A poll, of sorts
Feb. 6th, 2010 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo. My house may be as broken as everything else just now - my body, my mind, my career, my finances, y'know - but one thing remains to me, so long as the computer lives and I am plugged into the TENS machine. I can, at the least, still work.
I have all this novel to revise. I have read it word for word, and scribbled all over it; now I get to realise those scribbles into actual typed changes, rewrites, new matter and cuts.
Which means I get to spend significant portions of time debating: teeter, or totter?
I have consulted the dictionary (how many jobs let you do this?), and find it ambivalent. It does note that teeter derives from the Middle English for totter, which is not reflexive (totter coming from the Norwegian, apparently), which might suggest that totter is older and perhaps more authentic - but I'm not sure that's relevant here, it's just interesting.
Anyway. Here is your Saturday task: in the paragraph below, would you use teetering or tottering? I have myself swapped them in and out to the point where I can no longer see either one as an actual, y'know, word...
There were just two things he would not willingly relinquish, out of all the world. Despite all terror, and all betrayal. Tien was one of them, and actually this was the other: this constant grinding oppression of scale, this teetering always on the edge of a catastrophic fall. This revealed savagery, this terrible landscape, eternal wrath, this dragon.
I have all this novel to revise. I have read it word for word, and scribbled all over it; now I get to realise those scribbles into actual typed changes, rewrites, new matter and cuts.
Which means I get to spend significant portions of time debating: teeter, or totter?
I have consulted the dictionary (how many jobs let you do this?), and find it ambivalent. It does note that teeter derives from the Middle English for totter, which is not reflexive (totter coming from the Norwegian, apparently), which might suggest that totter is older and perhaps more authentic - but I'm not sure that's relevant here, it's just interesting.
Anyway. Here is your Saturday task: in the paragraph below, would you use teetering or tottering? I have myself swapped them in and out to the point where I can no longer see either one as an actual, y'know, word...
There were just two things he would not willingly relinquish, out of all the world. Despite all terror, and all betrayal. Tien was one of them, and actually this was the other: this constant grinding oppression of scale, this teetering always on the edge of a catastrophic fall. This revealed savagery, this terrible landscape, eternal wrath, this dragon.