Comments | seti_fan: DW Fic: Moment of Silence

seti_fan

DW Fic: Moment of Silence

Jan 31, 2009 00:39

Took a break from stats and mapping to write up a story that's been rolling around my head since this ep re-aired on BBC America. Hope you enjoy! Off to go dig toad traps tomorrow. The life of a wildlife ecologist is ever so glamorous. :)

Moment of Silence

Setting: Forest of the Dead

Rating: G-PG

Characters: Donna, Doctor, Lux, River (sort of)

Spoilers ( Read more... )

Comments 13

RANT WARNING!!!! penguin2 January 31 2009, 07:16:48 UTC

No. Please, no. Please, please, please NO. It's not a single word, it's a phrase. A phrase. An expression. It is not not not not NOT 'alright', it's 'all right'. It's all right. Every time. I beg you, please, please correct this.

Yes, I know, there's language shift and there's orthographic drift and all that and all that, and I know that the battle will soon be lost and that yet another beautiful piece of Standard English will have been killed by phonetic spelling and the meme-power of the internet, but 'alright' STILL looks wrong. It's clumsy. It's ugly. Alright is very much a part of colloquial imagery - no, not just colloquial but lower-end colloquial, a slurred grunt coming out of the mouth of an urban slacker or rural village idiot. Granted, it can be used to signal regional dialogue (an' a' tha'!), but in general usage it's still a phrase rather than a single word.

I think it sticks out particularly egregiously here because Doctor Who is, after all, one of ours, and our lot still speak (and spell) in Standard. I can accept ( ... )

Re: RANT WARNING!!!! seti_fan January 31 2009, 12:59:13 UTC

:) Heard and understood, ma'am.

It's funny, that's one of those spellings I've gone back and forth about. For some reason, since I was a kid, I've liked it and gotten used to it being one word, even though it's properly two. (And I guess English and writing teachers have never corrected me on it, to my memory.) Even though I do see it in print as "all right", it almost looks wrong sometimes, and I don't know why. I've sat and considered which way to use it in writing (I have been known to get defiant over grammatical rules that I disagree with), whether there is some connotational reason to use one over the other and come to no conclusive answer. But since "all right" is the more correct way to do it, I guess I'll start retraining myself to write it that way.

I didn't even think about it having a class connection in the UK. Life teaches me something new every day.

Will go back and correct it later today/tomorrow! Ugh. It's too early and cold to dig holes for toad traps. At least it'll warm up once the sun's up.

Re: RANT WARNING!!!! penguin2 February 1 2009, 11:38:40 UTC

~grins and bows~

;-)

So how did the toad-trapping go?

Re: RANT WARNING!!!! seti_fan February 1 2009, 18:26:43 UTC

The trip went very well, thank you. Though it was too cold most of the day for toads to be active, we got three traps built before noon, thoroughly trouncing the previous day's group of volunteers by about 4 hours. (We attribute our superior efficiency to sandier soil in our part of the park and our general inherent awesomeness. :) ) The park was absolutely gorgeous (East Texas pine forest), the weather was perfect, getting into the 70's, and we had a great group of people working together and just plain having fun. We rode around in the back of a pick-up through the woods, picnicked with sandwiches in a clearing after finishing work, and found a freshly dead red-shouldered hawk by the roadside that must have lost a fight with another hawk. In true biologist fashion, the others proceeded to remove our drinks from the cooler and put the hawk in to take back and mount as part of our school's specimen collection. (The grad student in charge has a permit to do so and we didn't kill the bird ourselves so it's a legal collection, though we ( ... )

Thread 11

maekala January 31 2009, 08:26:29 UTC

The rant above notwithstanding (while I agree, my eyes gloss over such things nowadays unless I'm reading to edit, that it didn't bother me), I liked it. You get the relationship between the two of them and you portray it very beautifully. I'm glad you include their own bits of angst and yet you know they'll come together again once they've each had a chance to process what they need to process.

Very well done.

seti_fan February 1 2009, 20:16:39 UTC

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

BTW, will you be coming out to All-Con in Dallas this March?