Someone buy Jeff Parker a map...
Jan. 13th, 2010 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daibhidcI've just got Spider-Man: 1602 #3. I enjoyed it (I'm a sucker for alternate versions of existing characters), but there was one part that had me staring at the page in disbelief.
Peter goes to see a theatrical troupe called "The Watsonnes of Scotland" (who, of course, include a red-haired daughter named Marion-Jane Watsonne). And for the first time, it's revealed he's Scottish[1]. And then the leader of the troupe says this:
"...My family has travelled a great way to entertain you from our small borough of Staffordshire."
Things wrong with this sentence, in ascending order of importance.
1) In Scotland, "borough" is spelt "burgh" (and pronounced "burra"), as in Edinburgh.
2)"Burgh" or "borough" refers to a town. Anything "shire" is a county. The Royal Burgh Of Inverness is in the county of Inverness-shire.
3)Staffordshire isn't in Scotland! It isn't even near Scotland. It's in the Midlands. Even when Scotland included a fair chunk of Northumbria, the border was nowhere near Staffordshire, and that was long before 1602.
Seriously, how hard is it to check these things?
(Then again, Mark Millar is actually Scottish, and he cheerfully had a caption in Ultimate X-Men read "Land's End, Scotland"...)
[1]This is fair enough - he kept quiet about it since he was apprenticed to a man working directly for Good Queen Bess. I'm less certain about the claim that "Parker" is a Scottish name (it isn't, although "Watson" is, as in George Watson's College), and that the reason he was going by "Parquagh" - which looks pseudo-Gaelic - was to cover this up.
Peter goes to see a theatrical troupe called "The Watsonnes of Scotland" (who, of course, include a red-haired daughter named Marion-Jane Watsonne). And for the first time, it's revealed he's Scottish[1]. And then the leader of the troupe says this:
"...My family has travelled a great way to entertain you from our small borough of Staffordshire."
Things wrong with this sentence, in ascending order of importance.
1) In Scotland, "borough" is spelt "burgh" (and pronounced "burra"), as in Edinburgh.
2)"Burgh" or "borough" refers to a town. Anything "shire" is a county. The Royal Burgh Of Inverness is in the county of Inverness-shire.
3)Staffordshire isn't in Scotland! It isn't even near Scotland. It's in the Midlands. Even when Scotland included a fair chunk of Northumbria, the border was nowhere near Staffordshire, and that was long before 1602.
Seriously, how hard is it to check these things?
(Then again, Mark Millar is actually Scottish, and he cheerfully had a caption in Ultimate X-Men read "Land's End, Scotland"...)
[1]This is fair enough - he kept quiet about it since he was apprenticed to a man working directly for Good Queen Bess. I'm less certain about the claim that "Parker" is a Scottish name (it isn't, although "Watson" is, as in George Watson's College), and that the reason he was going by "Parquagh" - which looks pseudo-Gaelic - was to cover this up.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 06:54 pm (UTC)It's bad enough when fanfic writers can't be arsed to do the vaguest bit of research, but if he's getting paid for this, then he could at least try to get it right! [headdesk]
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 06:57 pm (UTC)I have a similar peeve in a book I'm reading at the moment - it's set in 1939, in England, and the author talks about the main character having a feeling as if his face had been stroked with poison ivy, (which of course doesn't grow in England and never has) ...
The worst part is that the author is Irish, so he ought have a fighting chance of knowing better.