What kind of crisp morning are you?

[calimac]

So a member of the Mythsoc list on Yahoogroups was reading Legacies by L.E. Modesitt Jr., and posted about his invention of local terms of weight and measurement, and such, that don't give the reader a sense of alienness so much as a sense of confusion.

Take a line like "He awoke to a crisp Octdi morning." What is a reader supposed to envisage here? "Okay," our correspondent thought, "so is this the month, or a day of the week?" And if either, which one?

It occurred to me that the probabilities here could be nicely gauged by Google, gateway to a fountainhead of bad contemporary writing. A few quick phrase searches revealed that crisp [month] mornings outnumber crisp [day of the week] mornings by more than 2 to 1, but that crisp [season] mornings are more common than either, and of these, crisp fall/autumn mornings are 2/3rds of the total. So the fact that Modesitt's "Octdi" consists of the first syllables of two fall months (respectively the 2nd and 6th most likely months to have a crisp morning, according to Google) is probably not a coincidence.

Sunday mornings (most common) are some 20 times more likely to be crisp than Thursday mornings (least common), and the period of April through August is generally (but not entirely) devoid of crisp mornings.

It's worth remembering that Tolkien, having taken care to invent hobbitish names for months and days of the week in his appendix, "translated" them to ordinary English for the story itself.

In other news, following nellorat's reminder that an LJ can be a blog, allow me to refer you to the CBC's word-usage site, an archive of stunningly detailed columns on topics from whether conjoined twins can be Siamese to whether to capitalize Internet. There's even some SF in here. Not only may you read the entire history of how Captain Kirk came to boldly go where no man had gone before, you will also be informed, in a column on getting quotations right (and whether to call them quotations or quotes), that

In the original Star Trek TV series, Capt. James T. Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty." He did, however, say "Beam us up, Mr. Scott" in one of the roughly 80 episodes.

I always wanted to write a Trek episode in which Kirk, after requesting "Beam me aboard, Scotty," suddenly finds himself holding a 2-by-4.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

UPDATE: Our correspondent writes, "I'm now 84 pages into the second book of the Modesitt series, and Octdi is in fact a day of the week. It would have been very helpful to have had this information somewhere in the first book."

Comments

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

As a kid I always wondered about those cool crisp September mornings. In Oklahoma if it isn't raining it's hotter'n hell in September. Eventually I lived further north and east and found out about it, but not all fall mornings are crisp in all places.

MKK

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Maybe they were crisp in Australia.

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

"I always wanted to write a Trek episode in which Kirk, after requesting "Beam me aboard, Scotty," suddenly finds himself holding a 2-by-4."

Except a 2X4 isn't usually a "beam"--it's usually a "stud"-- :)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But it is a board. "Beam me a board, Scotty" ... was my pun unclear, or were you just trying to one-up me in the pun department?