Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

“Enormity” bothers me. What bothers me worse, though, is when a writer confuses “councillor” and “counselor/counsellor” (depending on your dialect of English). Trust me, a city alderman does not want to hear about your marital troubles.

*wince* I wish I could change that to “bothers me more”.

freerice! I hate the freerice! I loathe the free rice! I wish it would go away, but there it is, and at this point I’ve donated enough rice to feed Ethiopia!

Complement vs compliment. I have to look it up every single time. And stupidly enough, lose and loose, especially if I’ve just used chose or choose.

I laughed to see “nonplussed” on the list, because my husband misused it just that way the other day. I mocked him mercilessly, since we’ve both spent immense amounts of cash getting better-than-college-educated. He also said “noisome” once when he meant “toothsome,” which really turned a compliment around.

I’m guilty of using “peruse” incorrectly.  Oh the shame…

Do you think Jane Porter’s parents were Edgar Rice Burroughs fans?

The daily papers here do tend to gloss over the high cost of living, the increasingly horrendous traffic, the homeless population, how we are one shipping strike away from not being able to feed the population, etc., so don’t get too jealous. The weather is quite lovely today, though.

You’re welcome :)

Hmmmm.  Intergalactic silence on topic #1.  Is it the result of flying/driving home after Thanksgiving, helping hubby with his slain deer, or (perchance) egotism?

Okay, I’ve fucked up with pristine (but not so much, I guess, if it essentially means “unspoiled").

Do I want to read about writers who live in Hawaii?  Are you freakin’ nuts?  I live in central Wisconsin.  It’s almost December.  You go grab a map and figure it out.

Hoff?  The only time I cared about him was when he cried, as an audience member, on “American Idol” (5) as Ryan Whatshisname announced Taylor Hicks as the winner.  (I love me some Tay!) You can view this event for yourselves on YouTube.  Now that it’s over and done with, I don’t care anymore.

Complement vs compliment. I have to look it up every single time.

Here’s one of those things a teacher taught me that will forever be stuck there in the back of my mind when I see one or the other of these words: compliment is spelled with an i because compliments are something I like to receive.  There’s more of these sayings rattling around my brain, a la “dessert is so good that it has 2 s’s”, and it’s hard to know if it was a blessing or a curse that this teacher was so effective with those memory devices.

As for freerice...oy, what a timesuck!  I get obsessed with increasing my level, then drop to the depths of despair when I get one wrong and see my number going down.  Then of course I have to give more rice and keep on going to regain and improve my position.  If giving to others was always so selfish, no doubt there wouldn’t be a need to give at all.

The only reason I can remember if I need to use two O’s in loose/lose, is an English teacher once pointed out that “lose” has only one O because it lost the other.  Same teacher who said that everything (well, just about everything) is doubled in “committee” because committees always have lots of people in them.

Wow! I wish I had some of these English teachers when I was growing up in Oklahoma.  They always told me to “sound it out” and “find it in the dictionary.” For those teachers I always wanted to point to “knight” which a 10 year old is not going to “sound out” correctly.  But worse, in Oklahoma pin and pen sound pretty much the same as do when and win etc etc.  That’s why today, I spend my time learning phonetic languages like Turkish and Italian.  Forget English, I never could spell right anyway. ;)

They missed “hopefully” which drives me nuts. 

“Hopefully the criminal will spend the rest of his life in jail” doesn’t mean “we all hope the criminal will spend the rest of his life in jail”. 

It means “The criminal will spend the rest of his life in jail in a hopeful frame of mind.” Get it?  “Hopefully” describes how someone is feeling or behaving.  The poem ended hopefully”.

Oh god, I am such a pedant.

In Modern Manners, PJ O’Rourke advises (I paraphrase):

When someone misuses a word, do not correct them. Rather, use that word yourself, in the proper context, at least five times in the next fifteen minutes of conversation. Be sure to make lots of eye contact when you do. It’s only polite.

I’ve used this technique before, and I get a little burst of evil pleasure each time.

Oh, and here’s another one I just ran into: the use of “titular” as a simple, nuance-free synonym of “eponymous”. NO.

When you call something “titular”, you’re hinting that the person which the book (or comic, or whatever) is named after is in reality powerless. That’s because titular’s more common and older meaning is “a title in name only”, ie. one without any power or responsibility. For example, a “titular see” in the Roman Catholic church is a diocese that is no longer active, usually because the inhabitants converted to Islam centuries ago.