Saturday, September 05, 2009

Grounded

If one of your characters falls, where does he fall? If outside, he should fall to the ground. If inside, he should fall to the floor.

It irritates the bejesus out of me when an author and/or the author's copyeditor uses or allows the use of "ground" as a synonym for "floor." I've checked my dictionaries and my thesaurus: They aren't synonyms.

4 comments:

sandra seamans said...

Maybe they have dirt floors in their shacks? ;-)

Stephen D. Rogers said...

What's with all the falling characters? :)

Michael Bracken said...

OK, Stephen, they don't all fall. Some of them get knocked to the "ground" or get thrown to the "ground."

Here's an example from page 156 of Vince Flynn's Act of Treason: "The Bosnian was lying on a nylon field stretcher that sat only a few inches off the ground."

Except that the stretcher is inside an airplane flying over the Atlantic. It's quite clearly more than "a few inches off the ground."

Kevin R. Tipple said...

Yes! Bugs the heck out of me when I read it.