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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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

501 replies

PhaedraIsMyName · 27/07/2014 18:01

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?

OP posts:
ChoosandChipsandSealingWax · 29/07/2014 16:06

Grin I'd never noticed that before scones but yes that would drive DH crazy too! I always remember the withering look he gave me first time we went to the Caribbean and I suggested driving to the top of the hill to watch the sunset (sunsets lasting all of ten minutes there, it would've been well over by the time we got there).

NatashaGurdin · 29/07/2014 16:34

Racers
Natasha Henry the thirteenth?! Wow, they really got that wrong! ;-)

There are some great examples of bad or non-existent research on this thread, will read through later, just thought that was quite funny!

Obviously Racers the plot makes me so cross that I can't proof read properly! Grin

I hate the fact there is no way of editing the mistakes on here! Angry

ScrambledSmegs · 29/07/2014 16:40

Thank you for understanding what I was getting at, Choos! It was quite amusing when I was watching at the cinema (I know, I paid for the privilege), when that bit came on the entire audience laughed and you could hear loads of people saying 'Now, what I'd have done is taken the Vauxhall Bridge, gone via Streatham High Road and then straight down the M23...'

I thought it was a stupid film anyway, but that was the moment I mentally checked out.

That Peter James quote is hilarious!

alAswad · 29/07/2014 17:13

ProcessYellowC and sashh, late reply but I wasn't remotely surprised when I heard about that - university freezers are minging Grin Still wouldn't recommend carrying it around the country, though!

I'm very sad that I seem to be several pages too late to join the Buffy-fest Sad

Lostforaname · 29/07/2014 17:13

Very late to this thread. Absolutely love it.

  1. Daphne gave birth in her dungarees, didn't she? Not just green tights.
  1. Vellum is still used for Parliamentary Acts. It's made of goatskin exclusively now.
  1. I once lived in a university room that Elizabeth George had used for research for a novel. The book had an accurate description of my hideous curtains, the nearby bathroom, and included my cleaner as a character.
  1. I am (foolishly) reading Spare Brides by Adele Parks, set in 1921. It swings between deliberately inserted unnecessary detail that she's obviously looked up on Wikipedia, eg two characters discussing "they had both enjoyed a recent exhibition of Federico Barocci's work", and really bad writing, like

"'Some of my best friends-'

He didn't let her finish, but barked out a derisive laugh. 'What, some of your best friends are black, or queer, or dead?'" In 1921???

Also my favourite line so far: "The snow couldn't have been much fun in the trenches".

ChoosandChipsandSealingWax · 29/07/2014 18:50

alAswad likewise very sad to have missed the Buffy fest!

lostforaname may just have to read that, sounds class trash Grin

Agree with whoever said upthread that whenever you know about something, it's always wrong. My pet subject is Classics, so it doesn't often come up. But I did get very annoyed recently about the chairman/CEO of Nike writing a letter about how to pronounce it. And he was Wrong.

Jux · 29/07/2014 19:03

More and more books these days are suffering from the illiteracy of eidtors and the rapaciousness of publishers.

That's in answer to the OP as I haven't RTFT yet, but am going to later - have to get supper on now!

Delphiniumsblue · 29/07/2014 19:05

The snow couldn't have been much fun in the trenches Grin

ObfusKate · 29/07/2014 19:09

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Waswondering · 29/07/2014 20:23

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FryOneFatManic · 29/07/2014 20:24

Who's Muphry?

CrimsonPermanentAssurance · 29/07/2014 20:33

Muphry is the cousin of Murphy (of "anything that can go wrong will go wrong" fame). Muphry's law states that any post on the subject of grammar or spelling will contain at least one typing error.

ScrambledSmegs · 29/07/2014 20:35

Muphry's Law

The main reason I never let my pedantry out on the internet Grin

FryOneFatManic · 29/07/2014 20:37

I hadn't heard of Muphry's law, but it makes sense now. Grin

Kittymautz · 29/07/2014 20:38

Using synonyms unnecessarily in the same sentence is NOT good writing. it sounds clumsy, pretentious and can lead to confusion for the reader.

See en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation

OnIlkelyMoorBahtat · 29/07/2014 20:54

Hahaha Jax- unlucky! Grin

Having worked in publishing, on the editing side it's more likely the editors are rushing through the jobs as they've got eleventy million other books to work on at the same time. Job cuts have been huge across the industry over the past decade and the time the book is being developed has been massively cut as well. When I started, way back in the mists of time, after the manuscript had been edited and sent for setting, there would be at least 3 proof stages, a press proof stage and a camera-ready proofing before it went for print - now it's one proof stage, a quick whizz through the press proofs and print!

Anyway, back to annoying mistakes in books! Is it at all possible to squeeze one in about an annoying mistake in a factual book, not fiction? Years ago I was reading a great book about the history of pigments - yes, I know that makes me sound beyond nerdy but it had it all; history, geography, politics, geology, chemistry, history of art, social changes, the lot, it was brilliant, and then in the chapter on "Black" the author revealed that

"'khol' [in the black eye make up] derives its name from the Arabic word for 'eye'"

except as I speak Arabic I know that the word for 'eye' is 'iyne' and the word 'khol' comes from 'akhal' which means, er, 'black' (hence the name!) . As the words "eye" and "black" are hardly obscure, esoteric terms that are not easily checkable, this did make me wonder what else in the book was wrong....

Gosh, I've carried around that grievance for years! Thanks all! x

SolidGoldBrass · 29/07/2014 21:00

I was going to offer to share some absolute honkers from unpublished books (years spent as a freelance slushpile reader) but that's perhaps not entirely fair.
However, if we're onto shit TV now, does anyone remember the mid-90s show Bugs? Not only did it feature the most elegant outbreak of mass food poisoning ever (people just rolled their eyes a bit and daintily fainted. No-one even retched, let alone shat their pants or threw up on their colleagues.) but also had a car chase through the then -newly-opened Limehouse Link. And went in and emerged at the same place (presumably because they were only allowed to film at one end of it).
Admittedly, there was an added bonus for me and my former colleagues in that they set one episode in and around our very own office building, built a false porch onto it and rammed a truck into it, much to our delight.

ilovesooty · 29/07/2014 21:06

One of the best threads ever!

When I was studying Thomas Mann' s Tonio Kroger at school I made the mistake of looking at the Penguin English translation. I was amazed to see that since the first edition published in the 1930s they'd been translating the Ostzee as the North Sea instead of the Baltic Sea. I wrote to the publisher and got a very nice letter back. Grin

cashmiriana · 29/07/2014 21:09

Bugs?
Henry from Neighbours?
Marcus from El Dorado?
DI Johnson from The Bill?
Never heard of it.

Grin
SolidGoldBrass · 29/07/2014 21:10

Though actually, sometimes, this sort of thing is 'stuff you didn't know you didn't know.' My own biggest published one was mixing up two types of computer game - neither I nor the editor knew that there were two kinds of computer game system and the most popular game for one couldn't be played on the other, and it was just a couple of throwaway lines (grr - still get occasionally reminded of this by Certain People).

SolidGoldBrass · 29/07/2014 21:11

Cashmiriana - Yes, Craig McLachlan, running around the top floor of our old office with a glue gun! (A couple of my colleagues at the time and I had a running joke involving glue guns, so you can imagine our delight when that episode aired...)

ObfusKate · 29/07/2014 21:17

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SolidGoldBrass · 29/07/2014 21:19

ObfusKate. No. Sonic the Hedgehog on a GameBoy Blush It was 20 years ago...

ObfusKate · 29/07/2014 21:24

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cashmiriana · 29/07/2014 21:42

As an aside, for all those Buffy fans, is there a place on MN where we can indulge our love? Our own little club (the Bronze, obviously) would be great. Even a spare crypt would do...

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