Irony Burns

[akirlu]

Okay, I have to confess, I find the spectacle of Charlie bloody Stross complaining about someone else getting their Transatlantic details wrong a bit giddy-making. It's a wonder he has the face to do it, in light of the patent hash he makes of his own American characters and dialog. He's rather deeply into pots and kettles territory, there.

(You'll have to scroll down in comments to find it.)

I presume the excuse will be that Willis is writing about WW II and this period is IMPORTANT, but I don't know that the alleged importance of the period makes the sin any greater. (I'm also a bit dubious that WW II is really that much more important a period for England than WW I, espeically given the ways in which the latter set up the former.)

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.

[joyful-storm.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I just wanted to clarify what books you felt had issues (I haven't read everything of his yet). I didn't say there weren't any errors, just that nothing happened to jar me enough that I broke out of my reading flow.

The one I've heard the most complaints about is the coffee. "Want to go out for a coffee?" or "Should I bring you back a coffee?" sounds totally natural to me.

I could make more strained arguments as to why the nail varnish and people seconded somewhere didn't trip alarms, but so it goes. I must just not have noticed sport on the TV, as I'd agree that's just a plain error.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Look, these are just examples that I still remember after having done my best to forget. The books were absolutely full of this stuff. I can't even remember what he used the word "junket" to mean, but it definitely wasn't a subsidized trip in aid of public relations or marketing. Yes, you may well be able to make individual cases for one or two things, but when you sum it all up together, page after page, it just screams Britishness.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Erm. The Merchant Princes aren't in our world.