Your Logic Does Not at All Resemble Our Earth Logic

[scioscribe]

I'm trying to think of some of the most banally baffling lines I've come across in fiction, lines where the component parts are all seemingly normal but just come together in a way that makes you think you and the author live on different planets.

My all-time favorite is "Rats scurried over his hands and face, but he ignored them." No, he didn't. Not in my world, buddy. Maybe if he were a professional stuntman or rat trainer, but otherwise, I don't care how stressed you are, you're paying at least a little bit of attention to rats crawling across your face.

What made me think of this was recently encountering "Cops go through girlfriends like veal cutlets." My attention was immediately derailed by trying to figure out how many veal cutlets these people are going through. More than I am, presumably. I desperately needed follow-up on this, maybe with a series of thinkpiece articles. Veal Parmesan: Surprising Popular with Cops?

EDIT: Rachel reminded me of another gem: "...I, who had refused for years to let the husband in Paris realize his lifelong dream of photographing a scorpion in my vagina."

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I am literally laughing out loud at both of these. I also like how the second sentence could also be read as the veal cutlets going through the girlfriends.

At a movie studio where I worked we had the Board of Shame where we'd pin lines from screenplays. My all-time favorite was Fear burned like piss in his veins.

Just... what? How would you know what piss feels like in your veins? Are you a piss junkie? More importantly, why would you think that was such a good metaphor that it should be repeated on a later page of the same screenplay as Power burned like piss in his veins.

post the scorpion line too. It counts!

[scioscribe]

I will edit for scorpions!

I'm almost wondering if the piss guy had some kind of urethral condition that made peeing burn and so he was like, "What if the fear burned like piss, but like, he felt it in his veins? Oh, man, that's good, I'm going with that."

The girlfriends hung in the sky in much the same way that veal cutlets don't.

[isis]

Here via rachelmanija, and this topic made me immediately think of the way Douglas Adams skewered this sort of thing most delightfully in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the classic: "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t."

[scioscribe]

Such a beautiful and classic line.

[sholio]

HAHAHA (and also, what).

This is not quite the same thing, but it makes me think of my bafflement at Robert Sawyer making a point in his Neanderthal AU books (Earth accidentally opens a portal to an AU Earth where Neanderthals, not regular Homo sapiens, is the dominant intelligent species) that Neanderthal hair naturally parts in the middle and this is one of the key defining features that can be used to tell them apart from regular humans, since human hair doesn't do that. It's mentioned in several different scenes and people find it odd and unusual, as if center-parted hair has never been seen on Earth before, and every single time I was thinking "... Sawyer, have you ever. seen. an actual human being."

[rachelmanija]

WHAAAAAAT?

[sholio]

To be fair, there was a lot of WTFery in those books, but that was probably the thing that stood out in my mind as the most utterly bizarre failure of basic observation skills.

[scioscribe]

Wasn't that also the one where the society's solution to rape was to castrate not only the rapists but also any male descendants of the rapists?

[sholio]

I don't remember the male descendants part, but I do remember that the castration was accomplished by biting the dude's junk off.

[scioscribe]

Huh. I... guess I might be a Neanderthal, then? I'm going to go examine my brow in the mirror.

That is terrible on such a beautiful level.

[sholio]

SAME. *fistbump of Neanderthal solidarity*

[rachelmanija]

I carefully brush my hair to proclaim my status as a Homo sapiens!

[scioscribe]

I now need a YA dystopian trilogy about teenagers obsessed with concealing their Neanderthal status by worrying about their hair all the time.

[rattfan]

Re the rats scurrying over one's face and being ignored. Hm. As a longtime rat owner, in my experience they never just scurry, they always stop and nibble. There's always one with an eyebrow fetish. [Back to normal programming now]

[scioscribe]

Then he definitely shouldn't have been ignoring them1 (Though now I'm contemplating an alternative to getting my eyebrows waxed.)

[rattfan]

It's like stabbing yourself with pins all along your eyebrows :-) Nobody can ignore that.

[st_aurafina]

"Cops go through girlfriends like veal cutlets."

The two seem so... disconnected.

[scioscribe]

"Hmm, what's something people use pretty regularly?"
"Veal cutlets?"
"Yeah, that'll work."

I really need to know the thought process behind it.

[oracne]

My favorite Anne McCaffrey line ever: "He wasn't gentle, but he was thorough." Describing a sex scene between F'nor and Brekke in DRAGONQUEST.

[scioscribe]

Well, there's nothing worse than gentle but partial sexing. (I can't help but read this as "He wasn't gentle, but at least he got it in all the way.")

[rattfan]

I think she was a virgin, so.....ewww.

[genarti]

Oh my GOD.

Also, for the scorpion one especially: what????

[scioscribe]

I can't get over it! And I'm haunted by the fact that "refused for years" may imply that she eventually caved. At least it was fiction.

[sheliak]

I want to contribute something, but any possibilities have been driven out of my mind by the scorpion.

(Here via rachelmanija.)

[scioscribe]

That's fair. I'm not sure I had another thought the entire rest of the day I read that sentence.