Morning Rant

Let's take a look at some basic, english grammar, shall we?

1) To lie, lied, lied = to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
(for those of you who didn't finish highschool: the first one is the infinitive (lie), the second the simple past (lied), the last the past participle (lied).
The present participle is lying.

That leaves us with the following examples:
He lied about his age.
He had lied to him before.
I know he was lying about his age.

2) To lie, lay, lain = to be or to stay at rest in a horizontal position
Present participle: lying

He lies on the bed.
He lay perfectly still, hoping that the tiger wouldn't eat him.
If he had lain perfectly still, he'd still be alive today.
He is lying on the bed when he sees the tiger approach him.

3) (and here is where it really gets tricky) To lay, laid, laid = to put or set down; to place for rest or sleep;
Present participle: laying

Now I lay me down to sleep. (I'm not even sure if this is correct, but I assume that it would have to be 'me" rather than the reflexive 'myself' because 'lay' stands necessarily with an object, so the reference to the subject isn't really reflective. But who knows?)
I laid the money on the table and left.
He has laid the money on the table.

Notice how this is the act of putting is something down. The object that is placed somewhere is passive in your sentence. You can lay yourself down but you canNOT order someone to "Lay down on the bed!"
So the more dominant of you (generic you, meaning writers in general, not anyone specific on my flist) should write
"Lie down on the bed, bitch!"
and
"Lay her down on the bed, slave!"

And if you absolutely have to include spanking (I don't mind spanking from time to time), please, please , don't write "Whack - whack - whack", especially not in direct speech, because it makes me think that the character is saying "Whack - whack - whack!". Or - to put it in spanking terms -it hurts my brain, not my bottom.


Disclaimer:
As you all know, I'm not a native speaker. I make my fair share of mistakes. Let's not even mention the typos. The correct use of the comma in the english language will forever remain a mystery to me, but I try my best. The whole lie, lay, lie etc. thing is something I learned in highschool (well, not the spanking thing, obviously.) It is really not that hard to remember and there are thousands of websites and essays dedicated to this little problem. So if you know that you tend to use it incorrectly, look it up. Ask. Get a beta.


Next we learn why words like "definately" and "competant" do not exist, and why you maybe should have take those latin classes after all.

This was your morning rant, brought to you be the letter 'B' and oceana_, as a shameless excuse to use the pretty Skinner icon that I snatched from literati.

Say NO to explanatory dialogue!

In another futile attempt to make the world a better place, I'd like request the prohibition of what I call explanatory dialogue. Yep, it's one of these days...

Examples:

Numb3rs, episode 2x09 "Toxin":
David (completely out of context): "So we need to find out why a poisoner is trying to find a federal fugitive."
Colby: "The better question is how he intends to find him."
David: "And the best people to answer this question are the ones who've been looking for him the past seven months."

Supernatural, Pilot: (notice how I totally don't watch this show, because I will not succumb to peer pressure and Jensen Ackles alone cannot be reason enough to watch even more TV than I already do and OMG who am I kidding?)
Brothers talking about missing Dad.
Sam: "I swore I was done hunting for good."
Dean: "Come on, it wasn't easy, but it wasn't that bad."
Sam: "Yeah, when I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a 45."
Dean: "So what was he supposed to do?"
Sam: "I was nine years old. He was supposed to say 'Don't be afraid of the dark."
Dean: "Don't be afraid of the dark, are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark, you know what's out there."
Sam: "I know what's out there, but still, the way we grew up after mom was killed and dad's obsession to find the thing that killed her."
(it goes on and on, with a memorable "We were raised by warriors" somewhere in between.)

CSIs:
Almost everything, especially everything that Grissom or Horatio say, with or without sunglasses.


All these conversations have one thing in common: The characters tell each other things that they already know, but that are new or maybe unclear to the viewer. A normal conversation between Sam and Dean could have gone like this, for example:

"Remember the 45?"
"Yeah, so what. Was he supposed to tell 'Don't be afraid of the dark?'"
"No, of course not, but still, after mom died, dad became obsessed."


This conversation would give the brothers all the clues they need to understand each other. The gun, the scary things, the death of their mother. Problem is, the viewer won't have any idea what's going on (this takes place about ten minutes into the show). Same with Numb3rs. David and Colby are FBI agents hunting for a man who tried to poison food. They know what they are doing. They know why they are going to wherever they are going (and it's not just so Colby can hero-worship Edgerton.) But the viewer could have been a bit confused by the events, unable to make the connection between the poisoner and the federal fugitive, and so it's up to David and Colby to have this useless conversation in the car. CSI, as the self-declared Forensics 101, is pretty much all about explaining to the viewer who is doing what and why, so I shouldn't even complain about all the bad dialogue in these shows.


Explanatory dialogue is annoying for many reasons:

1) It is unnatural. We know these people wouldn't usually have the conversation they are having. In TV and even more in fiction, it throws me right out of the story and makes me realize that I sit in front of the TV, wondering why the writers wrote this the way they did. It seriously lessens my TV watching pleasure, and you know how I get if you touch my TV.

2) It can be derogatory, like the Numb3rs example, because it obviously says "I think that you, viewer, are too slow to understand this show, so let me explain it to you again."

3) It is lazy. Supernatural is a good example for this. I would have loved to learn all these things about the brothers, but the writers were too lazy to show them to me, to explain them with the medium the yare using, which is a movie, albeit a 43:20 minute one on TV. So they put all this information, that would have made a good story, into a few sentences. Things I would have liked to have found out by myself, like the information that they were raised like "warriors". Which, btw, is a rather stranger thing to say about oneself. Apart from that, it wasn't that hard to figure out, with the burning woman and the baby and everything, which leads me back to point 2): how stupid do they think I am?

On TV, 2) is the more common mistake, but it sometimes mixes with 3). If you think your reader/viewer can't follow the actions, then maybe you have done something wrong before. 3) is very common in fanfic. It's okay to have SG-1 talk about their mission if you start your fic already off-world, but it isn't okay if Jack and Daniel tell each other that they have been lovers for only a month, because they wouldn't usually talk about that. Usually, I say, because you can always find a reason, and explaining things in dialogue doesn't have to be all bad. But then you need to give me a reason why these people are having that kind of conversation at that moment. If Sam and Dean had explained this to the stupid looking blond girl with the smurfs, it would have made sense, because she, like the viewer, would need the information to understand what they are talking about. As long as it's just the two of them, it's just annoying.

The Numb3rs writers, as much as I appreciate them in other ways, had no excuse at all to make David and Colby have their conversation and it annoyed me even more when I think they they could have been having sex instead.


Now I'll go back to watching Supernatural, which I don't watch, but won't judge by its first ten minutes either.

Supernatural, Pilot

After 30 minutes I still don't think that this show is very good, but how can I NOT watch a show where Jensen Ackles is thrown across the hood of a police car and hand-cuffed?

Supernatural 1x02 Wendigo

I agree with castalie, ( this was worse than the pilot. )

Supernatural 1x03 "Dead in the Water"

I get it now! They are totally the A-Team of the Supernatural!

It's all there, the pretending to be someone else (without the cool costumes, of course), the fight for justice, uhm, against the 'bad things' I mean, the cheesy pick-up lines and the sparsely dressed blond women. The car. The fact that -while not real fugitives - they are from what I understood so far at least trying to avoid the cops. Dean is totally Face and Murdock's love child, Sam is more Hannibal/Amy/Teal'cBA.

And then: "Name three children that you even know"? I can feel the beginning of a wonderful affair with a bad tv show. But then, I have seen every single ep of The Sentinel, MacGyver and Highlander, so high-quality television is obviously not a priority for me. Not saying that those shows didn't have excellent episodes from time to time, especially Highlander. Sentinel? Not so much.
*loves Jim and Blair nonetheless*

But the A-Team! I LOVE The A-Team! You people should have told me that this is just another version of my favourite 80s TV show and I would never have said a bad thing about Supernatural.