Okay, I admit it - there's a little bit of Monk in me... well, maybe more than a little. There are times I just can't help myself.
When I am in a store or someone's home and see an even slightly askew picture frame on the wall, I straighten it. When I see award plaques that are atilt on a wall, the same thing. In restaurants, chalkboard specials and menus provide particularly fertile grounds for me; I always point out errors I find; sometimes the chalkboard is changed; sometimes not. I can't help myself - I have to say something. Even standing at a checkout counter where a small pile of impulse items rests, I find myself aligning them to even them out. I once even wrote to Dean Koontz to tell him of an error in one of his books. He graciously thanked me and said he had done his research and must have been given faulty information (he had).
I was reminded of the above last night when I was reading a Lisa Gardner novel The Other Daughter (I follow authors when I find one I like - she is the latest. I have a pile of eight of her novels I am working through). A reader and writer have to work together - the writer's work has to ring true as the reader suspends his or her disbelief as the journey unfolds. A long time ago, for example, one book I read was set in Boston. The writer describe an area I was intimately familiar with; the problem is he described it wrong. That ruined the rest of the book for me - I disbelieved!
Back to Lisa Gardner (I would have written directly to her, but I couldn't find contact information. Maybe someone will forward what follows to her). As a character, an FBI agent, is handed a pistol, he says, "My God, this sucker has radioactive sites! I've only ever heard of them." My first thought was it's a typo, but it happened again... and again a third time on the next page. That was no typo: "Radioactive sites!" I did a quick Google search and found out a lot about radioactive sites. Whooda thunk the government was hiding the stuff right in plain sight on gun sights? Whooda thunk it? Arrrgh!
Later.
1 comment:
And the other misuse that I want to correct all the time is the word "cite" -- which people seem to think is interchangeable with "sight" and "site." Who says the English language isn't fun!
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