Some more living on an ocean planet
Mar. 29th, 2016 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aldersprigAfter this
Tropical life was weird. Austin was on the building crew, and so he and William and Mable had gotten first dibs on their choice of house.
They'd chosen a shelter on what they were now calling Auswilma Island, an acre-and-a-bit hilly, wooded lot with steep drops to the water on three sides and a nice casual hill down on the side immediately opposite The Big Island. They got there first, so even though they'd have to share it with two or three other houses - two were built, and there was room for a third - they claimed naming rights.
But owning their own island wasn't the weirdest part, any more than swimming the narrow channel between Auswilma and Big Islands twice a day to get to 'work' was, or bedding down to sleep while the weather was so warm they couldn't stand to touch each other for more than a few minutes.
Weirdest was the wildlife, mainly flighted animals, and the way a couple of them seemed to latch onto each colonist and follow them around. Austin's were a blue-and-marmalade-patterned thing the size of his hands together and a dark-buff-colored thing whose wingspan was bigger than Austin's. At night, they roosted on the roof of the house, his and William's red-and-blue pair and Mable's trio of mostly-black ones. During the day, they followed them around.
When the big one dove into the water next to Austin and pulled out an eel-thing twice his size, Austin was suddenly very grateful indeed for their company.
Tropical life was weird. Austin was on the building crew, and so he and William and Mable had gotten first dibs on their choice of house.
They'd chosen a shelter on what they were now calling Auswilma Island, an acre-and-a-bit hilly, wooded lot with steep drops to the water on three sides and a nice casual hill down on the side immediately opposite The Big Island. They got there first, so even though they'd have to share it with two or three other houses - two were built, and there was room for a third - they claimed naming rights.
But owning their own island wasn't the weirdest part, any more than swimming the narrow channel between Auswilma and Big Islands twice a day to get to 'work' was, or bedding down to sleep while the weather was so warm they couldn't stand to touch each other for more than a few minutes.
Weirdest was the wildlife, mainly flighted animals, and the way a couple of them seemed to latch onto each colonist and follow them around. Austin's were a blue-and-marmalade-patterned thing the size of his hands together and a dark-buff-colored thing whose wingspan was bigger than Austin's. At night, they roosted on the roof of the house, his and William's red-and-blue pair and Mable's trio of mostly-black ones. During the day, they followed them around.
When the big one dove into the water next to Austin and pulled out an eel-thing twice his size, Austin was suddenly very grateful indeed for their company.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 02:35 pm (UTC)---ooo dragons? :-D?
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Date: 2016-03-29 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 02:36 pm (UTC):-D
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Date: 2016-03-29 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-29 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 05:09 am (UTC)Crap, I hate losing text that I've typed, and it keeps happening.
• Big Islands
-> Big Island
• blue-and-marmalade-patterened
-> patterned
• whose wingspan was bigger than Austin's
> Austin has wings?
no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 10:17 am (UTC)No, but he does have a wingspan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingspan#Wingspan_in_sports
(It's also used in fashion, which doesn't seem to merit a wikipedia note here)
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Date: 2016-03-31 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 10:19 am (UTC):-(
Date: 2016-03-31 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 10:21 am (UTC)-> Big Island
Noop.
Auswilma and Big Islands
the islands, Auswilma and Big.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-31 01:46 pm (UTC)Now I understand, but I still think that was a poor way to put the sentence together. "Auswilma" is clearly a proper name, and though you introduce it as "Auswilma Island", saying just "Auswilma" after that would be completely idiomatic. But "big" is an adjective, a very common one, and Adj + N referring to a specific thing or group of things is normally preceded by the definite article "The", as in the state of Hawaii, where "the Big Island" refers to the island whose official name is also Hawaii. (Apologies for the linguistese.) Likewise, you first mention that island in this story as "The Big Island", with the article also capitalized.
So both generally in English and locally in this story and setting, the reader strongly expects to see "The/the Big Island" whenever such a specific piece of land is mentioned. "Big Island" with no article is also a possibility, but understood as colloquially short for "The Big Island" -- as opposed to, say, "Staten Island" in NYC, where the two words are tightly bound as a name and never take "the". No New Yorker would say "*The Verrazano–Narrows Bridge links Staten and Long Islands". (This asterisk is linguistic notation for "ungrammatical".)
* "The Verrazano–Narrows Bridge (sometimes called simply the Verrazano Bridge) is a double-decked suspension bridge in the U.S. state of New York that connects the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn." -- Wikipedia. Brooklyn is geographically part of Long Island (a similarly tightly linked name, with no "the", ever).
Then you say "the narrow channel between Auswilma and Big Islands", which you mean as a standard condensation of "between Auswilma Island and Big Island". But the reader would never expect that, because according to the expectations you've set up, "Big Island" without "the" is ungrammatical and would never be used, just as you'd never say "*the Auswilma Island". The normal and only way to interpret that is to have "and" connecting "Auswilma" with "Big Islands". But there's _no such thing_ as "Big Islands". So, the reader thinks, it must be a typo.
Sorry to go on at such length, but you've stumbled into my territory, and I'm explaining your misstep the clearest way I know how.
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody