some of the ideals that perhaps were intended in the ebook back in the 90s:
Amazon
Anyway, as you see in a 1999 text, the interactivity of the electronic novel was part of its promise then. Interactivity includes personal preferential manipulation of content, perhaps including the very words of the text - allowing the personal remediation of the older, no longer sacrosanct, monolithic medium of the novel.
To read about the impact of Remediations, you can see this article from Seminar.net.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin said:
Amazon
Anyway, as you see in a 1999 text, the interactivity of the electronic novel was part of its promise then. Interactivity includes personal preferential manipulation of content, perhaps including the very words of the text - allowing the personal remediation of the older, no longer sacrosanct, monolithic medium of the novel.
To read about the impact of Remediations, you can see this article from Seminar.net.
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Probably, but, depending on the character and the context, sometimes you just want go with something quick-and-dirty and easily understood so you can focus on what the scene is really about. Why come up with some clever new way to describe hair if what matters is that the Romulans just attacked DS9?
Speaking as someone who has written way too much advertising copy, sometimes you can be too clever and original. There's something to be said for being blunt and direct and just saying what you mean in the most accessible way possible. I think of it as the "brute force" approach. Communication over complexity.
Granted, you don't want to use the same made-to-order phrases so often that they call attention to themselves and get distracting. But, to be honest, we all have our pet phrases and tics that we fall back on too often sometimes, especially when you're writing three or four books a year.
(I know what my crutches are, but I'm not going to incriminate myself here!)
I don't see what's wrong with "salt-and-pepper" there. It's a widely accepted and understood usage, and it's in the dictionary with that particular meaning -- although it seems to be a variant on the earlier "pepper-and-salt," which dates back to around 1770s. So that's simply the word for that type of hair or coat pattern. It seems no worse than using "redhead" to describe someone with orangish or coppery hair.
And it's not just used for men. Nearly everyone in my family past a certain age has salt-and-pepper hair.
The new Sony PRS-T2 doesn't have the full flash on every page turn from a French video I saw the other day showing the T2 turning three pages.
(IMHO), the Kindle just looks old and the style is just ugly.
Was all that from one book or multiple books? If multiple books, it doesn't actually count.
Maybe I'm misinterepreting CNash but I don't think he's saying that there's anything wrong with that expression, just that it's over-used.
Not a Trek example, but while I love George R R Martin's writing, I do get a bit weary of him using the expression 'waddled' in relation to Tyrion Lannister's gait. Yes, Tyrion's a dwarf and walks funny. We get it George. Just open the thesaurus and find another way to describe it...
But that's just it. How can something be overused when it is the standard word for the thing being described? It's not even a slang expression, it's just what that particular coloration is named. Hence my "redhead" analogy. It's like saying the word "phaser" is being overused. What else are you gonna call it?
To be fair, it's a judgment call. If "waddled" or "salt-and-pepper" are distracting readers, you at least have to ask yourself if there's problem--even if it seems like the perfect word for the occasion. I guess it depends on how unusual the word or phrase is. "Corscucating" or "eldritch" are probably more noticeable than "dark."
(By the time I finished writing a HULK book years ago, I was running out of synonyms for "green.")
Not the same thing at all.
A phaser is a phaser. That's what it is. Salt and pepper are condiments, not hair colours. That expression may be a way of describing a particular hair colouring but I wouldn't say that it's the 'standard word' for it. It's descriptive, not factual. And it's certainly not a phrase I've ever actually heard used in every day speech or conversation. In fact, I'd be pretty sure I've never actually heard it used in real life.
Perhaps it's more common in the US than in the UK or Ireland, but over here, you'd be more likely to hear 'greying' or 'grey.' I certainly wouldn't compare it to the word 'redhead', which seems to be fairly generic. But even still, you might hear someone with red hair described as having auburn hair, ginger hair, copper hair, rusty... (being a red head and having a redheaded daughter, I know of what I speak!)
Besides, given that you can have black pepper, white pepper, red pepper, brown pepper, I've never thought that salt and pepper is a particularly helpful description of hair colour...
Hmm. I suspect this is a regional thing. "Ginger" hair is actually something of an Anglicism here and one could raise the same objections to using "ginger" as a description of hair.
"Ginger is a spice, not a color. And it's actually a brownish root that's not red at all!"
Honestly, I only know "ginger hair" from British books and TV shows.
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And orange is the name of a fruit. But it's been used as the name for a color as well for many, many centuries, so it's the actual word for that color now, not just a slang term. This is the same thing. Hair that mixed black and gray/white has been called "pepper-and-salt" or "salt-and-pepper" for at least two and a half centuries. It's in the dictionary as a word meaning that particular coloration. It may have started out as just an expression, but it is the standard word for it now and has been for centuries.
I have -- but then, as I said, it's a term that would come up in my family, since it describes most of us.
But that's a different concept. "Gray" refers to hair that appears to have a fairly uniform gray shade. "Graying" may refer to something like the Reed Richards look where portions of the hair such as the temples are gray and the rest is not. But "salt-and-pepper" refers to a particular type of graying pattern where white hairs are interspersed fairly randomly among the black, but not uniformly enough to appear as a solid gray. It's a word that carries a specific meaning not conveyed by other words.
But it's been part of the language for a quarter-millennium. What the constituents of the word originally meant is beside the point. This is what it means now.
^As Greg says though, it's probably more of a regional thing. Perhaps UK readers can correct me, but I don't think it would be anywhere near as common on this side of the Atlantic.
And I honestly didn't know the specific type of greying pattern (note - there we go again, divided by a common language; grey v gray) it meant until you explained it.
And I honestly didn't know the specific type of greying pattern (note - there we go again, divided by a common language; grey v gray) it meant until you explained it.
This is all very pedantic and nitpicky, ultimately description demands a conceptual language that will usually be drawn from the author's preferred own lexicon, which comes from their own experiences. You see this in how schools and education is described by different authors across the globe in a more broad context, with words like 'sophomore', 'high school', 'secondary', 'university', 'college', etc, drawing from their own experiences and creating reader familiarity or alienation. This in similar to the use of 'salt and pepper' or 'graying', etc, in that the writer's experience and desire to use traditional or non-traditional word pools (as they define them) determine the word choice, and create either reader familiarity or alienation.
The tendency to certain descriptive terms is not a new thing, nor limited to our tie-in authors. One of the most common words in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is 'countenance', appearing I seem to remember in every chapter of the 1830 text at least. It of course originated in her geographical, educational and class origin, and perhaps was just as annoying to her 1810s and 1830s readers. But more importantly, it more annoyed and fascinated me as a 2000s reader because the word is antiquated now, so uncommon to how I then used language. In the same way, I don't use 'salt and pepper', it is not part of my linguistic background; 'graying' or 'grayish' would be the choice I have. Hence I usually notice the term. [Nor do I describe dwarves as 'waddling', hence the term might stand out to me, and especially because Martin isn't just describing, he is adding subtext to Tyrion, a voyeuristic allusion to how the dwarf is perceived as non-human, animalstic and abhorrent by others.]
But arguing over the merits of these words can pedantry, and ineffective pedantry, since it is based purely on the arguing minds' own experience. Perhaps the only effective complaint, outside pedantry, is that 'salt-and-pepper' is functional, and very unlikely to be subtextual: it is pure description. More open-ended words, more suggestive words, from simple things like 'graying' to complex statements are far more open to analysis, therefore more interesting and more artistic. Consider how the Modernist Mervyn Peake described various gray-haired characters in his texts, like in Titus Groan and its successors: never simple, either in word choice or symbolism.
[and i love this quote from Titus Groan in my signature. The book is one of the masterpieces of poetic prose from the last century, one of those highlights of modernist attempts at capturing the avant-garde & simultaneously making remediation of past media and genres.]
The tendency to certain descriptive terms is not a new thing, nor limited to our tie-in authors. One of the most common words in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is 'countenance', appearing I seem to remember in every chapter of the 1830 text at least. It of course originated in her geographical, educational and class origin, and perhaps was just as annoying to her 1810s and 1830s readers. But more importantly, it more annoyed and fascinated me as a 2000s reader because the word is antiquated now, so uncommon to how I then used language. In the same way, I don't use 'salt and pepper', it is not part of my linguistic background; 'graying' or 'grayish' would be the choice I have. Hence I usually notice the term. [Nor do I describe dwarves as 'waddling', hence the term might stand out to me, and especially because Martin isn't just describing, he is adding subtext to Tyrion, a voyeuristic allusion to how the dwarf is perceived as non-human, animalstic and abhorrent by others.]
But arguing over the merits of these words can pedantry, and ineffective pedantry, since it is based purely on the arguing minds' own experience. Perhaps the only effective complaint, outside pedantry, is that 'salt-and-pepper' is functional, and very unlikely to be subtextual: it is pure description. More open-ended words, more suggestive words, from simple things like 'graying' to complex statements are far more open to analysis, therefore more interesting and more artistic. Consider how the Modernist Mervyn Peake described various gray-haired characters in his texts, like in Titus Groan and its successors: never simple, either in word choice or symbolism.
[and i love this quote from Titus Groan in my signature. The book is one of the masterpieces of poetic prose from the last century, one of those highlights of modernist attempts at capturing the avant-garde & simultaneously making remediation of past media and genres.]
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^I don't think it's fair to describe the dialogue above as 'pedantry.' We've just been discussing how we use or don't use particular words and phrases or why they work or don't work for us.
I mean, this is pretty much the same as you've done in your post. And isn't that what this thread was about anyway?
I mean, this is pretty much the same as you've done in your post. And isn't that what this thread was about anyway?
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