Used a lot of nail varnish in Cambridge, did you? Watched a lot of sport on the TV? Used coffee as a count noun? Have a lot of federal agents seconded to other agencies? Yes, I mean the Merchant Princes series, and yes, I really do find lots of the usage entirely at variance with American English, even Cambridge English, even if all of Charlie's American characters hailed from Boston, which they don't. It's not a question of retained phrasing, it's contemporary British usage that has never been current in the US.
I complained bitterly at Charlie after the first one and offered to read through the current manuscript for him. I made the mistake of reading through the second book first at his suggestion, which while still technically in manuscript form was already past recall in terms of text edits, and it broke my spirit. My copy was so covered in hi-liter that it looked like some festive form of ribbon candy, and all that language I found out would be going to press that way. When I got to the third book manuscript, the "nail varnish" was in the first paragraph of the first chapter and I just couldn't go on, especially since, by the third book, Charlie's editor was supposedly reading through to catch British usage, and it was still that egregious. I owe Charlie a big apology for not immediately and explicitly confessing my failure at that point, but I really was surprisingly dispirited by the whole experience of reading through finding changes that would never see the light of day anyway.
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Date: 2011-08-29 06:08 pm (UTC)I complained bitterly at Charlie after the first one and offered to read through the current manuscript for him. I made the mistake of reading through the second book first at his suggestion, which while still technically in manuscript form was already past recall in terms of text edits, and it broke my spirit. My copy was so covered in hi-liter that it looked like some festive form of ribbon candy, and all that language I found out would be going to press that way. When I got to the third book manuscript, the "nail varnish" was in the first paragraph of the first chapter and I just couldn't go on, especially since, by the third book, Charlie's editor was supposedly reading through to catch British usage, and it was still that egregious. I owe Charlie a big apology for not immediately and explicitly confessing my failure at that point, but I really was surprisingly dispirited by the whole experience of reading through finding changes that would never see the light of day anyway.