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?
Lisa Kleypas uses sardonic for almost every expression her male leads have.
Beeming keeps showing up throughout Harry Potter, very noticeable.
Imo unusual words like that should not appear more than once or twice in a book, no words should stick out enough to distract me.
Ottessa Moshfegh uses “pilly” a lot throughout her novels and short stories
I tried the ACOTAR series (got to the 3rd book and had to stop) and Sarah j Maas CONSTANTLY uses the term “vulgar gesture” for some reason. That was part of the reason I had to stop.
Lovecraft. Eldritch.
I learned a new word today.
Try to surmise what it is.
I’ll give you three surmises.
The Dresden Files series has a lot of them, but it’s been years since I read them so I’ve forgotten a lot. One that I definitely remember is the word “Serpentine”, used to describe an attractive woman. Either the way she moves, or her figure. He uses it for pretty much every scene used to describe an attractive woman in the series, and there are a lot of them.
I was reading a book where characters kept shrugging and so I looked up the word shrug in the search bar and it appeared I think 34 times. Which for a 200 something page book feels like a lot.
Also another book had the main character’s friend and his husband show up quite often and they were always referred to as “Dave and his husband Steve” after the 5th or 6th time I was well aware who Steve was
I love Terry Pratchett, but you could often tell which was his current “pet” word at the time of writing. “Gingerly” is one that got around, but there’s plenty of others he loved too.
Incidentally, William Peter Blatty loved to use the word incidentally as often as he possibly could.
A phrase, not a word (and I forget the book), but the author kept saying that characters ears were burning to indicate that they were angry. I’d never heard that phrase used in that context, and it was used that way a bunch of times in the book.
“Preternatural” can you guess which book/books this repeated word is from…?
the Invisible Life of Addie Larue - Palimpsest. It drove me crazy!!
I find in a few books where the author gets stuck on a word for a few chapters then moves onto the next. Like they are testing the word around the house for a week then move onto the next word.
Ayn Rand overuses “impertinent.” Very annoying. But then her prose is pretty ordinary. It’s the plots that are interesting.