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Author Vocabulary Calendar
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(Before we begin— grab a few beers.)
Ever suspect that an author has an idiosyncratic Word-of-the-Day Calendar? Some really unusual, often sesquipedalian, word appears in the text, perhaps not used in a completely natural way, and perhaps used in a manner inconsistent with a character's established idiolect. It appears two or three more times in subsequent text, in increasingly unlikely and egregious settings…and then is never seen again.
This is mostly a literary trope. Although there are, indubitably, egregious examples wherever a single author has a distinguishable voice (or is just plain loquacious), shows and movies are usually expensive enough to produce that this kind of writer egregiousness gets filtered out—not to mention that TV and movie audiences supposedly have tiny vocabularies anyhow.
Compare this to Perfectly Cromulent Word, where fictitious words are inserted in an attempt to sound smart, and Malaproper and Shlubb And Klump English, where the words do exist but are egregiously misused. Egregious.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- One word: EXCELSIOR!
- Alan Moore apparently loves to have his characters say "apparently". (Though he himself does not over-use the word in interviews and the like.)
- Elongated Man makes note of this phenomenon in an issue of Formerly Known as the Justice League.
Fan Fiction
- There's a Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic where Rei's eyes were always being referred to as "alazarin". Alizarin (or "alizarin crimson") happens to be a deep bluish-red pigment — and probably the true color of Rei's eyes, at that. But it still looks like fanfic thesaurusitis.
- In the 1990s, almost every other story featuring Tom Paris from Star Trek Voyager called his blue eyes "cerulean". Cerulean eyes in story after story. Worst part: cerulean is a specific shade of blue, and his eyes aren't that shade.
- My Immortal: Those limpid tears. Statistically
- There used to be a sample from some unknown fanfic being circulated and mocked on the Net which had prose so purple that it was practically unreadable; unfortunately, all the pages containing it seem to have disappeared. To give an inkling of what it was like: it referred to someone's eyes with the word "syndicates:" "syndicate" -> "circle" -> "orb" -> "eye."
- "Disappeared"? Wh-what? Sir/Madam, you are describing the legendary Eye Of Argon, and it's not gone from this site at all. Although the synonyms for "eye" are really the least... egregious crimes against the English language in that story.
- Oh, it wasn't Eye of Argon. Believe it or not, it was even worse.
- The authors of Undocumented Features are overly fond of the word "sardonic", which they seem to use to describe every third facial expression.
- Rise Of The Tau, an otherwise awesome fic, uses the various tenses of "thunder" and "coruscate" way too much. One sentence even had 'two' occurrences of "thundered" in it.
- The entire Doctor Who fandom has a perennial love affair with the words "gravitas", "pantomime" and "nadir".
- From what I remember of my Yu Gi Oh prowling days as an eleven-year-old, it seemed practically blasphemy NOT to describe Yugi's eyes as "amethyst-colored orbs." The Yu Gi Oh fanfiction-writing fandom was particularly fond of its overuse of the word "orb." Dear GOD it was fond of it...
Film
- Let's try Director Vocabulary Calendar...for a laugh, watch the director's commentary for X2: X-Men United some time and take a swig each time Bryan says "ultimately". If you make it all the way through, your liver will never recover.
- "Abomination" in Lilo And Stitch. He's a killer Space-Dropbear! He warrants it!
Literature
- Alan Dean Foster with book names such as "Phylogenesis".
- Stephen Donaldson is a master of this: The narrator's use of "argent" and "lambent" come to mind. It might be possible to identify a specific year of a specific Word-of-the-Day Calendar with each of Donaldson's books. Good-naturedly covered at Stephen R. Donaldson Ate My Dictionary
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- Nick Lowe's essay The Well-Tempered Plot Device describes the sport of "Clench Racing" in Donaldson novels.
- Donaldson is a Doctor of English. You had your warning.
- The narrator of M. John Harrison's recent science fiction novel Light uses the word "ruched" several times, among others.
- In several of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer stories, written in different decades, the Shakespearean phrase "alarums and excursions" is spoken, each by a different character, none of whom would naturally use this phrase. The first couple of times it is misspelled as "alarms and excursions".
- Rex Stout, creator of gourmand-turned-P.I. Nero Wolfe, made a point of using a few unfamiliar words in every Wolfe story or novel he wrote; the words would usually be utilized by Wolfe himself or his business partner, Archie Goodwin. Given, however, that Nero likes to flaunt his intellect in true Hercule Poirot fashion, Stout may have been doing this as character development - at least when Nero does it. When Archie Goodwin does it, it occasionally approaches Sophisticated As Hell.
- One novel has Wolfe identifying the author of a piece of text by how often particular words show up.
- Bram Stoker, Dracula, and the word "voluptuous," making this one Older Than Word Of The Day Calendars.
- The Tairen Soul books and "claiming". But I think I'll claim the next volume anyway when it comes out.
- China Miéville uses the word "concatenate" and its derivatives too often in Iron Council. It only comes up a few times, but it's such an unusual word that it stands out.
- There's also his frequent use of "puissant". His entire brain appears to be an Author Vocabulary Calendar, to the extent that it requires a dictionary — a large dictionary — to tell which words are obscure technical terms, which ones are Britishisms, and which ones he made up out of whole cloth. If there aren't a dozen five-dollar words on the page — you're probably looking at the title page.
- Miéville uses tons of very obscure words to describe landscapes. If you've taken a few geology classes, you'll know most of these, but you've never seen as many instances of words like "graben" or "arete". Most notable in Iron Council.
- Gene Wolfe uses many obscure words, real and otherwise, particularly in The Book of the New Sun. The obscure, but real, word 'tribadist' (lesbian) appears next to the word 'algophilist' (from context, one who enjoys inflicting pain on another, but somehow different from sadist). Algophilia, by the way.
- In a nice bit of Lampshade Hanging, the narrator says this about his teacher: “He mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau.” What's more, if you look up the meanings, they are words that it would be reasonable for the character in question to know.
- E.E. "Doc" Smith of Lensman fame does this with words like "lambent", "coruscating", etc.
- Among many other things, H.P. Lovecraft popularized the word "cyclopean". Whenever a writer uses that word, you can be absolutely certain that writer learned it from Lovecraft — although, sadly, not all of them have correctly grasped what it means.
- For reference, it refers to a construction technique; a Cyclopean building uses huge stones instead of bricks or wood. Castles are often cyclopean.
- As far as Lovecraftian vocabulary is concerned, "cyclopean" has nothing on "eldritch". There's also "squamous", "rugose", "gibbons", "chthonic", and "non-Euclidean".
- Affectionately parodied by Terry Pratchett: very few people in Discworld really know what "eldritch" means, but they've been told the Luggage is eldritch, so they've mostly decided it means "oblong". This eventually becomes a series-wide Running Gag. For those too lazy to look it up, "eldritch" just means spooky.
- Lois McMaster Bujold describes approximately two characters per book as "saturnine" - generally, whoever is being the deadpan foil to Miles at the time. The "saturnine" is to emphasize the deadpan. She also uses "dour" a lot. And "waft".
- Brave New World considers everything "pneumatic". An overstuffed chair cushion is a "pneumatic chair"; two women ask each other if they are "too pneumatic" the way normal women ask if an outfit makes them look fat. It's always the characters saying it, however, so this is probably more an example of fictional slang than anything. In that world, where promiscuity is encouraged, one character mentions about how "pneumatic" Bernard's semi-girlfriend is, after sex with her.
- Charles DeLint uses the term "little say" at least once a book.
- In his excellent book about China, travel writer Colin Thubron went through a curious love affair with the word "shriven", which does not mean what he thinks it means. It means "absolved by confession", but he uses it as if it meant something like "wizened, exhausted, dried up." Maybe he was thinking of "shriveled". According to a book review by Scott Malcomson, use and misuse of obscure words is common throughout Thubron's writing: "I'm not at all certain, however, that mare's milk can be 'fomented' (though it is fermented)."
- In Brian Doyle's Spud in Winter, enormous emotional significance is attached to the hero's girlfriend's philtrum. By the way, the philtrum is that little vertical groove just between your nostrils and your upper lip.
- An odd example — Steven Brust's fictional narrator Paarfli often uses the phrase "a propos" as a lead-in to paragraphs. "Apropos" is now the name of a software package. About half the time, people incorrectly pronounce the 's', which is silent.
- Piers Anthony can't seem to get through a single book without describing something as "quiescent." He loved using the word balk in the earlier Xanth books.
- Ever notice that Edgar Allan Poe seems to like the word "arabesque"? Also "singular"
- Robert Newcomb's novels, and how! Everything that would normally be blue is "azure"; every single room, meal, and set of clothing is "sumptuous". These are far from the only examples, but Newcomb is particularly bad for only consulting the thesaurus once and then using that obscure word for the rest of his series.
- Garth Nix's Old Kingdom Trilogy: "incipient" appears about ten times in three books and stands out.
- Neal Stephenson characters have a thing for referring to Japanese people as Nipponese. Granted, this is a more accurate English translation of the country's name, but it pops up much more in Stephenson than anywhere else. A character in Snow Crash corrects another character's incorrect usage of the slur "nip," which is taken from the word Nipponese.
- In Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince, the word 'surreptitious' is used six times. Interestingly enough, however, it is far less present in the rest of the books.
- The word "rent" meaning "to disturb with a violent noise" was used several times in the The Deathly Hollows, but none of the previous books.
- Not quite the same thing, but Dumbledore's eyes twinkle constantly in Goblet of Fire.
- J.K. Rowling is probably the last writer in the English language to use "ejaculated" as an innocuous synonym for "said." She only did it a couple times, but it was memorable enough that the fandom has been taking the mickey out of it ever since.
- If we can extend this trope to cover sentence structures — what was with all those colons in Deathly Hallows? You know, "[Independent clause]: [Whole other independent clause, usually beginning with a capital letter, serving to explain or amplify what was happening in the first clause]." Open the U.S. hardcover copy to the page where Ron destroys the locket. There are five sentences like that. Two of which constitute a paragraph all on their own.
- The Twilight series contains a lot of these, which is slightly understandable since Stephenie Meyer is an English major and her narrator wants to seem sophisticated. Stephenie Meyer's favorite words are "Adonis," "incredulous" and "chuckle." Seriously, characters sometimes "chuckle" (insert adverb here) several times on a single page.
- Egregious chagrin?
- ARGH! Make it stop, make it STOOOOOOOOP!
- "Most of my Arizona clothes were too permeable for Washington. My mom and I had pooled our resources to supplement my winter wardrobe, but it was still scanty." These two sentences sound so unnatural, especially when you consider that the narrator is supposed to be just-your-average-teenage-girl.
- Mervyn Peake, author of Gormenghast, tends to use the word 'qualm' to mean 'shiver or ripple, as of delight' and, oddly, 'prank' to mean 'blotch or spot, pick out, color, highlight'. Also, the Tower of Flints is a blasphemous finger of stone pointing at the sky.
- Enid Blyton and "lashings" in relation to food, the root of the famous Beam Me Up Scotty "lashings of ginger beer". Also it's quite fun to imagine Bakura whipping people with a beverage.
- During the writing of Summer Knight, Jim Butcher seems to have fallen in love with the word "basso". Nearly everyone's voice is described as such.
- This trope is Played For Laughs and practically referenced by name in The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries. The narrator actually does have a WOTD calendar and will often look for opportunities to use the words from it.
- Tamora Pierce's characters do everything with "grim good humor." Everyone has "masses" of hair that "fights" to escape its accessories, unless it's "cropped" short. If they're in pain, expect their muscles to "scream." They'll never grab or hold anything, only "grip" it. And more than one character has a "thin blade of a nose" (this is contracted to "thin-bladed nose" on one occasion, which barely makes sense).
- In Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy, characters rarely seem to do anything "quickly," but they're constantly doing things "with alacrity."
- Dan Brown seems to love the phrase "quantum leap". It's used quite liberally in The Lost Symbol.
- David Eddings had an obscurely peculiar fascination with the words "obscure," "peculiar," and "fascination." Also "prosaic".
- Christopher Paolini has this habit when he writes; characters, many of whom do not have any sort of formal education, strangely have college level vocabularies, even when their status or profession would have them calling something differently. In text, he'll often pull a 25 point word from nowhere because, while he could have used several smaller words, or different ones altogether, he just had to use that big one, even if it chunks up the sentence, ruins the flow, and really has no place being there among such other common words.
- That is how you write when you're aiming for lyrical beauty between Tolkien at his best and and Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf.
- Ian Fleming in the James Bond novels seems to have a fondness for "elegant."
- Raymond E. Feist really, really loves the words "alien" and "quietly". Especially noticeable in his earlier books where "Character Name Sat Quietly" is a noticeably common way of opening a chapter.
- Harry Turtledove's Timeline 191 does this with a made-up word ("flabble", roughly synonymous with "whine") that was eventually invented and popularized in the alternate America of the series.
- Terry Brooks loves to use "dissemble" for lie in the Shannara series.
Music
Tabletop Games
- Gary Gygax put a noticeable stamp on the first edition Advanced Dungeons And Dragons books. "Dweomer" and "weal" win for obscurity; "notwithstanding" for frequency. Also "former" and "latter." He also loved (i.e., used all the time) Latin abbreviations (e.g., e.g. and i.e.), even really obscure ones, (e.g., Ibid. and Op. cit.) placed in ordinary text (Ibid.) The first edition Dungeon Master's Guide is full of these. Most memorable: referring a built-in ability to swim as "innate natatorial ability". The Prostitute Table in the City appendix has about a dozen different synonyms for prostitute (trollop, streetwalker, etc.)
- Those Latin abbreviations are obscure? Never go to grad school, then ... they're standard bibliographic terms, and used every day.
Webcomics
Web Original
- The infamous Eye Of Argon does this constantly. And it misspells and misuses the words nearly every time. Especially special is "posterior", as in "Descending the flight of arced granite slabs to their posterior", because it's obvious that Jim Theis looked up the wrong sense of the word "bottom" in a thesaurus.
Mike: Never say "posterior" again.
Western Animation
Real Life
- Among British A-level students, this kind of thing is very popular in General Studies exams- most universities ignore GS, so we take that to be free rein to insert egregious phalli into the essays.
How egregiously sesquipedalian.
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