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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3996 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Bad:

"By the way, in your world, do they have wizards?" He asked earnestly.

Good:

"By the way, in your world, do they have wizards?" he asked earnestly.

Nonstandard, but useful as an illustrative tool:

"By the way, in your world, do they have wizards [he asked earnestly]?"

I will take this opportunity to rant that I am really tired of bad English. I'm approximately 85 percent of the way through (my scraped EPUB of) Twig, and I find it extremely annoying that Wildbow—a person who has written literally millions of words—(1) makes exactly the same mistake that I explained above, (2) always uses a single hyphen followed by a space (not even a pair of hyphens!) rather than an em dash, and (3) can't tell the difference between subject and object (actual quote: "just behind Jessie and I"). At work, several of my coworkers—a pseudo-subordinate of mine (Cantonese), my boss (Vietnamese), and my boss's boss (Sri Lankan)—are ELLs who routinely verge on sending gibberish in their emails, and I have an "English tutoring" folder on my work computer to catalog the literally dozens of helpful corrections that I have emailed to the first two of them over the past six months (for which they have thanked me).

Is your issue that it's supposed to be "behind Jessie and me/myself"? I'd assume it is a deliberate archaism.

That's (possibly) my autocorrect being annoying, capitalizing the H in he after the use of quotes IIRC.

I'm not overly fussed about minor issues like that, if you think that's annoying, wait till you see what translated Xianxia often looks like!

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