Just Bugs Me Blogging
Irradiated by LabRat
As long as I’m going to continue having nothing of substance to say, I might as well try the snark-drive-by model of whatever random thought happens to be floating between my ears.
That said, here’s one of my huge linguistic pet peeves, to be found anywhere that teeth are mentioned, usually in the context of some other species: Your incisors are not your canines, and your canines are not your incisors. Okay? Your incisors can be found as the four teeth up front in your upper and lower jaws. They are flattish and come to a chisel-shaped edge. They are for chopping things. When you try to bite a piece off of food, unless it’s tough or gristly and needs gnawing or twisting, you use your incisors to do it. Your canine teeth, on the other hand, are pointy and tent-peg shaped and can be found immediately to the right and left of your incisors. They are for tearing things.
Since herbivores tend to take bites that involve chopping and carnivores tend to take bites that involve tearing, herbivores have big, strong incisors and smaller, less pointy canines, and carnivores have big, strong canines and smaller, pointier incisors. Humans, as omnivores, have teeth that are intermediate but tend to favor the herbivore model overall: our incisors are bigger and our canines are not nearly as large and pointy as the average carnivore’s.
The fundamental problem that arises here is with writers who writing certain kinds of stories- about animal characters, maybe, or possibly about vampires or werewolves. A favorite descriptive tactic here is for a character who should have big, scary pointy teeth to smile menacingly, so that those teeth can be exposed and do their job of impressing. The writer, being an expert on writing rather than on dentition, will then half the time reach for the name he remembers as being attached to the big teeth, which is kind of scary-sounding and generally SEEMS like it should belong to the pointy teeth… and the image promptly fixed in the mind of the reader who DOES know what the proper terms are is forever after of Buggy the Buck-Toothed Vampire, no matter how menacing he is in any other passage.
I hate this. And now so do you.
January 30th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Ah, yes. This sort of thing drives me insane also. I can’t watch medical shows any more because the ludicrous plotlines and procedures make me want to throw empty whiskey bottles at the TV while shouting incoherently.
January 30th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I’m the same way about all those “CSI” shows.
“We’ve found the blood by hosing the whole room with luminol - now let’s take some of it for a DNA sample!”
Uh, nooooo…. *click*
- MuscleDaddy
January 30th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Satellite surveillance in films following a character around in realtime.
January 31st, 2009 at 12:12 am
What really gets me is when they take an extremely grainy photo, something that has the resolution of an astigmatic mole, then enlarge it eleventy kabillion times and hit a magic button and get a near perfect image showing the face of the murderer reflecting off a car door a hundred feet from the camera.
Sorry, doesn’t work that way. You can do certain things to manipulate the image, such as playing with the levels or contrast in order to bring out certain details, but you don’t get to create resolution out of nowhere. And what really pisses me off is that unlike the forensic stuff and the gun stuff, the people doing the filming should fucking KNOW BETTER. They’re professionals who work with FILM. They should know that they can’t manipulate images that way.
The computer stuff amuses me as well. In almost EVERY show, the computer technicions do EVERYTHING with the keyboard, even things that ought to require a mouse. They are all also apparently the fastest typers on earth, given the clacking of the keys sounds like there’s an epileptic cat standing on the keyboard. Oh, and don’t get me started on their GUI’s…..
January 31st, 2009 at 6:12 am
Like the safeties on silenced revolvers, I’ve gotten to the point where I just tune out the Dyak vampires.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:41 pm
The human mouth doesn’t seem to be well-designed for a vampire lifestyle. (I feel like I’ve seen movies that try to address this issue, but I don’t remember if they were any good.=p)
January 31st, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Ditto to Robert re photo resolution. Makes me nuts.
And: weirdly, true vampire bats (Desmodus) DO have the incisors pointed and useful for piercing- probably the only mammal that does. (I double checked this in Walker’s Mammals of the World.)
January 31st, 2009 at 6:28 pm
And probably because of this, the very first movie vampire, Nosferatu, did too- but everyone else apparently decided the long canines looked much nicer, because so far as I know he was also the last.
Interestingly, the last place I ran into this error was in a description of a werewolf. That was a wallbanger, especially because the author was otherwise so scrupulously careful.
February 1st, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I always liked this guy.
http://www.figures.com/databases/news/actionfigures/172/13.jpg
I hope img tags work. If not just follow the link.
February 1st, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Nope.