Otter's Rock

I am a pedant and a grammar geek.  I'm normally the one who gets tweaked by apostrophes in the wrong place and always notices when someone uses the wrong word and it really tweaks me off.  (The large annoyance factor has to do with my Aspergers, I'm pretty sure.)  (Which is why I was so surprised that this weekend at the synod's youth gathering I wasn't the one to spot the repeating error in the devotion directions--it said "scared" instead of "sacred," so there was like a whole page talking about "scared space," and once somebody pointed it out to me it was pretty funny, especially considering it's October and I'm on the board of a group planning a small haunted house in town.)

But, anyway, in fic I can usually tell when someone has too much reliance on their spellchecker and not enough on an actual dictionary to make sure they're using the right word.

Today I spotted a perennial favorite: "rouge" instead of "rogue"

Rogue (the word they meant) means "a person who is dishonest or immoral; a man who causes trouble in a playful way."  "Rogue" is also the name of one of the X-Men, and the name of Luke Skywalker's squadron in Star Wars.

Rouge, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned word for red (well, in English it's old fashioned, in French it's the regular word for it), and also an old-fashioned name for certain types of makeup, usually what we now call "blush" (i.e. the red stuff you put on your cheeks to give you color).  The nightclub Moulin Rouge (the setting for the movie of the same name) means "The Red Mill," so named for the red windmill on top of the building.

Having your hard-bitten investigators sitting around a table talking about bringing in someone who  "went rouge" is, er, unexpectedly humorous and gives me a mental picture of someone being brought in under arrest for being a drag queen or something similar, or possibly turning into a can-can dancer.  Not quite the effect the author was going for ...

This is one reason why betas are a good thing, because they (hopefully) catch things like this.  And I don't care how good a writer you are, everyone does this sometimes (or has a computer do it for you when it autocorrects incorrectly and you don't notice ....)

What are your favorite (or least favorite) perennial typos/misspellings/homonym abuses/malapropisms?

I love Mark Twain--doesn't everybody?--and while re-reading one of my favorite of his essays, I had a thought.  The essay is "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," a hilarious critique of "The Leatherstocking Tales" by James Fenimore Cooper, the only one of which you have likely heard being The Last of the Mohicans.  Although they were hailed as classics and great works of literature in their day, they've largely fallen out of circulation, largely for the reasons Mark Twain lists.  (Though a modern critic would add quite harsh words about the overwhelming levels of prejudice and condescension towards non-whites in the stories.)

Anyway, the point is, that most of the problems Twain lists can also be found in the worse kinds of fanfic, the kind that make discerning readers hit the back button quite quickly.  I know that none of you, dear Readers, would ever commit these heinous crimes against the Literary Art, but in the hope that some among you may find them Useful, I hereby present "The nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction" as given by Mark Twain, with some additions by myself.

( Nineteen Rules ).

There will always be bad!fic, if for no other reason than that every writer has 1 million bad words in zir, and zie just has to write until zie gets them out.  (I know there is a great deal of my early work--two whole novels, and some other stuff--that will never see the light of day again.)  Still, it's a lot quicker to get those million bad words out if one has some idea of what to look for in good work, because if you can find it in your own, it's a lot easier to polish what you've got.