Fraziled

This morning while I was hunting around for a synonym for the noun vigil (it sounds a bit too archaic, and watch is overused) I noticed Dictionary.com's word of the day: frazil. I'd never before seen the word, and I really don't like when that happens, so I clicked on the link for the definition, as follows:

The relatively uncommon noun frazil “ice crystals formed in turbulent water, as in swift streams or rough seas,” comes from Canadian French frasil (also frazil, fraisil), an extension of French fraisil “coal cinders, coal dust.” French fraisil is an alteration of Vulgar Latin adjective facilis “pertaining to a torch or firebrand,” a derivative of the Latin noun fax (inflectional stem fac-) “torch, light.” It is unsurprising that frazil first appeared in the Montreal Gazette in the winter of 1888.

From light to fire to ice, what do you know. It's a Robert Frost of a word -- really, you could build a poem out of the meaning and evolution of frazil. I love finding things like this. Made my whole day, really.

Last night I read a bit of a currently popular NA novel I purchased to get another sample of the genre, and felt a very different kind of awe: I could not believe how badly it was written. No, really, imagine the worst, multiply that by a factor of ten, and you'll get close to what the actual reading experience was like for me.

The profanity alone could have set a record; I think the eff word appeared on every single page multiple times. Everyone used it, too; all the characters were basically the same character with the same personality in different bodies. The plot, you ask? No plot. Just lame excuses for stomach-turning sex scenes and badly thought-out violence and absolutely pointless juvenile confrontations, none of which made any logical sense whatsoever given the ages and social positions of the characters. The romance, if you could call it that, was utterly ridiculous. I ended up chuckling through most of that (and trust me, the author was definitely not trying to be funny.)

Although it wasn't about vampires, it had a kind of bizarre Twilight feel to it, too. I think the author watched those movies a little too often and ended up writing another, more twisted version than even that Fifty Shades gal did. Finally I waded my way through all this crap right up to the black moment, at which point I gave up and set the book aside. It's really not nice to snicker at someone's earnest efforts. Also, I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes, which made it impossible to read any more.

I know reader expectations have dropped considerably over the last couple of years, but if this kind of crap is what they expect, they haven't set the bar too low. There simply is no bar.

Image by me while in the Smoky Mountains, circa 2013