Colin <
Scatalogic@aol.com> wondered: "I would be interested,
for next month, if US readers have had much difficulty with
British English, in UK HB - tough and colloquial, but whose
colloquialisms?"
Well, Liza Cody's Eva Wylie books, for one. They're confusing
to read word for word; you have to sort of throw yourself
into them, like Constantine's.
(Anna Lee makes a guest appearance or two in these books, and
I'm thinking of getting that Cody series, now that I learned
of its existence.)
Colin also said, "I do remember noticing that both Hammett
and Chandler would signal street hoodlums and the like by
using 'Could of,' while the hero keeps using the correct
'Could have.'"
Writers writing "could of" raises my hackles. At least in my
dialect, anyone who isn't making a point of speaking
precisely and plummily says "could've," and spelling it
"could of" is dissing the speaker.
Joy, who'll have to look up "hackles" and see if she has
any
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 17 Jun 2002 EDT