No-one is more surprised than I am

[indri]

OK, I've finished drafting my fic about the Burkles. I think that took three years, a personal record for fic.

Is there anyone still reading this journal who'd like to beta? It's only 2300 words now that I've ruthlessly culled the superfluous subplots.

Anyone?

ETA: OK, I have an Australian and an ex-pat Brit. I really need an American too, as it's set in Texas.

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Switching between dialects is hard. In one story I used the word "hoon" and nwhepcat queried it; I was aiming for an English idiom, but "hoon" is Aussie. The other day, I used the word "snib" in front of my partner; it turned out that in the sixteen years we've known each other I had never before had cause to say "snib" and it's a Scotticism.

FYI, a hoon is someone driving recklessly and fast, while a snib is a catch, such a window-catch.

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

Dialects are weird and fascinating. I once completely fazed a New York editor by having a character refer to something (a cursed ivory statue another character was toting around, it being that sort of book) as a "play-pretty" . . . she'd never heard the term, and was strongly of the opinion that nobody outside of Texas was going to have heard of it either. I had to settle for "bauble," which was a close-but-no-cigar sort of alternative that left out the extra shades of meaning dealing with the relationship between the speaker and the listener in question.

[indri]

I've not heard of "play-pretty" either, despite my two years in Austin.

I didn't realise, before I left Scotland, how many of the words I used were local: "barry" meaning "great", "shoogle" meaning "to shake something that's at least partially liquid" and so on.