Sometimes, text written by a subliterate writer can lead to fun stuff. A silly, 20-something self-pub subliterate writer (whose “editorial” helpers are no more literate than he is) provided such a brief moment, before I ashcanned his stupid book.
“. . .tells me that a newly discovered landmark was uncovered by the storm and that the ruin is not in any kind of withered [sic] state.”
Oh, my. The subliterate writer was probably groping for “weathered,” but since
a. his ears are apparently dull and
b. he just flat-out doesn’t know the differences between “wither” and “weather,”
. . .he went with a near homophone that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
But. . . then I paused and thought of the different meanings of wither, and their etymologies. (Yes, because I spent much of my youth reading dictionaries–and still do to this day, for that matter–and have a wide range of interests in disparate fields, I knew that the noun “wither” and the verb “wither” came from two very different roots. *shrugs* So? 🙂 ) So I had a bit of personal entertainment contemplating a horse’s withers and the withering of a plant.
And then, back to the Badly Written Text to a further description of the “ruin”:
“In fact, it doesn’t look “ruined” at all! It appears to be in perfect condition!”
*head-desk* Then why, oh why, did the “eminent archaeologist” initially refer to it as a “ruin”?
Because the writer had no appropriate vocabulary to describe it else, of course.
Well, this lil incident combined with four others in the two pages since I picked the book back up to convince me I needed to delete it from my library entirely, so as not to even accidentally pick it back up.
Oh, well. At least I managed to get all the way to 4% of the thing this time. . .
