This post was originally published on this site.
Location matters in real estate, but even more so in writing. When the word you grab is close to the word you want — but not exactly — sometimes the result is disconcerting. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s puzzling.
But it’s always, always unsettling. Even if the reader can’t quite peg what’s wrong, she’ll know something is off-kilter. And if she does know what’s wrong, she’ll have more trouble trusting you to get anything else right, too.
…a Southern bell….
Bells are in church towers. The kind of woman who’s described as a Southern debutante — the sort whose main goal is often marriage — is a belle. The French word means beautiful or fair.
…to give her a wide birth….
No. Just NO. When we avoid something, we give it a wide berth. The phrase refers to the large amount of room necessary to maneuver a ship up to a wharf or a pier — into its parking place, its berth. Similarly, a bunk on a ship is a berth, not a birth. And a sailor’s job is sometimes called a berth — possibly because the ship would only take on the number of sailors it could accommodate in sleeping quarters.
Frankly, The Snarky Editor would like to scrub the image of a wide birth from her mind.
I beseige you….
Oh, dear. The Snarky Editor beseeches you to get the terminology right, and not use the warfare term besiege when you mean to ask in a pleading manner — to beseech.
… and looked like it had born witness…
The Snarky Editor will be the first to admit that born and borne can be confusing. A kitten is born. A package is borne — carried — from one place to another. When someone testifies in court, he has borne witness — and that’s the context here, since the desk has been a silent observer to underhanded practices.
… because I’m balling like a baby.
Babies often play with balls, but when they’re crying, full-out wailing, they’re bawling like a baby.
And that’s just the “B” words from The Snarky Editor’s files. We could keep this up for months before we hit the end of the alphabet. Sigh.
The Snarky Editor comes out of hiding occasionally to comment on the awkward, silly, and sometimes hilarious editing errors found in published books.
#snarkyeditor #everybodyneedsaneditor
Leigh Michaels is the award-winning author of more than 100 books, including historical and contemporary romance, non-fiction books about writing, and local history. More than 35 million copies of her books are in print in 27 languages and more than 120 countries. She is also a writing coach and book editor, though she promises to be snarky only in regard to published books.
To find out more, check out https://leighmichaels.com
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