“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.

You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.

But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.

But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.

This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.

Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.

Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.

Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”

My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it’s more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

That one depends on the job. Some managers will love to exploit your inclination to hyper focus on solving problems and following the rules. They won’t ask you to work unpaid after hours but if you want to they won’t protest… Doing a third of the work for a team of six people? That’s great, but your next performance review will include the criticism that you’re not as social as your coworkers because you’re too busy doing the job.

The fragments can be a stylistic choice. Ultimately all writing “rules” are arbitrary and often decided by consensus, often based on “what we’ve always done” as much as based on a specific reason for better communication or possibly a reason that is moot now. It’s good to know what your potential readers are likely to prefer and it’s good to know what an editor or agent will want if you’re hoping to get published in a traditional manner.

That being said, I’m a fan of breaking “rules” when you have a good reason to and know why you’re doing it. If the narrative is reflecting the fragmented thoughts of a character, fragments might thematically work really well.

That said there are also ways of rephrasing the fragments to make them flow better. Some readers might find them abrupt because they’re looking for the noun and the verb with some kind of active action.

For the heavy chain, some readers won’t think of it as a grade or gauge of chains. Sometimes technically accurate isn’t better than stylistically smooth. But it isn’t a significant difference, so definitely keep it if you like it. You should write for yourself first of all.

I liked it in general. It was an interesting glimpse into a world where there are implications of greater detail I’d be curious to know more about, such as how the main character’s age and knowledge of magic works. Some of the characters are necessarily one dimensional in such a short peic of writing. Scared and concerned victims of witch trials and puritanical patriarchal male authoritarians is what I’d expect because that’s what’s been depicted before, in the Crucible, in the Sleepy Hollow movie, and other fictional depictions.

If you share a Google doc link instead of a PDF, people can make comments in the document itself, so it’s easier to provide direct feedback to specific text.

You have some tense issues. “Behind him, sat a woman.” (past tense) then “…she stares down…” (present tense).

Some of the sentences are incomplete sentences. “Her posture, in direct contrast to that of the Good Reverend.”

“A red mark wraps around her neck, and a heavy chains secure her delicate wrists.” Wraps is odd as an active verb unless the mark is appearing in the moment. Usually an inanimate thing is wrapped around rather than wraps. I’d suggest something like “stretches around.” “Heavy” is redundant with chains. Chains are rarely light. “a heavy chains” has an agreement problem. A is singular, chains is plural.

“and the Reverend’s clearly dire distress,” It hasn’t seemed like he’s in dire distress prior to this descriptor. Earlier he was described as having a “posture proud with authority…” “full of fire and fury, but steady and deliberate.”

Some of the narration seems to be Colette’s internal monologue and should probably be in italics to distinguish it from just third person omniscient narration.

For example: “This poor girl has not a speck of magic in her – And the vegetables from Reinette’s garden aside, neither does anyone else within a thousand kilometers.”

But then the next paragraph mentions Colette in the third person again.

There are too many to mention since there’s so much out there.

You can go to a font website like dafont and perform a search for a font or browse different themes/styles and specify in the results that you want Public domain / GPL / OFL fonts.

Almost all of my fonts are released under an attribution license, so they’re free for commercial use and remixing.

https://michaelwmoss.com/typefaces

A pattern I’ve noticed isn’t the legal aspect, but rather the monetization. Everyone is offering a platform where an obscure writer can pay to give away their writing for free or pay for an ad campaign where you’re spending more on ads than you will otherwise make off your work. One of the significant advantages for writing is that it requires very little overhead versus another activity like making physical objects that require equipment and material. But the market is saturated and publishing platforms are harder to access unless you’re a guaranteed seller who is already somewhat famous or has a built-in following. And there’s always someone out there willing to “help” by taking your money for the promise of connections and exposure.

It reminds me of the old poetry contest scams where you submit a poem, they tell every poet that they’ve “won” and will be published, and then they offer a “discount” for poets published in the book to get print copies for you and your friends and family, but the book is only advertised to the poets.

It does seem like there should be more open and free resources for this—websites where authors and readers connect without barriers or monetization. There probably are, but they don’t show up high in search results. Obviously they’re not going to be seen before all the paid options with ad funding.

About 18 years ago when I was a dispatcher, I had someone call 911 to report their drug dealer stole their laptop because they couldn’t afford to pay for the drugs they wanted to purchase. I asked them a few times if they would like to file a police report that states that they intentionally purchased illegal drugs. They didn’t seem to understand the angle of the question and we asked them to stay where they were so a deputy could go out and take a statement.

I would guess someone invented the handshake in prehistoric times and we just have no medium in which a record could exist aside from an undiscovered cave drawing or something like that. Humans seem to naturally touch hands outside of any social influence or cultural history. Babies reach out and people touch their hands. It seems like a pretty intuitive human action. We touch things with our hands, so other hands seems natural as a thing to touch. The shake just seems like a minor variation on that.

You can coin a neologism if you can’t find an existing word.

onomato- is a prefix that is often used to mean word or name felic- is a prefix that means happy ortho- can mean correct, but also straight

So maybe orthonomatofelicity?

Probably too long.

Maybe just onomatofelicity?

There are other roots you can find with similar meanings to mix up your own neologism.

That note was both sharp and flat.

NES and SNES were much more ubiquitous and often the exclusive consoles for a lot of games, so Sega was coming up with it’s own line of games that weren’t as likely to enter collective memory or later have movies made out of them.