JaneEspenson.com

Okay, so my new pattern for the blog is to disappear for a long time and then come back with a post that gets something wrong while being critically snooty about people getting things wrong. And I accomplished it on my very first try!

Friend-of-the-Blog Craig Miller has directed my attention to the actual standard use of the phrase “butter wouldn’t melt in his/her mouth.” And I was totally wrong about it, although I’ve certainly heard other people be wrong as well, in different and contrasting ways. The actual use is to refer “dismissively to somebody who appears gentle or innocent while typically being the opposite.” Erm. Okay, yeah, that actually seems right, although the connection to the relative behavior of mouths and butter is obscure.

I will point out that this totally proves my point. Sometimes we’re so sure we know how language works (what with being writers and all), that we don’t double-check this stuff and then we get in trouble when our scripts meet a reader who does know what they’re doing. In fact, this makes my point so perfectly, that I suspect maybe I played it exactly this way on purpose.

So check those idioms!

Lunch: Korean bbq chicken, brown rice, kim chee and pickled radish from the food court at the Century City Mall.

You know what’s been bugging me lately? Words and phrases being used almost but not quite correctly. Sir, you mean “unkempt,” not “unkept”. “Whirlwind,” not “worldwind.” You might mean “incidents,” or you might mean “instances,” but you certainly do not mean “incidences.” And, Miss, you must mean “hot on the heels of,” not “hot OFF the heels of.” Good lord!

Oh, and if you say that someone looked as though “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth,” you mean that they had a very cold expression, not that they looked sweet and harmless — what’s your reasoning there? That they look so benign they wouldn’t even harm butter?

The only thing wrong with feeling superior about knowing how to use these words is that each of us has a matching supply of words we’re using wrong without even knowing it.

This is yet another reason to make your friends read your scripts and give you honest and thorough feedback on issues like these. By the way, for stuff like this, you don’t even need to rely on your screenwriting friends. Try giving a copy of a script to your most literate “I only read the classics” friends. They may not have anything useful to say about space battles, but they are very likely to be the ones to tell you about the difference between “invoke” and “evoke,” “lie” and “lay,” and about that weird second “i” in liaison.

Lunch: Penne Arrabiata

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