I'm sor(r)y...

[muninnhuginn]

Cory. But, I'd given up with Makers when I'd hardly begun. My interest in the work killed outright. A victim of the third paragraph:

The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell—the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her—the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted way.

Sentence one was fine--odd first name notwithstanding (I gather our friends across the ocean sometimes cast more widely for appropriate monikers) and "prep-school" (whose precise meaning I'm unsure of in a US context).

But sentence two got out a knife and jabbed me in the readerly eye.

"Brit"! Brit?

No, he's English or Welsh or a Scot. And no Brit inhabitant of Great Britain who's attended a prep(aratory) school (i.e. one of those private institutions that feeds into the public school system) would have a name like that. It does not reek of posh, of privilege, of Eton Mess and Wet Bobs and Dry Bobs (and all those other things that are completely foreign to me too). With a surname like Kettlewell, I'd've believed a good honest ordinary name like John or Andrew, and might assume he was a bright boy on a scholarship. Or something more unusual like Peregrine or Auberon would've worked with a slightly more elevated family name: Lacey? de something or other with a family tree right back to the Norman invasion?

But, Landon? Nope. No way. It's not in the Oxford Dictionary of First Names. Not even as a mainly US coinage.

Now, as a surname it's fine. But here in the UK, I don't think it's yet made the move from last to first that other names have made over the centuries.

Of course, the joy of electronic text is that I can fix it... if I so choose. A little search-and-replacer-y is all it takes. So maybe I can continue reading about [insert appropriate first name] [insert appropriate last name] after all.

And don't worry (and I'm sure you won't), you're in good company: I failed to buy Revelation: Space (I think it was that one by Mr Reynolds) for several years due to the misuse of "crescendo" on the first page. And there was a Brian Stableford I hesitated over because of the typo in the first paragraph.

Signed,

Perfectionist, Pedantic and Proud (and English)

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

Do you know ewx?

[muninnhuginn]

I believe I know of him. I can't remember if we've met.

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

I think it depends on her (the speaker's nationality. Non-British people do refer to "Brits".

Landon is, I think an upper-class US name.

Yes, John etc. would work well for an upper-class Englishman. If the author did want something a little more elite, then something Imperial (Julius etc) French (Gervais, etc) would work. Or anything with a St. in it. Place names sometimes work. Oddly. Kettleswell Landon sounds more plausible than Landon Kettleswell.

Thank you for the interlude! I really should be preparing for today's meeting (I am on a train to Epsom).

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, I so agree. I hate the use of 'Brit'.
And the only place I've seen Landon as a first name in a UK context is in Jasper Fforde, where it's a pun.