'Shells'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
That was her first book, IIRC.
As a racing-mad teen, it made me want to write a long, annoying letter detailing everything she got wrong, which was almost everything.
In that pre-Google era, accurate information on horse racing and breeding rules and regulations was still not hard to come by, drat it!
But I suppose I can forgive her for it. Mebbe.
(Yes, it is my Bullet Proof Pedantry!)
If I recall correctly, they kept telling her she was being mean ....
Like the girls who picked on them in High School?
Accusing someone of plagiarism rightfully is so nerdy and ugly and mean.
And, on the SBTB site, they had a plagairism expert of some sort who'd looked at the examples (or perhaps only one or two) and say it did look like plagairism ... and someone posted accusing him of slander.
It's very fan-girly in there.
I wonder how one becomes a plagiarism expert.
Dear God, plagiarism is a fucked-up word. -iari-? Are they trying to make sure that only people intelligent enough to spell it can accuse people of it?
hasn't stopped anyone so far ....
Now you people made me go read some of the CE threads over at SBTB, and I'm flabbergasted by the commenters who seem to think that it was wrong and mean for a reader to google passages from the CE ferret book.
As if there's some other magical, telepathic way to divine plagiarism.
Dear God, plagiarism is a fucked-up word.
It's following Italian (presumably, Latinate) spelling: the I after the G and before a vowel forces a hard G rather than a soft one. Like Giovanni or Giuliani or that scary chef Giada de Laurentiis. You don't actually say "Jee-oo-lee-an-ee", just "Joo-lee-an-ee" -- the I is for consonant-hardening purposes only.
(In Spanish, a C before and E or an I is a soft C, so if you want the hard-C sound, you have to use QU. But a C before an A, O or U is a hard C, so if you want it to be soft you use a Z. Italian is way simpler.)
Let's all just switch to Esperanto.
Italian is way simpler.
Phonetically, Italian is an absolute dream. Of course, it's a language with very marked regional differences, so there are only like 12 highly-educated people from Florence who actually pronounce things the way they were presented in class as the One True Way -- but oh, the rules, they are lovely and clear and consistent rules!