just a moment of fussing

[fox]

Okay. In fanfic that's set in the UK, or whose dialogue is spoken by people with UK accents, I admit that I can overlook "gotten". It's better if you don't use it, of course, because they don't, but since I do, it doesn't really bother me that much -- kind of a buzz that I can brush away and move on. (I try not to commit this myself, of course. I'm just saying.)

What I cannot allow, though, is drug as the past tense (or participle, for that matter) of drag. Good lord, I have not been so comprehensively yanked out of what I've been reading in ages. I don't have any problem with constructions like "That sentence ought to be drug out and shot", or "They drug the corpse into the light", or "He felt like his deepest secrets had been drug out from inside him" -- but I do when those constructions are supposed to be in the POV of (to take one example) Ianto bloody Jones, whom I haven't known for long but whose dialect I can just about assure you does not have this form. (It is frequent in rural areas of the -- especially southern -- United States, but in British dialects more or less obsolete. The OED notes it as "obsolete Scottish and English dialect usage", meaning it was off-standard even when it was in use, which was a long time ago and, still more importantly in Ianto's case, not Welsh or they'd have said so.)

Also, please stop capitalizing vocative "sir".

Comments

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Of course there are exceptions. :) Idioms come with their own rules, and that's fine. An educated person who's deliberately using a very slangy or street or otherwise dialectical expression will make "errors" in their English. An idiom or other "off the shelf" string of words might not be proper standard American (or British) English, but might be correct in and of itself.

My complaint is when "drug" is used non-idiomatically by a character whom I feel, because of how they use the language otherwise, wouldn't use that word. It seems like the writer uses it in everyday speech (and I know one or two writers who use this word in their stories well enough to know that they do use it when just talking -- I'm just assuming with the others) and doesn't know that everyone else doesn't. Rules should be broken deliberately and for a reason, because you want to achieve a certain effect, not accidentally because the writer didn't know any better. [wry smile]

Angie