It's called prosopagnosia. I have it and can't picture faces at all even if I've seen them before many times (like myself or my mother or father or twin sister).
It's actually one of the reasons I like books more than movies. You don't have to recognize anyone (which I've always struggled to in movies especially if characters have the same height, gender, and hair color). Just let go of the urge to and follow the characters using their names.
As in "acerbic wit"?
And yes, some words stand out. In several of his books including the Imager series, the Corean Chronicles, and his latest Councillor series, LE Modesitt Jr uses the word "eased" a lot.
When I first noticed it, he was doing it in the context of a horse being ridden. Eg. "Alucius eased the gray around the quarasote." It felt pretty natural to me. When I read his latest series and the same thing was used to describe a steam powered car being driven, it caught my attention. And then on a re-read of Imager, I noticed it was being applied to people's movement too.
Obviously, I don't have that big of a problem with it since I keep reading his books.
I'm not sure I'd call it the worst, but Eragon was pretty disappointing. Part of it was that the dragon didn't look realistic (along with basically everything else).
But the bigger problem was that none of the characters felt real. Brom was disappointing. So was Roran. And Arya. And every other character. The mental communication also just felt wrong in the movie.