something I enjoy is when an author falls in love with an uncommon word and overuses it. a China Mieville book, perhaps The Scar, uses “judder” anomalously often. Neuromancer uses “lozenge” seven times
@regehr a while back I was getting heckled on vacation by family/friends for reading a book called "Dinosaur Planet" and I was like "look, it's Anne McCaffrey, even when she's writing pulp you're going to learn new words", and sure enough on that page was a sentence with "sough" which nobody at the house had ever heard or used before.
....now my parents both use it, **with regularity**, in their writing
@elfprince13 @regehr ... what do your parents write about?
@steve @regehr my mom mostly writes poetry. my dad (when he's not teaching computer science) writes song lyrics, a fishing/outdoor-sports column for the local newspaper, occasional poetry, and *gestures about* all this https://www.amazon.com/stores/Matthew-T.-Dickerson/author/B001JPALWW/allbooks
@steve @regehr yeah. when I get asked "what does your dad do?" it's always like "uh how much time do you have to listen to the answer?"
Among other things, he did graduate coursework in Old English concurrently with doing his PhD in Computer Science, and now teaches occasional creative writing and environmental studies courses (usually J-Term or summer) in addition to CS.
@elfprince13 @regehr That is an impressively diverse oeuvre!