Kevin's Watch

With gratitude to the ideator, and some seasons having passed since reading the series, has anyone a tale to share? Some example of... unexpected elocution or perhaps insightful perception of others' drollery ... some way in which the author's gift of vocabulary has provided an unforeseeable benefit for you? The ubiquitous their/they're/there memes and such aside?

Sadly, all I can offer at the moment is the memory of an 8th grade book report (LFB) that both made a teacher refer to a dictionary and blush when describing certain disconcerting content to my mother. I am the reason SRD was not welcomed into the junior high library.

LOL The only benefit I can think of is to my ego when people tell me they have to Google some word that I used casually in conversation.

--A

Sometimes it helps with Wordle--I play the New York Times version. They also have another game called Spelling Bee that will occasionally accept what I think of as "Donaldson words."

When I'm actively reading the Chronicles, I do have to be careful not to slip into a Landish or Giantish or Haruchai cadence in daily conversation!

One of the things I've always enjoyed about those books in particular is the contrast between Covenant's and Linden's speech patterns--they use contractions!--and those of characters from the Land. Still makes me laugh sometimes, in a good way. Especially the scene early in Lord Foul's Bane where Foul reels off his list of spectacularly evil-sounding titles, and Covenant just says, "Forget it." That contrast of formal right up to the edge of pompous (or in Foul's case, well over that edge) with colloquial--it gets me every time.

Also the way each group has their own pattern, all of them formal, but in subtly different ways. Even without knowing who's speaking, you can tell a Giant from an Elohim from a Stonedowner from a (an?) Haruchai. It's not just vocabulary--it's syntax and rhythm and all that good stuff. Funny enough, iirc, the "Donaldson words" are mostly in narration/description, not individual characters' speech. Not sure about that, but I think so.

I like to say "Hellfire!" occasionally to get a smile or two.