Books

Timothy Zahn - People saying things "drily" and wincing and snorting all the time.

Ann Rice - preternatural.

Fucking constantly.

I bought a digital copy of sci-fi novel by established author. Noticed that a certain medium length word was substituted by a longer unrelated word throughout the book. The correct word, identified by context was "understand". Anyone familiar with word processors knows how to do this deliberately, and guess how it might happen inadvertently. Thought this mildly amusing/annoying. A excellent example of when to not be upset at another's blunder. My fifth grade paper on Abraham Lincoln was not turned in spelled "Lincon" because my dear mother gave my paper a quick read.

A professional editor can help a professional author in ways AI and spell checkers can't.

Bram Stoker- Voluptuous

After reading Dracula, I now hate this word, it feels very icky to me

Ain’t really a professional author, but Steven Gerrard with his autobiography released in 2015, where he used the word ‘desperately’ literately all the time, overused it, so to speak

I learned the word ‘unctuous’ because it was repeatedly used to describe Snape’s hair.

I read some stupid alien book by Kathleen Marden, and I swear she used the word «prosaic» probably a hundred times in the book. It was so bad it almost felt like she was using it as a joke to see how many times she could get away with it.

Robert Jordan: She folded her arms under her breasts

In Frankenstein Mary Shelley constantly uses the word “countenance”

I noticed "agreeable" for Jane Austen and "ardent" for Mary Shelley

Yes! In Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros uses the word “nausea” SO MANY times (ad nauseum) and it’s awful when you’re trying to read this book while eating too lol

Diana Gabaldon uses ‘dubiously’ a LOT in the outlander series. There’s a few more she uses a lot but dubiously is the first one that came to mind.

The word "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. It's one of the reasons why some people absolutely hate that book. I think it's kinda funny, ironically.

An author I've read recently really likes using triplet lists.

"She was [word] and [word] and [word]."

It happened frequently enough to be noticeable.

I tried to read Fifty Shades of Gray. Only got about sixty pages in because of the story and writing as well as the phrase "My inner goddess."

In the road by cormac McCarthy he says “wan slats of light” a couple of times. It was such an idiosyncratic phrase that even twice is too much

So many in A Song of Ice and Fire:

• winesink

• jape

• sell sword

• whore

…and George, buddy, for fuck’s sake quit saying someone forked their horse. The word you’re looking for is STRADDLED.

Brandon Sanderson loves the word adroit.

Piranesi - Vestibule

JRR Tolkien said queer like 50,000 times in the Lord of the Rings

Twilight - Meyer loves to describe Edward’s chest as “marble-like”

Recently read "Something New Under the Sun" by Alexandra Kleeman- it's amazing BTW- and I swear she used the word indelible 15 times. I read her short story collection Intimations right afterward and kept my eyes peeled for any instances of the word, but it didn't make an appearance lol.

Shoutout to Tolkien for having his characters spring back a lot!

If acerbic appears more than twice in any book not about lemons or lemon husbandry, I'd really sour on it too.

Sarah J Maas is notorious for doing this with lots of words or phrases. My least favorite and what I noticed the most is "balk". Such an ugly looking and sounding word.

China Meiville has quite a few like puissance, jackknife, or pinion

Also Kim Stanley Robinson sure loves his escarpments