The Mythcreant Podcast 466 – Our Wordcraft Pet Peeves
Most of the time, we try to keep our podcast focused on important topics that matter to writers everywhere. Not today, though. This week, we’re complaining about all the wordcraft annoyances that bother us most, and maybe we’ll discover a bit about how writing works along the way. If you can’t trust three voices in a podcast, who can you trust???
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mbali Mathebula. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Opening song]
Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Wes, and with me today is?
Chris: Chris.
Wes: And?
Oren: Oren.
Wes: I’m sure you two will agree with me that, really, you’ve never met any other kind of word person who just didn’t have a bunch of just-like peeves, right? And just get unreasonably angry about things that a reasonable person just would say. Oh, why are you so mad about this? But I think that’s just the way it works. And so today, I want to share all of ours with everybody out there.
Chris: This is probably why people become copy editors… I guess.
Wes: I guess so.
Chris: I wonder how many of our volunteer copy editors decided to do it because they read our blog and they’re like, I like Mythcreants, but I wish they just wouldn’t do this one thing.
Wes: I can’t say that was the reason why I joined up. And I still affirm that the reason why… I like editing, copy editing is to try to help people make good stuff even better and bad stuff passable, right? But it’s hard to not like let certain things really get to you when your world is words. It’s just, it’s fine. And that’s okay. I’ve made my peace.
Chris: Somebody on the internet is using words wrong.
Wes: They’re using words wrong, but I don’t know. But I can also say I don’t care about that person. But if it’s in something that I’m responsible for, oh boy. And this is our podcast that we’re going to talk about. Dang it.
Oren: Yeah, I try not to be a jerk about shifting speech patterns. Some of them bother me, but if one bothers me, I usually try not to use it. But it’s unless we have a podcast, in which case then I might complain about it.
Wes: I generally subscribe to that as well. And I’ll use an example here momentarily. I think just the root of some of my peeves, is if there’s already a perfectly serviceable word. Or a different way of expressing the same thing, but just unnecessarily and it’s not fun. Whatever. Here’s my suggestion. So a good example of that is we know that taking verbs and making them nouns is a thing. And I think it’s good, right? I think you’ve got to play around with language. If you don’t, what’s the point? But the one that I’m having a really hard time getting over is the nouning of the verb ask. As in someone saying, oh, what’s the ask? Or, oh, that’s a big ask.
Oren: I’m sorry. I say that all the time Wes.
Wes: Oh, Oren man
Chris: And every time Wes is just seething inside. And plotting against you
Wes: Okay. So one, request is a perfectly good word. Sure. It’s an extra syllable.
Chris: Yeah, I think those syllables matter, personally.
Wes: Two, I find what’s the ask to be rather passive. In the sense of somebody not being direct with me. With, what they want. And that is, I think, the core of my frustration with that. It’s like, you’re in a meeting or when you’re talking to people, and they’re like, oh, what’s the ask on this? No, tell me what they want us to do. And then we will do it. What are they requesting of us? Not like, oh, what’s the ask? And let’s get chummy about it. No, just be direct. Tell us the thing.
Chris: People will go out of their way if it sounds like they’re being rude. It’s like, tell me what do they want? That, that now has a connotation.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Being annoyed. That’s the problem. I feel like there are some words that are on a never-ending, escalator of creating new phrases.
Wes: Yeah, I think you’re right.
Chris: Because I just thought about it. Now, when you send somebody, an email, you ask them the end, does that make sense? And that’s supposed to be the polite way of being like, OK, was my message received? But I think previously it was, do you have any questions? But then what happens is people start using, that end, after they give directions or something, in a very passive aggressive, do you have any questions? And then suddenly nobody can use that phrase anymore. And they have to defend it. And then, OK, let’s see, did that make any sense? Or did I make any sense? Or, right? And I think a lot of phrases are just on that, constant escalator of being taken and used in rude context. And like, oh, no, that’s rude. Have to invent something new. And saying, what do they want, now sounds rude. It sounds like you hate them.
Oren: We can’t say, per my last email anymore. But sometimes I need to refer to an email I sent. That’s a thing I need to do. And I can’t do it anymore.
Wes: Yeah. You’re right, Chris. I like to rephrase it, that elevator. Because it’s real. We get it. And the elevator speeds up by the fact of just how much we’re sending correspondence, right? Like, through IM, email, anything, any of these mediums, right? So the same things show up. But context is important. And that can be challenging. And another good example, I’ll just carry on with my peeves and you guys can get yours in.
Chris: Eventually.
Wes: It bothers me when someone that I consider to be a friend will, like, let’s say we’re in the kitchen cooking something together and I say, oh, do you want to hand me the spatula?
Oren: Hmm-mm.
Wes: Say, hey, hand me the spatula. We’re friends. You’re not going to make me mad. Do I want to do that? And I have been sometimes this horrible person who will say, no, I don’t want to do that. But I will.
Chris: No, Wes.
Wes: Look, you guys, the whole point of these things is to just be honest. And here we are.
Chris: Are you the person who, when somebody says can instead of may you respond, I don’t know, can you? Do you do that as well?
Wes: No, I do not. But I do think it’s an important thing for me. And again, I have another quick follow-up that is going to make you guys hate me even more. The point is, I don’t have to want something to do it. I will do something if I don’t want to do it. But if it’s important to you that I do it, I will do it for you.
Chris: But you want to do it for them, then?
Wes: I want to do it for them.
Chris: I really feel like we could mince this definition of want to enter certain definitions. You do want to do it.
Wes: I think so, yeah. But that’s just where I’m coming from, is I don’t think my want has anything to do with helping. I’m here for you. Just tell me what you need. And that’s being raised in a pretty, maybe like too formal of a household. And I just wish… I could just be a little bit like rawer with some of the people that I care about.
Chris: I think it’s a matter of habits that you build that you then use in other places. And there was at least one study that showed in workplace environments, when it came to giving commands to your subordinates, that women were far less likely to just give a straightforward command. And more likely to be like, hey, could you do this for me? Or something like… That’s what sometimes people bristle. And that kind of waffly language… That’s used to be polite and avoid pissing anybody off, is a lot of times language that women end up using so that people don’t get mad at us.
Oren: And admittedly, I use that kind of language a fair amount. And I hope we can still be friends. I know it’s a big ask.
Wes: Oh Oren. Oh, okay. So I will say the last thing that did not endear me to my colleagues. But we had an icebreaker meeting. And it was… The icebreaker was, what are some of your pet peeves? And I said, I’ll go first. My biggest pet peeve is when people pluralize pet peeves, because there can only be one pet peeve. Because pet, it’s like a teacher’s pet. There’s only one. That’s the whole point of that adjective, pet.
Chris: The teacher can’t have multiple pets?
Wes: No. They just would have favorites. And that’s just how that word works. But again, that’s the point. It’s like language grows, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I can still be upset about it and accept it.
Chris: Didn’t you suggest the title of this podcast is Pet Peeves?
Wes: I did. I did say specifically in our chat, I would like to talk about Wordcraft Peeves.
Chris: Oh, I see.
Oren: It’s getting meta up in here.
Wes: Oh, Lord. Okay. One of you guys needs to go less, because I think I’ve made everybody turn off their audio.
Oren: I’ll admit, one that annoys me is when people say penultimate when they mean ultimate.
Wes: Ooh, yeah.
Oren: And the reason why it annoys me is that I feel like they are losing a very useful word. I think penultimate is a very useful word. It means second to last, and it’s way easier to say than second to last.
Chris: And we already have words for last and ultimate. And yeah.
Oren: Yeah. And so when they say penultimate and they think it means the last one, I won’t lie. Part of it is because I know it’s wrong and I’m a petty person, but at the same time, I do think that they are having a disservice, perhaps done onto them by whoever taught them that word, because they are missing out on a really useful word. And I can’t point it out. There’s no way to point it out; that’s not going to make me sound like a jerk.
Wes: That’s why we have this podcast.
Chris: I have a theory about the use of penultimate to mean ultimate. There is a lot of wordcraft, and word distinctions are about when we want to add emphasis to a statement or when we want to de-emphasize. Wes was annoyed with; do you want to pass me the spatula? But those extra words are to de-emphasize that statement. And in this case, I think that extra syllable, when you want to say the ultimate, that extra syllable, it’s easy to imagine that. It’s extra-ultimate. Making the word longer somehow makes that feel more significant.
Wes: Yeah, that’s a possibility. That would make sense.
Chris: And so it’s being adopted because it almost sounds grander than ultimate, even though it actually means before ultimate. In any case, should I do one?
Oren: You’ve got to give us one now.
Chris: I have so many that anybody who reads my lessons posts has encountered. Much of my pet peeves, I have so many. Okay. Specific words that I don’t like. Anything that indicates a very unnatural, uncanny valley body movement that is clearly not intentional, like vibrating. Okay, people don’t vibrate. We have so many words. Quiver, quake, tremble. Right? We have so many words. Or just say shake. For when somebody shakes. Vibrating is so uncanny valley because it sounds mechanical and maybe sort of sexual. And we just don’t need people to vibrate. Similarly, the Pendergast book that I did lessons posts on had a character describe her as waddling. And, oh, that just sounds so dehumanizing, right?
Oren: Yeah, it’s dehumanizing. It’s fat shaming specifically. That was just gross. Come on, man.
Chris: Just stop. And in Eragon, a character runs, and it’s described as bounding, which is just strange for a humanoid, right? To be, that’s, don’t really have what we would usually consider a bounding, unless we’re like jumping from various points.
Oren: Or anamorphic. Save your bounding for your weird human deer hybrid creatures. Okay, those things can bound.
Wes: Oh, that sounds horrifying.
Oren: Deer with hands.
Wes: Oh, no.
Oren: This one is zooming out for me a little. It’s specifically in. Books. When authors don’t think about what this is going to sound like in audio. And they give their characters names that look different on the page but sound the same. An example from the book, The Goblin Emperor is the one where this came up a lot. There was, there’s a character named Setheris and a character named Csevet. And Csevet has a C in front of it. It’s spelled C-S-E-V. And Setheris is just S-E-T-H. So if you’re reading that. You’re not going to get those names mixed up because one of them starts with C and one starts with S. But if you’re just listening to it, you don’t know there’s a C there. You just hear two names that start with “Cse”. And they’re used very close together in the scene. And you’re just like, wait, which of them is which? I’m getting so confused.
Wes: Oh, boy. Something that I don’t like reading in dialogue is laughter. It’s like people literally writing hahaha hehehe or something. Absolute worst. I’m listening to a book. That I love. And it’s from decades ago. But I was like, oh, I want to do the audio version. I’m loving the audio narration. Except one character. The whole thing is he has a verbal tick where he laughs. Just he does that. And when I was reading it, I didn’t like it. But I could skip it. But on the audio book, the voice actor is doing all of it. And it’s driving me wild. I’m just like-
Chris: That poor voice actor.
Wes: -Oh, I can’t. Props to that guy, committed. But also, it is grating.
Chris: Yeah. Don’t write your laugh out in the dialogue. Don’t do it.
Wes: Don’t write your laugh out. Don’t do that. Yeah. We will edit that right out.
Oren: There are a lot of those, right? Long strings of random characters that in a text, your mind just glazes over. But in audio, you have to listen to the whole thing. And it’s like, oh, God, this means this is so aggravating. Or sometimes a book will shift into chat format if the characters are using a messaging service or something. And in, again, in a page, you can just ignore the fact that each line starts with a character’s name. But in audio, you can’t. You have to listen to them say, Steve. And then Steve’s dialogue. Bob. Bob’s dialogue. Steve. Steve’s dialogue.
Chris: When I did a short story that was based on emails for the audio, just had the narrator start to slowly drop those things off. Right. And then only say the time after a while, so I do think there’s options for that. It’s just that whoever is making the audio book is not using them.
Wes: Other things that annoy me are it’s more of just like a copy-editing thing. But these things just happen, but if I have a say in it, I’ll probably cut it. But just redundancies, like a closed fist, is there an open one? There can be a closed hand, right? But a fist, if you can show me an open fist, please.
Chris: Like that chapter that started house at the end of the world. That was one alone.
Wes: One alone.
Oren: Alright, so I’ve got my hand and, like kind of a partial fist where it’s like my fingers are curled in but not fully closed up. This is like a weak, wobbly fist. You got to close it all the way up.
Wes: Yeah, but this shows up a lot. Right? Free gift added bonus advanced warning. Like, those are all redundant, right? They’re just unnecessary, but I don’t know. Every day, it’s also a battle of, do words have meaning anymore?
Chris: One thing that gets me all the time is when women scream.
Wes: Oh, yes.
Chris: I’m not gonna say there’s no situation ever in any book where it would be okay for a woman to scream, but the behavior that we see in movies where something scary happens and then a woman just opens her mouth really wide and then sometimes pauses to take a breath first.
Wes: That deep breath, yeah.
Chris: Top of her lungs. That is not a real human behavior. People do scream, but it doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t sound like that. And women don’t scream with a drop of the hat. And a lot of writers, it’s just anything intense happening, and we want to make a big deal out of it and the nearest woman screams. And I just hate when a lot of times screaming is over the top already, but it’s just a big pet peeve of mine. I think the most notable one that I remember is I Am Number Four, where… the main character, he’s just on the edge of a boat, dangling his feet in the water, and then, he has this magic charm around his calf that suddenly starts to glow and grow hot. Right? And I think it’s painful for him. And then when she sees it, the girl next to him screams. And I’m just like, what? She screamed because something glowed around his leg in the water.
Oren: She must hate going to raves. Oh no. The glow sticks. They scare me. There is… This one is even more zooming out a little bit, but this is a Wordcraft thing that I just can’t stand, which I’m calling chained narration, which is a narration format where the story is being relayed through several different people. And I just… every time, it bothers me because I never know who is being referred to as the narrator. So like, in The Fisherman, we have the protagonist who’s telling us a story he heard from a cook, who heard it from a minister, who heard it from an elderly adherent, who heard it from her husband and father. And so I have no idea who the I pronoun is. Like, ever. It’s just so irritating.
Chris: For me, some point of view stuff is I get annoyed with omniscient, that’s not really omniscient, and with epistolary narration, that is nothing like epistolary narration. In the case of omniscient, it’s when there is supposedly omniscient perspective, but then the writer just doesn’t make any use of it. It just feels very uncreative. It’s like, when you’re using omniscient, you have the ability to include any information from anything, anywhere, any facts at all. Right? And so if you’re just going to narrowly focus on your character, maybe you just shouldn’t be omniscient at that point. Maybe you should just use a close perspective then instead.
And sometimes writers will open in omniscient, and then they’ll move, they’ll get closer and move into the character’s head, which is fairly typical. But then, immediately, they’ll do something very awkward to maintain the viewpoint from within the character’s head. And I’m just like, why don’t you just stay in omniscient and do that in omniscient instead of doing all these contortions to justify, instead of that awkward block of, for instance, in the beginning of Elantris, Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris, we open in omniscient and then we move into the prince’s head, and then we have to have him look at the city of Elantris before thinking things about it. It’s like, we wouldn’t need to do that if we just stayed in omniscient for a couple paragraphs.
Whereas for epistolary narration, oh man, I’m seeing especially so many cases of a writer claiming that this is coming from a journal entry or a diary or whatever it’s supposed to be. And that is nothing like what people talk about. For instance, with The Alchemist. With a guy, writing in his journal about how, I am legend. I am death.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: This is like his daily journal entry that he’s talking about. How great he is.
Wes: He had strong coffee that morning.
Chris: But just other things where it’s like, we can’t just do a normal teaser at the beginning of the book. We have to make that teaser come from somebody or some fictional work within the world. It’s just like, why did that person write that? It doesn’t look like something somebody would write. Or 10,000 Doors of January.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Which is obviously a first-person retelling. But at the end, the narrator claims this is a book written for one of the other characters. No, it’s not. It’s obviously not something you wrote for this person. It’s just not.
Wes: That person really wanted to see your dad’s weird thesis on portals.
Oren: A really new weird one I discovered that I hadn’t thought of before. So this is only once, so maybe I will never see it again. But it’s describing emotions as vague or mysterious or unidentifiable when their source is right there. So this was in A Study in Drowning. Very mild spoilers. The protagonist is describing how I’m afraid of this guy for reasons I can’t identify. And it’s like, alright, in just this scene, he has made multiple and increasingly aggressive unwanted advances on you. And now he’s driving at reckless speeds down a washed-out road with you in the passenger seat. I know why you’re scared of him. It’s right there. You don’t have to pretend it’s weird.
Chris: Yeah, it reminds me of the opening of The Alchemist, where we describe there’s a character who’s behind a window of a shop and there’s light, afternoon sunlight cast on the window, right? That would make her less visible. And we describe that in detail, and then she’s like, I just had a feeling that you couldn’t see me or something or shouldn’t be able to see me. How is this a feeling? You just described exactly why.
Yeah, I think we know. That’s a hard balance because in order for something like that to work, it would not make it seem either completely unbelievable, that they feel something that comes out of nowhere or not just explain it. So, why is this just a feeling? You have to choose something that’s a little bit more subjective. So that one’s a little tough.
Wes: Maybe they’re just trying to cultivate an air of mystery by being vague, which is also a peeve.
Oren: Yeah, I suppose there is that. Oh, another, this is a more random real word one. This one that I found the hard way was I was on the internet a few years ago, and I hadn’t heard the term fight me, at that point. And I now know that fight me means don’t fight me. It means I don’t want to talk about this. But when I first saw it, I thought it meant the person wanted to debate because they made some provocative statement and then said fight me. So I thought they wanted to argue, and so I went to argue with them, and they got really hurt and were like, why are you arguing with me about this? I don’t know. I thought that’s what you wanted. Look, I just, if you’re saying something that means the opposite of what it literally means, then maybe don’t assume everyone seeing it knows that secret meaning.
Wes: Yeah, yeah.
Oren: Be aware of your context here. I’ve learned since then that when someone says something I don’t understand, I should just not engage with them because I have no idea what they’re talking about, and it probably means something completely different than what I thought. But at that point, I hadn’t quite put that together yet.
Chris: Another thing that’s a pet peeve of mine that is also frequently in A Study in Drowning is metaphors that bring up imagery that just don’t match the scene and just feel very out of place and bizarre because when you bring up a metaphor, I imagine the thing, right? And sometimes it’s just like this feels, so… A Study in Drowning does this a lot, and it has things like, oh, she’s about to eat a meat pie and there’s steam coming up, and the steam rises like a spirit. I’m like, why am I imagining a ghost coming out of this meat pie? It makes an overly dramatic statement about a mere meat pie.
Oren: Which is weird because I feel like the point of that was to make us empathize with the fact that she does not want to eat this meat pie because she does not like this kind of meat pie, and she’s being pressured into it by this dude who doesn’t care about her feelings. But there’s a much more visceral and like straightforward way to do that, which would be describe the smell. Describe the smell and how she does not like that smell.
Chris: Just describe the pie so it looks unappetizing, right? And right there. Or just like other things, like I touched the love interest, elbow, and he came alive like a sprout coming out of the ground. I’m like, really? And just like they’re together in bed and you want me to imagine like just a sprout? It’s just very random.
Oren: Is that not what it feels like when you hit your funny bone on something, and you just have this enormous energy to do something because your arm hurts for no reason?
Chris: But just I’ve seen this all over the place, right? It’s clear that just a lot of writers who use metaphors just are not thinking at all about how they fit into the context and whether the imagery they are evoking actually mashes with the scene. And it can. You can easily use metaphors that do, but if you’re not thinking about that, they just they feel very bizarre and don’t create an experience that feels like it’s clashing instead of a unified experience.
Oren: There’s also one that keeps getting to me is authors who try to make something threatening by describing how it looks weird or spooky, but never have it do anything threatening. Yeah, it never does anything dangerous. Like, sure, when you don’t know what it is at first, you can create some tension just by making it look spooky. But at some point, it’s gotta do something. The whole story goes by and all it does is, be a fish person.
Chris: Dagon. Lovecraft’s Dagon.
Wes: I was gonna say, if you’re talking about Dagon, this is definitely Dagon.
Oren: It’s not just Dagon. Interestingly, another one from A Study in Drowning actually did something similar where they find some sexy pictures that some guy took and the protagonist describes the woman in the picture as like, if you gutted her like a fish, she would have two even sides. I was like, what the hell? What? Where did that come from?
Wes: Oh my god, gross.
Oren: It’s just a sexy picture. It’s not actually doing anything bad to you.
Chris: Yeah, speaking of people reacting to things, again, one of my pet peeves is, obviously, I think that emotions should be shown rather than told. I’ve said this many times. Telling them is still better than not having emotions, though. But there’s one particular emotion that people get way too elaborate with, which is fear. Fear.
Oren: Fear!
Chris: Fear. And so, stating fear, I think, is more pet peeve-y for me than the other emotions. Many cases when, again, just a lot of writers are just trying to create a dramatic story, and they want it to be powerful, and they just don’t know how. And so, they just use a lot of exaggerate language, and fear, fear, fear is one of the things that is done.
Wes: Italicize all caps. Actually, that is I don’t like using italics. You don’t see bold too often, but I don’t like emphasizing words that way. I like using word order to emphasize words, but I will not fight over this, because I think there’s a time and place for that tool.
Oren: Yeah, look, sometimes in dialogue I have to communicate that the character puts emphasis on a certain word, and I don’t know how else to do it, Wes. I’m sorry.
Chris: The order matters. It’s just subtler.
Wes: It’s best used sparingly… yes.
Oren: So, like, only once a sentence, then.
Chris: Yeah, that reminded me of a very strange instance in one of the lessons posts, where we had a line of dialogue, and one word was italicized, and then after that, we had a description of how the speaker emphasized a different word. How did this happen? Did you not want to italicize two words because it looked tacky, but you still wanted to learn emphasized, or I don’t know. Yeah. But no, I definitely think there’s a place for italics, but it certainly calls a lot of attention to itself and is much stronger emphasis than other forms.
Wes: I could bring this podcast to close with one, even though I still have, like, 30, because there’s still a lot of things that bother me. Like, cliche is a perfectly good noun. I’m a fan of cliched as the adjective form. Don’t like centered around. I don’t like firstly, thirdly, secondly, any of that. Like, flat adverbs are a thing, people. Just say first, second, third. It’s okay. I don’t know. It just bothers me. It’s by accident, not on accident.
Chris: I had never heard of cliched before copy editors started correcting me. Thought that was also an adjective. I thought cliche was also an adjective. I don’t know what to say.
Wes: Yeah, I don’t think you have to say the D.
Chris: You don’t have to say the, wait, you don’t have to say the D, so it’s like a silent D?
Wes: I don’t know. I’m not a French speaker, but maybe. You don’t have to. All the French loanwords are just full of mysterious letters that don’t mean anything. It’s fine. Yes. And I will always notice, but never correct anybody when they say that they’re nauseous.
Chris: Wait, how is that supposed to be?
Wes: It’s supposed to be nauseated because, like, the toxic flower is the nauseous thing that makes me nauseated.
Chris: But that’s not how it’s spelled. The state of being.
Wes: The thing that causes someone to experience nausea is nauseous. The person experiencing nausea, is nauseated.
Chris: Oh, okay. But that’s more syllables. I will murder people to reduce syllables, okay? The syllables gotta go.
Wes: If we want to just cut syllables, then we lose so many fun things. But also, like I said, I also am a proponent of that. I do not like based off of when based on is right there. So, again, better close this podcast.
Oren: Yeah, based off of that …, I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If we did not give you a new pet peeve, which was listening to our pet peeves, multiple pets that are peeves here.
Wes: Oh boy
Chris: Consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Closing song]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.