Italics and spam

[ladyofastolat]

It always irritates me when fantasy novels use italics for made-up words. I know this is standard practice. I know this is recommended practice when using foreign words that are not yet commonly used in our own language. But it still annoys me. I can't stop myself from reading it with a bit of mental emphasis, and it continually slightly throws out my reading of a sentence. You'd think I'd have got used to it by now, but no. I'm the same with italicised ship names. For me, nautical tales are positively riddled with confusing emphases.

Totally unrelated to the above, several recent spam emails have had very pleasing subject headers. I seem to have deleted most of them, but these two remain:

"The debt locates the jaded account"

"The grumpy company inspires the cook."

I fear that I have been mistaken for a spy, and my failure to reply with the correct countersign will result in Consequences.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

You know, it's the opposite with me - I get really, really irritated with the (over)use of italics for emphasis and, even worse, for thought, rather than the grammatical standard use for foreign words, book titles and vehicle names.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I just saw a tweet about an 'angry foam hand inventor' which made me think that maybe your jaded account and grumpy company had escaped from Twitter...

Mind you, I think a nervous cook could be quite reasonably inspired by having to cook for a grumpy company!

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

Yup. Can't be doing with itslics all over the place. Or indeed names with apostrophes in them to show they are magic/barbarian/elvish/alien or whatever.

But I am quite taken with the poor nervous cook.