I’m currently reading The Duke and I and the author is constantly using the word “acerbic”. I had never heard of the word before now and had to google the definition. The word has shown up so much that I’m tempted to go through the book and count its appearances lol.
Have you noticed any authors having favorite words that they use page after page?
I find Stephen king repeats himself a lot and it’s one of the biggest reasons I’m not a huge fan of his books.
Fairy tale for instance has this fantasy world and the child can understand in his head this magical language. Well it felt like from then on every time someone spoke in the book he keenly reminded the reader “He said this word, but I feel as if it was another word that doesn’t exist in my language.” And variations of. I swear there was one paragraph we’re it was brought up like four times alone.
The past is obdurate.
I wanted to take away King’s dictionary after reading that book. You know he saw that word and created a whole book out of it. My theory, anyway.
I want to count the number of times the obdurate past is mentioned in 11/22/63
In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon he talks about the sound of her urine twice. How does an editor miss that?
He talks about it in The Stand too, talking about the old woman using the bathroom, and how ar her age it just falls out of you. It was a very uncomfortable passage…
He mentions urination a lot. Someone wets their pants at least once in most of his books.
I noticed Stephen King always uses the word graffito, as if to show us how fluent in Italian grammar he is.
Let’s have a palaver about it
I’m reading Fairy Tale now and have been wondering why I need be constantly reminded about this automatic translation issue??
It is mildly amusing when he points out he said “Knock it off” but that what comes out is “Cease speaking”… But then I start wondering how exactly THAT works. I don’t speak German but if I went to Germany and magically could communicate, would I know if my German was archaic or slangy and colloquial?
It’s a strange thing, but I’ll live with it 😌
He also mentioned TCM a lot in that book. King must have been watching a lot of classic movies when writing Fairy Tale. 😅
I’m sort of crawling through The Stand at the moment, and (TW) there’s a boy he absolutely cannot let enter the page without commenting on his “savage”/“slanted”/“Chinese” (sometimes one or two of these, sometimes all three) eyes, which makes me really uncomfortable. Same with all the descriptions of how fat one character is and how disgusting we’re obviously meant to find him because of that. As for repetition, well, I unfortunately got the version of the book that includes a bunch of stuff originally cut, which makes it clock in at some 1300 pages, which I find hard to believe is necessary.
Gooseflesh is one that stands out to me.
I love King, but he definitely has some words and expressions he overuses. You hear a lot about chsmbray shirts, but the one I’ve noticed that nobody mentions is dumpster. He manages to get that word into every story he writes.
I notice he uses the word apt in his books a lot.
Apt Pupil for example