NotSpellingMistakes

This page exists to collect some notes for non-native speakers of English, who have a tendency to read certain archaic dialect words and usages as incorrect.

In An Orcish Incursion and elsewhere, "march" is not a typo for "marsh"; also, in Liberty, "marchlander" is not a typo for "marshlander". "The marches" is archaic English for the border country of a kingdom. The word was originally Norse "mark" and is related to the ordinary English word "mark"; it also appears as an element in the place name "the Estmark Hills" which is "the hills of the eastern border".

In Son Of The Black Eye, the phrasing "the River Bork" is correct. Modern English usage would favor "the Bork River", but "the River Bork" is historically common and still used in fantasy literature.

In Son Of The Black Eye, "whupping" is a Southern American rural dialect word - a rather rough and rude one - that means "a severe beating", either as verb or noun. It is an appropriate word for Orcs to use.

In Liberty and Two Brothers we make an exception to the normal rule of using American spellings in preference to British in the base text. Thus, "Grey Woods" rather than "Gray woods". We do this because to anyone who notices the difference, "Grey" will probably sound slightly archaic.

In Sceptre of Fire we make another exception: "scepter" is spelled British fashion, for the same reason.

In Northern Rebirth and elsewhere, do not mistakenly change the verb 'preying' to 'praying'. They mean different things.

In Northern Rebirth and elsewhere, "to espy" is an early-modern-English variant of the verb "to spy" inserted as a deliberate archaism. The form "espied" occurs as well. (compare "espionage")

In Heir To The Throne, the word "thutter" is not a misspelling of "thunder". It is a rare and specialized word describing a fast series of striking or slapping sounds, found mainly in SF novels and possibly invented by the writer Poul Anderson. In modern English one might speak, for example, of the thutter of helicopter blades.

Remember that we capitalize the name of a race when (and only when) referring to the entire race. Thus: "the lore of the Elves", but "a band of elves".

UTF-8

The mainline campaigns are being switched to UTF-8. We are adopting the use of the following glyphs:

en dash:            – U+2013 (8211)   
em dash:            — U+2014 (8212)
horizontal bar:     ― U+2015 (8213) aka quotation bar
minus sign:         − U+2212 (8722)
apostrophe:         ’ U+2019 (8217) same character as the right single quote
left single quote:  ‘ U+2018 (8216)
right single quote: ’ U+2019 (8217) same character as the apostrophe
left double quote:  “ U+201C (8220)
right double quote: ” U+201D (8221)

This replaces the current uses of - ' and -- in dialogue, most of which have already been cleared out. If you see characters such as "... the land’s very heart..." instead of "... the land’s very heart..." (the exact triplet shown may vary depending on your operating system), your system/editor/viewer/whatever is not displaying UTF-8 characters correctly.

We are also adopting the use of Pango-style markup, allowing us to mark up text with colours, bold, italics and large or small text.