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Date Posted: Tue, Apr 13 2004, 18:28:27
Author: MST Meg
Subject: Re: Did some searching, maybe this helps!
In reply to: Evil Ilse 's message, "Did some searching, maybe this helps!" on Tue, Apr 13 2004, 17:29:06

Hi Ilse!

>I Googled 'he who * none'.

*smacks forehead* 8 years on the Internet, and I didn't think of using the * in my search. ;-p

>This is what turned up. The
>author's bio doesn't say what nationality she is.

I suspect she's got a Spanish-speaking background, the "Jimena" character could well be an author self-insertion. But she could just as much be a native English-speaker, a scary number of fangrrrrlz are.

>It would also
>explain the funky spelling mistakes, because a lot of
>words in a foreign language are stored passively, not
>actively (meaning you understand them and can
>sometimes pronounce them, but not write them).

That unfortunately also applies to a number of people whose first language is English. It's a damn difficult language to spell and I'm afraid that if you're lazy or uninterested in literature, you can get to godawful levels of bad spelling (Netspeak isn't helping).

At any rate, being a non-native speaker wouldn't be an excuse for leaving said funky spelling in fics. I know a few authors who write great fic in English, even though it's not their first language. They're good because they're not afraid of opening a dictionary regularly and have got proper beta-readers (actually I had a beta-reader who was better at noticing spelling/grammar problems than native speakers, and her first language was Portuguese).

>If you
>don't thoroughly know the language, hook line and
>sincere probably makes sense. (I wouldn't even know
>the correct spelling of sinker).

And Word wouldn't count it as a mistake. It's actually very amusing to see how Word's spell-checker can make things *much* worse than they were. >:D

>He who esteems none but himself is as happy as a king.
>Source: Italian proverb

Hm... if the author was really referring to that proverb, she was using it waaaay out of context (I was thinking she's trying to refer to a proverb that means something like "if I don't do my job/duty/etc now, I'll be in trouble"). Still, considering the rest of the fic...

>Hmm, I'm not sure if the code's cracked yet :-)

Me neither. Would it be evil to email the author to ask her what she meant, to MST her better? ;-p

>Good
>luck with your MST-ing. I'd love to read it when it's
>done.

My associate (Sev) and I are creating a little website for our new hobby, I'll share the link when we have anything up. ;) (Al's Waiter was the one who inspired us with his MSTs of godawful LOTR fic, btw)

Meg

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