Quick Fire Questions (A Place to Ask and Answer)

[Warren_Paul]

Ok, thanks Gumboot. A bit to think there.

I think I need to find something in the middle. I don't want it to be so serious that without medical care its fatal. But I also want it to be a bad enough that it keeps the character bed ridden for a couple days, in and out of consciousness, etc.

There is no actual bleeding from the fracture itself, right?

[David Evil Overlord]

Originally Posted by Venusian Broon

I'm still struggling to connect why looking younger = endearing trust/comfort in people, but that might be explained in the passage around about it.

Might be that people think "He's younger than me, less experienced, surely he couldn't fool me if he tried".

Originally Posted by Gumboot

The bleeding from the ears and nose is a symptom of a Basilar skull fracture which is a linear fracture to the base of the skull. These are very rare and dangerous as the base of the skull requires much more force to fracture than other parts of the skull.

Symptoms of a basilar skull fracture include bleeding from the ears and nose, "racoon eyes" (caused by pooling of blood in the optical cavity), blood in the sinuses, and leaking of cerebrospinal fluid from the ears or nose (it may drip into the back of the throat resulting in a salty taste).

Originally Posted by Warren_Paul

Ok, thanks Gumboot. A bit to think there.

A bit for me to think about, too. I have a character I've given some of those symptoms. I don't want her injuries to be too severe...or do I?

[Vertigo]

A quick question about use of foot and feet in measurement. It seems obvious at first but then not so.

It is clearly correct and normal to say the building is one hundred feet high. 100 is plural and so the plural of feet is used.

However it would certainly be normal to say the one hundred foot building. Is this also correct? Grammatically it would appear to me to be incorrect and yet it is certainly how most people would say it. Is this an example of common but incorrect usage and which should be used in prose?

[Aaron Stone]

When talking about a person's height it is often said "Five-foot eight". Though it is perfectly correct to say "Five feet, eight inches". I think when just using the phrase "___________(object)", "foot" is correct, but when adding words or explanation/description, "feet" is used. Basically, feet is used when additional information is being imparted, rather than just "blank foot table".

[Ursa major]

It depends:

• Narration:
  • In third person omniscient and most third person close, I'd expect to see feet.
  • In third person conversational**, the choice as to whether to use feet or foot would be that of the PoV character.
  • In first person, the choice would be that of the PoV character.
• Dialogue:
  • The choice would be that of the speaker, and would depend on the context.

** - By which I mean that the narration is so close to the PoV character that it's similar in feel to first person (apart from the tense) and the narration is much like the PoV character's dialogue.

[The Judge]

Er... well, I wouldn't say "one hundred foot building" in case people thought it was some kind of centipede...

Although it's commonplace to say "foot" instead of "feet" in those circumstances, strictly it's incorrect. So if you're writing it in dialogue, first person or very close third narrative, you can get away with it; in ordinary narrative I'd go with "feet".


EDIT: pipped to the post!

[Vertigo]

Thanks for the responses.

It's interesting; I have dug around a little more and have found a number of online dictionaries saying that the five-foot wall is completely correct (with the hyphen).

In Standard English, foot and feet have their own rules when they are used in combination with numbers to form expressions for units of measure: a four-foot plank, but not a four feet plank; also correct is a plank four feet long (or, less frequently, four foot long).

However that approach doesn't seem to work as well when the number is more than one word.

My actual context is in referring to a mountain, as in:

Ahead lay the final five hundred foot climb to the summit.

If I write:

Ahead lay the final five hundred feet climb to the summit.

To me at least that just sounds wrong when I read it. But maybe that's because I'm so used to the way it is more normally spoken.

[Ursa major]

Now you know why I put the weasel words, I'd expect, in my post.


If you want to obey TJ, and use feet, a little rewording may be called for:

Five hundred feet of hard climbing lay between him/her/them and the summit.

I've taken the liberty of using an adjective.

[Interference]

I see it's left to me to be the annoying futurist and suggest metres. Sorry.

[Ursa major]

I was going to do that, but it didn't help. The metre has been co-opted into English's list of colloquialisms:

Ahead lay the final two-hundred-metre climb to the summit.

[Interference]

Ah, but at least the multi-pedal creature-confusion (and its concomitant potential for unconscious humour) would be barred.



So, you mean, even had I waited a bit longer, it would have still have been my distasteful duty to be the annoying one again?

[Vertigo]

Yes I 'ummed' and 'arred' a bit about that actually and it wasn't natural to me. The nice thing about feet is they sound more impressive in this context! Saying you have a thousand feet to go or something is a thousand feet below, sounds so much more significant than three hundred metres to go or three hundred metres below. Sad but true. Also I suspect that even now in the UK most people have a better gut feel for what a thousand feet looks like than they do three hundred metres.

In my own climbing and walking I always use metres and kilometres, apart from anything else all British maps are now in kilometres and metres.

[Interference]

Hyphenation, in either case, would seem to be a good option, then.

"A hundred-foot climb...."

"The building towered over them, a hundred feet or more...."

"Fifty feet of empty space between me and disaster...."

etc....

[Venusian Broon]

Originally Posted by pyan

It's actually a researched scientific theory, with interesting conclusions:

Believe me there are kids around about where I live that for all their baby-faced looks they will endear absolutely no feelings of trust.

Especially when they start waving guns around at you. Although on the occasion they did that to me they only mugged 80p off me.

So from my practical experience of said youths, I'd have to say I'm inclined not to agree with the research

(But don't let that put you off Hackney though, 99.999% of the time it's a great place!)

[Vertigo]

Yes I think that is what I shall do. It's bizarre really how the simplest of things can set their own traps for you!

Ursa I noticed that you added an extra hyphen in your example two-hundred-metre. Is that first hyphen correct? Is it maybe needed because of the hyphen before metre?