slaves, tell me about 50 Shades of Grey

Exactly -- that's what I mean, it's a part of language that comes and goes with the tides and most people aren't aware that their tide isn't the only one

i always find the anti-adjective campaign weird (there's one now!). it's adverbs that need to be stamped out most of the time.

Also, as is made clear in the article above, some people have extreme ideas of what counts as flowery.

it's the precise combination of everything that leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths, which is a matter of style and sociolinguistic implications as much as word abuse

I just read a whole book on this topic:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517Mbej3AuL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

that's another lesson that people were taught, and comes and goes with the tides. there is nothing wrong with adverbs if you are not overusing them, or using them as sloppy shorthand for something else. re: "modifier phobia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3453

well yeah there's nothing wrong with anything. but i see adverbs attached like lampreys to drained and dead sentences way more often than i see adjectives.

(lampreys used here rather than leeches to tiptoe round the ghost of strunk and white)

still, is it the adverb's fault that the sentence is weak? fix the sentence, then see if the adverb is useful or not. kinda depends on what you're writing too.

still waiting to see someone stick up for I need to expend some of this excess, enervating energy.

sure. just, if you're trying to teach a green writer some helpful strategies for figuring out why their sentences don't work, "check for occurrences of the word 'massively'" is a pretty good one. the problem starts when people imagine it's productive to be a fundamentalist about this. just like all the other problems. xp

DJP - You haven't ever felt crazy manic and like you needed to run around? The sentiment is real even if the sentence is totally overwritten imo. (How was that?)

i'll stick up for that djp (and for "i need his proximity") if you stick up for the writer's down-to-earth, common-sensical suspicion of the grossly hoity-toity adjective "interminable"

anyway the worst one is "his jubilation has metamorphosed into concern"

I keep thinking of Stephanie Meyers and her obsession with 'chagrin', which always leads me back to The Princess Bride "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

I just like the idea of someone getting all incensed about the style of this book as a thinly veiled cultural criticism of the people who like it. That's way more interesting than the bad sentences themselves. I see bad sentences ALL THE TIME.

I think DJP is missing the point a little: some of the sentences pointed out in the article don't work. But the article as a whole fails because they're attacking, basically, any word that comes from a Romantic origin and replacing them with a Germanic equivalent = this is not how editing works, this is not how editing should work. 'Excess, enervating energy' is bad not because enervating is a complex word, it's bad for the reason that most of the writing in 50 Shades is bad, it has no consistency in tone. 'Enervating energy' may be a concept that jars you for a second, but it could actually work in a better piece of prose; 'excess, enervating energy', however, uses childlike alliteration to make you read the words quickly, so you're stuck with the sentence doing two things at once: it elides *and* it jars. It makes it confusing to read, so you assume that the writer is using the word incorrectly. She may well be doing so, but it doesn't mean that the word use is necessarily incorrect.

DJP - You haven't ever felt crazy manic and like you needed to run around? The sentiment is real even if the sentence is totally overwritten imo. (How was that?)

That was terrible! You concede the point that the sentence is overwritten! Furthermore, because "enervate" is most commonly used to indicate a lack of energy, using it in a context where the character is describing a need to get rid of a surfeit of energy is obfuscatory to authorial intent! And I say that as someone not at all averse to less common/fancier/longer/whatever-you-want-to-call-them words when the precision the sentiment being expressed demands them.

DLH: If "I need his proximity" is indicative of Alexandria's go-to phraseology, I begin to understand why Christian wanted so desperately to smack her with a belt.

I've never been very good at arguing. Or editorializing, for that matter.

emil.y that is a lovely piece of technical discourse analysis

uses childlike alliteration

It was the Anglo-Saxons who loved alliteration

Enervating energy is contradictory and makes the prose look pretentious. Pretentious in the sense of pretending to something, perhaps flowery, erudite prose, and failing to make any basic sense.

I think enervate means the opposite of what she thinks it means.

But if we were to substitute invigorating, it would still be redundant. "This excess energy makes me full of energy."

If she meant enervate, then maybe she is saying that excess energy actually has the effect of depleting energy. Which is a lot to pack into a few words, and maybe interesting, but still awkward in that sentence.

i think emil.y's right that "enervating energy" could be used successfully, as paradoxical reference to the way that being wound up can feel like a kind of exhaustion, although it's dangerous, and the alliteration (or whatever you call alliteration when it keeps going for multiple syllables) is always going to create a hurdle of goofiness. "exhausting" might be the better adjective, since it's still dissonant without being flat-out contradictory; i dunno. another weird thing here is that "enervating"'s been stuffed into the middle of the mild cliche "excess energy" like an attempt at disguise. and that nothing about the book's prose in general inspires confidence that the writer knows the phrase is a paradox.

mistaking enervate for it's opposite is a very common mistake.

its

(just being a pill, ignore me pls)

nah, I throw in unnecessary apostrophes all the time. I understand the difference, and I deserve to be called out on it

going on a Vivarin bender while cramming for finals in college = "enervating energy"

drinking 2 pots of coffee after 2 days of no sleep = enervating energy

prednisone = enervating energy

lol

butts

IMO, what the author of this article is suggesting is that these words are being used to bring a veneer of sophistication to some stupid bullshit

― that is a weird thing to bring up over lean cuisine (DJP), Friday, June 1, 2012 5:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is OTM. "Epistle" is a terrible word to use in that sentence, not because readers can't understand it - it's because it makes the whole sentence sound like 20 pounds of shit stuffed in a five pound bag. The reason why this reads like a junior high schooler plumping up her essays with fancy thesaurus words is because the rest of the sentences can't support those words.

Sure, many of them are technically correct, but editing fiction is about more than making sure everything is technically correct. You want the writing to be tonally consistent, too. Reading an "epistle" instead of an "email" is not even remotely tonally consistent. It's jarring as hell.

Another 50 Shades Domestic Violence PSA. Now with added author breakdown.

This romance author, Jennifer Armintrout, has been live-blogging her chapter-by-chapter read of Fifty Shades and I won't read the book but I'm having so much fun w her blog about it! But shit just got a little real in this entry.

Great post!

From the comments:

For example, from Entertainment Weekly 's 4 page (allowing for photos) April 6, 2012 cover story, the last column has this:

"Not everyone is charmed by the sex in Fifty either. Some believe Ana and Christian have an abusive relationship that misrepresents BDSM sex play. "He tells her when to eat, he stalks her and goes into jealous rages every time she's talking to her male friends. I'm like, that has nothing to do with BDSM. That's just a good old-fashioned abusive, controlling boyfriend," says sexologist Jill McDevitt, owner of the feminist sex shop Feminique Boutique in West Chester, Pa.

That's it. One small paragraph in a 4 page article. And slanted to look like it's just the opinion of "feminists"---and who likes them, right?

Way x-post to La Lechera:
Are you sure they didn't mean to write "adore" and spellcheck accidentally zapped it to "ardor?"

Eh, it was totally in character for her to do that. Either way, it needed to be changed and she was always pissed at me for taking some of the "pizzazz" out of her writing. I worked there before the digital revolution was fully underway, or I would have more examples. She was our queen of doggerel, and I appreciated her writing for its entertainment value in that regard.

xxpost carl: huge outloud laughs with 20 pounds of shit stuffed in a 5 pound bag

I look forward to your next fanfic

Lechera, this one's for you: Romance Story Plot Generator

haha

Science Fiction: This story takes place at a portal to another solar system. In it, a loudmouthed fire fighter is introduced to an athletic merchant. What starts as detachment soon turns into obsessive love - all thanks to treason.

Oh that is wonderful.

Fantasy: In this story, an elementalist with a chemical dependency falls in love with a confident demonologist. Yet, how can a vicious demonologist tear them apart?

Science Fiction: In this story, a nostalgic secret agent falls madly in love with a shuttlecraft pilot who has an obsessive attraction to a particular alien species - all thanks to the taking of a test.

this is disconcertingly close to the plot of Ender's Game

In this story, an innocent treasure-hunter is in love with a fence whose body was infected by an alien seeking to reproduce - all thanks to a birth. It seems a pleasant surprise will bring them even closer together.

would read tbh

So, I am really ashamed to admit this, but in 2009 I dabbled in the Twilight fandom. Just a tad. Poked around. Yeah, I liked the stupid Twilight books. Today, my sister asked me if I ever heard of the fanfiction, "Master of the Universe" -

I said yeah. And then like, I found out about the whole best seller thing.

Back in 2009, "Master of the Universe" was HUGELY popular. People freaked out over it. The author had a bunch of fans, enough that they had their own CONVENTION for her. I think I read a few chapters of this story--in fact, I have a copy in its original form if anyone wants to see it. Don't know why you would. If I recall there were a lot of obvious Britishisms and a sex scene which involved the male character ripping out a bloody tampon prior to fucking.

And also the title reminded me of He-Man.

Wait, didn't Ayn Rand already write this novel?

*cringes*
*sighs*

I wrote an unfinished Twilight fanfic for my best friend. She was reading all these horrible ones and she kept sending them to me and I couldn't stand them and then I got all 'well if you think they're so bad why don't you write one smartypants' and I did and I still die a little inside when I think about it.

I still haven't finished it. I am conflicted even talking about it, lol

If you read the Amazon reviews, it's really obvious who the fanbase is. People who don't read.

wait, wasn't 'Mr. Grey' the name of James Spader's character in Secretary?

i just got addicted to the chapter-by-chapter thing laurel posted and read it all. it's pretty o_O. when twilight was happening i assumed that the main thing that got its fans excited was the necessity of restraint, because sex might cause perfect chiseled dreamy dangerous superpowered badboy edward cullen to VAMPIRE FUGUE and RIP BELLA'S THROAT OUT, and this is a fun combination of teasing and danger and also kind of a novelty in Today's Hypersexualized Culture.[*] plus i figured people thought the vampire mythology and the adventures and the edward saving bella from other vampires was exciting and cool. all the stuff where edward is almost comically controlling and possessive and bella is almost comically self-loathing and solipsistic i thought no doubt appealed to some (the latter especially to Teenz) but could mostly be attributed (like the mormon overtones and the part where edward gives bella a caesarian with his teeth) to personal peculiarities on stephanie meyer's part and didn't really have a lot to do with everyone going berserk over it. i mean, i don't know -- these are the things that i liked about twilight, at least the movies (i was into most of the second one); this was the stuff i thought could be genuinely sexy, or cathartic, or whatever.

but maybe the fanbase was actually just super into the idea of being in an abusive relationship. apparently they were! cuz this thing is just twilight with the supernatural stuff -- the mythology and the adventures and the evil vampires and the teeth caesarians and even the VAMPIRE FUGUES -- removed, and what's left augmented, so that the story is literally just a self-loathing solipsist being abused by an emotionally unavailable psychopath. and everyone's just as turned on! maybe people are just reading it for The Good Bits, the spanking or whatever, or the descriptions of the guy's tie (it's grey), but there's so much of bella/anastasia's total pathological self-hatred, which manifests as contempt for and exasperation with everyone who is the tiniest bit nice to her (and conversely as helpless lust for the guy who is not nice to her at all except when he pays her the occasional strategic compliment like he's dispensing a pellet for a rat), and so much of edward/christian being controlling and manipulative and emotionally abusive, that i'm pretty sure this stuff is the point of the book. so this is what people are into at the moment, i guess? feeling fundamentally insecure and alone and hating/resenting everyone except people willing to exploit and abuse them? have we actually always been into this? am i taking this too seriously? does it mean anything? what are we learning here and about whom?

[*] (obv our culture remains infested by all kinds of patriarchal and disapproving and confining attitudes towards sex but in our media there isn't usually a lot of aching restraint.)

In this story, a cheerful gas station attendant falls passionately in love with a calm treasure-hunter - all thanks to an accident at home.