To get annoyed by a badly written novel with serious factual mistakes

[PhaedraIsMyName]

Author thinks the witness to a crime can decide who the Crown calls as expert witness.

Expert witness is a therapist who was treating the witness to the crime. Expert witness is married to a lawyer. Expert witness has been discussing the background with lawyer husband. The person accused of the crime is the crime scene witness'father. Author thinks the lawyer husband can represent the accused and this is not a conflict.

Lawyer husband is actually employed in a government legal department and author thinks lawyer husband can, whilst still employed, act as a defence lawyer.

It's tosh. Did nobody bother to edit or proof read it?

Is it just me who bothers about stuff like this?

The quote, having googled, is "you have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone". I don't think that can be anything but an error as a conversation between two British men.

To be fair to ASH though, he might have been correcting the misapprehension that arse is simply the posh British pronunciation of the word a-s-s.

True Pipbin. The closer that news sources get to your own area of expertise, the more likely you are to spot the errors which you have to assume are present in every other area of coverage.

I got stroppy with one book which had all the days and dates for that year mixed up. Having had a memorial year that year, I was in a strop about it and wrote it so on the review!

The book was removed for a while and came back with the dates sorted

MarrogfromMars
Can I just say how much I love this thread? Visions of hundreds of MNers nodding along to erudite historical facts one minute and thoughtfully squashing their breasts together the next

Yep, I've just done it. (not good).

kickassangel
See, you should never write about what you don't know. That's why Jane Austen never had any scenes that were just men, as she never experienced them

There are many contemporary authors who would do well to follow her on this - I cringe at lots of the male-male dialogue in books. Similarly, Catherine Alliot's depictions of any working class characters are just embarrassing, as are the lengthy rants her characters have - I wonder whether she has actually ever heard people speak?

Just to be pendantic - in the spirit of the whole thread - Austen does actually have some scenes which are just men. :-)

Now I'll get back to squishing my breasts together.

I'm only on page 6 but why are people calling zips zippers? Isn't zipper American English and zip UK English? Makes me want to stop reading this thread

Well it's possible that the posters are American. There are posters from all countries on here or maybe they are quoting from the book. This may be a bit of a generalisation, but lots of the historical inaccuracies come from American authors. Not all, but many.

Oh, another couple of shockers - Ruth Rendell's The Vault is a sort-of-sequel to a much earilier book (Sight For Sore Eyes) - only she has changed the name of a major character, probably out of sheer forgetfullness, but neither she not any of her editors have picked this up.

And Louise Bagshawe's Passion, which displays total ignorance of how you use Oyster cards (you CAN'T swipe them twice through the ticket barrier to allow two people to travel) and hair dye. You can't change your hair colour from black to platinum blonde with a 20 minute session of dunking it in a river. Not to mention how environmentally unfriendly and OBVIOUS this would be to your Fiendish Pursuers.

back to tap & faucet... (yes I so super late to this thread)

As an American I was taught to vary language a lot; this was good quality writing, not inconsistency. So writing faucet & tap in same sentence would be very good not at all bad.

I'll have to pay more attention to how DC are being taught to use words in British written work. I've noticed writing papers with British colleagues that some are horrendously repetitive in the same sentence or group of sentences, I hadn't realised they were encouraged to write like that.

*I am so super late...

I noticed that too SGB re The Vault.

Given Louise Bagshawe (Mensch) was actually a UK MP for a while I am even more concerned knowing that she doesn't know how an oyster card works, as that says something about how she always traveled around London ...

alardi Varying your language is great, but there should also be some consistency. Using two different words for the same item in one sentence is not great. I've found many ways to vary my writing, even though I don't write for a living.

On the other hand, those of your British colleagues writing boring, repetitive papers have probably never really paid proper attention to their English Language lessons.

Ok, not quite the same, but I always get ridiculously irate at the scene in Wimbledon (the Richard Curtis monstrosity, not the tournament itself) when the love interests go to Brighton from the Dorchester by taking the Westway into London. And guess where the Westway goes? Clue - it's not South, North or East.

And FYI, Mr Curtis, staying in the heart of Mayfair is not at all practical for commuting to SW19 every day. It would probably take the best part of an hour if the traffic was good. Which it NEVER is.

I've got plenty of pedantry stored up with regards to books, but I just had to let that out

Ooh! This one I have wanted to share for ages. John Marsden writes brilliant YA books set in an invaded Australia where a group of teenagers have managed to stay free from the enemy army. It's mostly grittily realistic and they have discussions about stocks of medicine and whether they can get condoms and they run out of soap, and so on.

The main character is a girl and there is no mention of sanpro.

I am that I read and loved that entire series LDR and never thought about that

This thread has also brought to mind an oldie which many others have spotted over time; the film, Karakatoa East of Java. It is of course west of Java.

Well, I didn't when I first read it, either!

One that always springs to mind for me is "Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow". It was full of esoteric facts about whaling (as I recall) and a great story and I thought "ooo this is an interesting book", and then the write made the fatal error of having the female protagonist when doing whatever-it-was on a hot day, take off her skirt and work in her tights because it was too hot, when as anyone who has ever worn tights would know, you would take off your tights to cool down. I thought if he wasn't able to check this fairly simple fact out, how could I trust anything else he'd written? I stopped believing in the character immediately and am not sure now that I even finished the book...

One enormous one is Dan Brown's Angels and Demons which is set in the very very near future and hinges on an antimatter bomb. He explains that the reason CERN have created all this antimatter is for use as an energy source. Now obviously looking for errors in Dan Brown is like shooting elephants in a paddling pool, with an RPG. But this is such a huge misrepresentation in a key plot area that it stood out even by his egregious standards.

The talk about Jean Auel's series sent me to flick through my copy of the valley of horses for some dodgy sex scenes (there are several). This one always made teenage me laugh:

'But the sight of her round, firm buttocks, and her exposed female opening, deep pink and inviting, were irresistible. Before he knew it, he was on his knees behind her, entering her warm, pulsating depths.'

Snigger. They seemed to have invented cunnilingus and blowjobs too.

I now have a tie for my personal worst moment of science on TV award. Maybe someone can decide it for me.

In the red corner we have star trek voyager with the episode in which they find themselves trapped within the event horizon of a black hole...and eventually blast a hole in the event horizon with a photon torpedo and escape through said hole.

In the blue corner we have Stargate Atlantis who destroy various outbreaks of nano-tech with EMPs. They go on to state that once the nano-tech has assembled up into a human sized replicator the EMP will no longer work as the replicator is too large now.

Yes, I'm fairly sure if your depths are pulsating there's something wrong with you.

It is awful writing, isn't it?

Blueberry scones definitely a thing in the US so I would let that one go.

A Canadian friend of mine lived in the UK for 5 years before discovering that ass and arse are two different words

hmm like maybe a colon full of worms....