Meme - caving to peer pressure:

[concertigrossi]

Pick a paragraph (or any passage between... let's say 200 and 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

And, um. You know you asked me once to check for 'Brit-speak'?

Well, um. The use of 'cot'... in British dialect now, it doesn't make sense here. I know from seeing it in other places, that in this context it means a collapsible or temporary bed. But in Brit, it exclusively indicates a bed for a baby.

(Specifically, in my dialect, it's the larger, usually wooden, permanent, rectangular sort of baby's bed, you know, with the bars. 'Crib' means a cradle, bassinet or basket for a very young baby.)

HOWEVER, I'm a little uncertain, because I don't think 'cots' in that sense were actually used in this period. (Baskets and cradles, sure, but the sort of 'cot' I'm thinking of I'm pretty sure was a furnishing of the 19th century nursery- as I understand it, in days of the wet-nurse, nurseries in the Victorian sense only came in when the pre-industrial wet-nurse was replaced by the more 'modern' nanny and her nursemaid.) Now, it's possible that the American usage is actually an older one that was commandeered in England to mean something rather more specific. (I tend to let 'fall' go for just this reason- it's not used in that way in Britain any more, but I think it actually pre-dates 'autumn'.)

In fact, the use of 'cot' that I'm aware of before the great parenting revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century is as a truncation of 'cottage'. So I don't know whether it's period or not.

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Ah! Gotcha. V. tricky, I wouldn't have thought of that (clearly!).. Thank you!

It's funny how words move back and forth... in the SCA, people want to use the word "remove" to indicate a course at dinner, because it feels older, but it turns out that the word "remove" in that context is a Victorian innovation, and when medieval people wanted to indicate the bringing on of a dish during a feast they used the word...

"course." :)

Thanks muchly..