funny you should mention it

[fox]

emila_wan has a post about being driven batty by overuse of fixed phrases.  In her case, she's made nuts by the "waves" metaphor, which is probably particularly frustrating since she reads mostly (if not exclusively) TPM, where emotions and feelings and whatnot are always radiating from people in waves rather than, I don't know, pulses or gusts or whatever.  Personally, the whole radiating thing bugs me over there, irrespective of the shape of what's radiating, and the shields and the dials and so on ... the whole Force concept is verrry tricky to do in ways that don't make people roll their eyes.

But anyway, the reason I bring it up ("it" being the fact that emila_wan brought it up in the first place [g]) is that I've been reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and liking it fine, but in the past few days I've been driven BANANAS by the writer's (over-)use of term as a transitive verb.  "Blah blah blah some phenomenon, which anthropologists term jargon item."  "Yadda yadda found in somplace or other (termed buzzword)."  I don't think one such use would bother me, but it's EVERYWHERE and now ANY TIME I SEE IT it's making me CRAZY.  Didn't he have a grad student (HA!  I just mis-typed that "grad stupid") whose job it was to look over the manuscript and flag the fact that he'd used the same unusual construction FIVE TIMES IN A TWO-HUNDRED-WORD PARAGRAPH?

And if not, why on earth am I the only one qualified to notice such things?

Comments

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

For every thing (term term term) there is a season (term term term), but not every 40 words!

And once you notice someone has a pet phrase, you see it as if in bold type EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Whatever their topic is, it takes second place to THAT DAMN PHRASE.

[emila-wan.livejournal.com]

See, there's an example of what I was talking about: your superior ability to notice such minutiae of usage. I read that book and NEVER noticed the construction you mention.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Somewhere sometime I saw a tool that would go through your LJ and identify commonly used phrases, but of course I can't find it anymore.

[lightgetsin.livejournal.com]

But wait, doesn't everyone know that emotions are both waves and particles at the same time?

[gloriana.livejournal.com]

Do you think of that as an unusual construction? I'd have thought it fairly common myself - perhaps the usage is more English than American, and only odd because he's an American author?

That said, I am horribly, horribly picky about repetition (unless done on purpose, of course :)), and sometimes surprise myself at how often I'll nag a writer in beta to change this or that innocent little word. And of course, the more unusual the phrase, the bigger the gap between instances is required to be.

As for Forces waving, or shielding, I would just be grateful if every instance of laving or shell-like ears could be deleted from the fandom. Forever.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

No, the first nine or ten thousand times he used it, it didn't bother me. It's the constant refusal to use anything else -- like he's afraid of "called" or anything similar. Gah.