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."

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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!

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."

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."

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]