I have finished really-rather-poor book with the telegram. It featured some spectactularly hilarious info-dumps, so good I may yet share one with you before I return this to the library. But it was also clearly written by someone who was not British. (The author is American.)
At one point, the heroine spots a suspicious person going into a chemists. So she follows that person in and, to look busy while listening in, browses the magazines.
In American and Canadian drug stores, magazines are ubiquitous. It's one of the basic places to go and buy a magazine.
In the UK? Chemists don't stock magazines. The only time I have seen them there have been in giant Boots, Boots so large they are mini-department stores with an electronics section, books, and stationary.
Have you ever seen magazines for sale in a normal chemists in the UK?
At one point, the heroine spots a suspicious person going into a chemists. So she follows that person in and, to look busy while listening in, browses the magazines.
In American and Canadian drug stores, magazines are ubiquitous. It's one of the basic places to go and buy a magazine.
In the UK? Chemists don't stock magazines. The only time I have seen them there have been in giant Boots, Boots so large they are mini-department stores with an electronics section, books, and stationary.
Have you ever seen magazines for sale in a normal chemists in the UK?
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owlfish- S. Worthen
- S. Worthen
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I love much about Connie Willis, who may or may not be the writer you are thinking of, but her research is so shoddy it throws me right out of the experience. American writers all too often seem to assume we're exactly like them buy quainter.
(I'm sure there are examples of British books and tv shows which get things woefully wrong about America too, of course. But being British with no experience of living in America, I don't tend to notice those unless they're really, glaringly obvious.)
Um, yeah, no.
There are various communities on LJ specifically for writers (amateur or pro) to check their facts; this morning, for example, I've seen someone asking what noise doorbells typically make in London flats. Nit-picky, I suppose, you it can make a difference, and I'm always a bit annoyed when I see a really stupid gaffe in a published book, which could easily have been checked (like Dan bloody Brown's characters travelling the wrong way across Paris; do they not have maps where he's from?).
Huh. They'd apparently never been to London or New York :)
That's really all I had to say.
Oh, other than the fact that it was funny to see Matt Smith and Karen Gillian doing their "American accents" on the Doctor Who in America special. Because, you know, just as there is only one "British accent" - there is only one American one as well. :)
(edited to add: apparently when I post directly to your blog - rather than from my friends page - it defaults to my Facebook id).
I don't really mind my FB account being linked to my LJ account - it was really more of an OCD reaction about orderliness than anything. :)
My pet peeve of this kind is houses with bathrooms and people who bathe every day: all too many US fantasists project daily habits bred from having bathrooms and hot water actually under the same roof as the sleeping space onto characters who have neither.
Magazines belong with newspapers, cigarettes, sweets and cheap toys at the newsagents. Chemists dispense prescription medicine, sell over-the-counter remedies and personal grooming products. They sometimes used to also drift into photography and even cameras for sale, though you don't see that so much now everything has gone digital, though our local Boots has memory cards and batteries.
(Still, that's really neat! Thank you for linking to it!)