Striking and Picturesque Delineations, or to give it its full name, Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn, is a travel guide by Angus McDiarmid, dubbed the "world's worst author" in retrospect. The book itself is standard travel literature, describing the "striking and picturesque" scenery around the southern Scottish Highlands, but the text is riddled with grammatical errors, so much so that writers have speculated as to whether McDiarmid was actually a real person. The common consensus was that McDiarmid's first language was Gaelic and that he translated it into English with a dictionary, choosing the most impressive word that came out regardless of whether it worked or not.
Compare and contrast English As She Is Spoke, as while Striking and Picturesque was a direct (failed) translation, English As She Is Spoke is Chinese Whispers played with dictionaries.
The demonstrative frequently utilised markers called 'tropes' thus continues:
- Mountain Man: The in-universe justification for the awful syntax is that due to being from the Highlands the author's words "overleap the mounds and impediments of grammar".
- My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Exaggerated. Apart from the opening dedication, the text is largely incoherent and full of obscure and misused words.
- Purple Prose: A strange case of this sort of thing being combined with Translation Train Wreck. McDiarmid, a native Scottish Gaelic speaker, frequently employs whatever English words sound the most impressive without taking into account proper syntax or parts of speech. It is believed he may have been attempting to emulate or even surpass the work of Samuel Johnson, to whose writings he had been introduced by the local church minister.
- Translation Train Wreck: Possibly the Trope Codifier. The author likely didn't speak English well at all.
