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English doesn’t make it easy to get the right word, because so many of them sound nearly alike while having wildly different meanings. Especially if an author has learned vocabulary by listening — from movies or song lyrics or audio books — rather than by reading and really noticing words on the page, it’s easy to get confused and grab for the wrong one.
I beseige you….
Beseige means to surround with armed forces, like a city that’s trying to withstand an attack by an army determined to wait out the residents. The word this author was looking for is beseech, which means to plead with or to implore. The Snarky Editor beseeches you to remember the difference.
Over the years, Kennedy had culled a unique friendship with Mrs. Jameson.
Unless Kennedy dropped her friend, she didn’t cull her — she cultivated her. Cultivating a friendship means nurturing it, as one would nurture a house plant by adding water and light and fertilizer to make it grow bigger. Culling the same house plant would mean sending it to the compost heap.
Classic defection technique — reply to a question with another question.
No, a classic defection technique would be to ask for political asylum. The term for redirecting a conversation to a more palatable topic is deflection — meaning to deviate from the established path.
Kat looked at his furled brow and worried eyes.
Flags are furled when they’re taken down — wrapped around the pole to be safely put away. Brows are furrowed to indicate worry or tension.
Ripley fixed a particular look on her face. One she homed in college…
Homed and honed are genuinely confusing almost-homonyms. Homed means targeted, like aiming at a particular goal or destination. Honed means sharpened or smoothed out, like putting a new edge on a knife blade, or made more effective. In this case, the look Ripley displays is one she had practiced to make it more effective. One she’d honed in college.
Fluffy, white flakes swirl in front of the window, pommeling the frosted glass…
A pommel is the knob on the hilt of a sword or saber, or the knob at the front of a saddle. It’s a noun, not a verb, so a pommel just sits there without doing anything. Even if a swordsman rammed the hilt of his blade into a window, he would be pummeling the window — he’d be pounding against the glass just as these snowflakes do.
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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