Everytime I run across penned used like this:
This episode was penned by Ray Bradbury
I get all itchy. It just makes me nuts. Why? So it’s a stilted, self conscious way to avoid the verb write. I could just laugh it off. Wry amusement. Condesending giggles. A raised brow. But the named thing works on me like nails on a chalkboard.
There are other words that do this to me for no apparent reason. The name Dorcas, for example. Hubby is another one that makes me crazy.
There’s nothing I can do about any of this, of course. Except bitch. Which I have now done.
You've stumbled across my official website and landed on the front page of my weblog.
Well. *hurmph* You clearly don’t understand how important it is to communicate your _method_ of writing to those writer folk who are beneath you.
Now _I_ wait until the fourth Friday of the month to scale Mount Reightersblaak where I gather the discarded tail feathers of a bald eagle. Once I am home, I brew a bracing pot of tea. As the leaves unfurl, and I inhale the heady aroma of freshly steeped tea, I use a knife given to my grandfather by Walt Whitman to shave the tips of the feathers into perfect quills.
As for the ink? Well on the second Sunday of the month, I collect the berries from…
Oh, wait! I can’t give away all of the secrets of how I _pen_ my novels, now can I?
You people with your Powerbooks and iBooks! hurmph.
I keep telling people that, if I ever get married, I will use the term “man-spouse” so that I may avoid ever saying “hubby.”
But I have to admit – I’ve used “penned” before.
Sorry, but I am constitutionally incapable of hearing something was “penned” without getting an image of (1) Bartleby the Scrivener or (2)Platt R Spencer &tc.
http://hans.presto.tripod.com/scan/ealupfer.html
(Not quite as jarring as the image I get every time a character “knits” his brow, though…) I’m okay with you powerbooking your novels, or crayoning them, as long as you keep doing ’em [g]
Penned – reminds me of the time I gave the wrong answer in a class, then declared (trying to divert attention to the dumb answer) that I’d made a write-o. It worked. Hubby, mate, lifemate, significant other, better half all stink. My current pet snarl is lack of self: She clasped the baby to her (Instead of (ahem!) penning that she clasped the baby to herself).
I see red when people say things like “Its more bigger” or “He’s more heavier than he used to be”. No people, no freaken no no no!