I think I spotted an error in the copy of Watchmen that I bought in 2001. The error is actually in the excerpts of Hollis Mason’s book Under the Hood. He makes a reference to several other costumed vigilantes active on the West coast of the U.S. when I’m pretty sure he means the East coast. So either Alan Moore’s people missed that, or Hollis Mason’s people did.

I have an old orange-cover copy of Dune Messiah from the early 1980′s that is full of typos and bewildering changes in font size. (Was this a standard practice in the olden days, to reset a corrected line of type in a smaller typeface to avoid having to reset a page or more?) Each time I re-read it, I say to myself Damn, those errors are still there, haven’t they fixed them yet? Of course, since I’m re-reading the same copy of the book, this probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

That one comes from a dialect common in Pennsylvania, influenced by the language of the early Scots-Irish settlers, that extends as far as West Virginia. There’s some info on it here on Wikipedia and here in an article I’d love to see the rest of. My mom’s family was from West Virginia, and I have a few other markers from the dialect: “redd up” (which means “clean up”) and the use of a positive “anymore” (“Gas is really expensive anymore”).

My dad’s family was from Texas, and I grew up there. I have a few interesting markers from Texan dialects, too, such as doubling (or more) of prepositions (“Get on up from there”) and modals (“I might could’ve done that yesterday if you’d told me”). Those serve a true function in the language of the area as politeness markers: You will be viewed as a terse, rude, brusque person if you drop them.

(I can’t force silly WordPress to set my quote marks properly up there–sorry. :-))

(Here, you would say “doesn’t need turning off” or “doesn’t need to be turned off”, but never “doesn’t need turned off”. The only other person I’ve ever “heard” use the latter expression is a WY transplant to CA. ::narrows eyes in thought::

Nah, this whole blog is dialogue, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s how I’d say it. :-)

I’m glad David was happy with my work. He’d told me that before, but it’s always nice to hear it again from someone else. :-)

Do you mean “doesn’t need to be turned off”? (I always say the only thing I can’t proofread is my own writing!)

The author who sang your praises was David Louis Edelman.

Which author was that?

BTW, I was talking to an outhor the other day who said what a great job you did on his book…