Guessing Post

[holmesticemods]

Thank you so much for another wonderful round of Holmestice! The mods want to say THANK YOU to all the creators who joined us for this, our twentieth round -- especially given how tumultuous these last months have been. Being in this community with you is a joy and an honour.

Reveals and the Master List go up on June 20th. Until then, please enjoy and comment on all the lovely fanworks. Creators, please do NOT respond to Dreamwidth comments or post your works elsewhere on the Internet until reveals go up in the community. You may of course reply to comments on AO3, which preserves your anonymity.

In the meanwhile, stay tuned: treats are coming up! For anyone thinking of making a treat, we will accept treats right through until reveals, so if there's a prompt that inspires you, please have at it! Just use the regular submission guidelines and send your headers to holmesticemods@gmail.com.

If you'd like to guess who created what in this round, here's a list of all the contributors for the main gifts. (You'll have to put in some extra work to guess the treat-makers!) Go ahead and take a guess! It's all in good fun.



alexcat
apprenticeofdoyle
bakerstmel / Callie4180
cam_elot (used to be thefrenchweirdone)
discordantwords
dryadinthegrove
evilinsanemonkey
fleetsparrow
fridaythegowerstreetcat / gowerstreet
gardnerhill
graycardinal
iwantthatcoat
Keenir/Rodlox/Anthony
language_escapes
mafief
milverton
monkiainen
natrix_natrix
oldshrewsburyian
pipmer1
rachelindeed
saki101
sanguinity
sanspatronymic
scfrankles
simplyclockwork
smallhobbit
starfishstar
strampunch
tepidspongebath
trobadora
twicecurvedspine / eyes-on-stilts
urbanhymnal
write_out



Go forth and leave love for your fellow Holmestice authors, artists, podficcers, and vidders! See you again on the 20th, when we reveal who made what!

Comments

[sanguinity]

Good to know, thank you!

[rachelindeed]

Always glad to add to everyone's potential for punctuation disguise a little more, LOL!

[scfrankles]

I will just point out that the full stop after abbreviated titles was used in the UK in the twentieth century too ^___^ I grew up in the 1970s and '80s and was taught "Mr. and Mrs." Incidentally both the "ize" and "ise" endings were considered correct British spelling then too. "-ize" has disappeared but we middle-aged folk tend to oscillate between "Mr" and "Mr."

[rachelindeed]

I have noticed before that you use periods after your titles! Knowing you were British, that pattern in your stories was one of the things that made me go back and notice that Doyle wrote that way, too!

I notice you also usually use " " for quotation marks rather than ' ' as some other British writers do. Is that a 20th century change, too, do you know?

[scfrankles]

Again, I remember as a child in 1980 being taught to always use " " for all reported speech and other quotations, and then only use ' ' for quotations and reported speech within quotations and reported speech. I still only use " " for reported speech, but do sometimes use ' ' for quotations. Once again I oscillate between the two ^___^

I have to say, just my personal reaction, using " " for quotations feels a bit old-fashioned now. But I'm not honestly sure what the current UK official rules are.

[rachelindeed]

It amuses me greatly that America today = the U.K. circa 1980 (and 1890!) in all these grammatical respects :)

[starfishstar]

Yes!! I'd been wrestling with this, because I used to think it was a pure US/UK Mr./Mr difference, but as ever, thing aren't that simple... (Doyle uses the full stop, but J.K. Rowling doesn't?? Why?) So I asked a British friend in Harry Potter fandom, and she said the same thing: that she was taught in school that it was correct to put a full stop after abbreviations, but that over time "Mr" & co. have come to be seen more or less as words in their own right, and thus no longer require a full stop.

And OH LORD the ize/ise thing! Again, I used to think it was as simple as US/UK ize/ise, but NO, a British (professional editor) friend once explained to me that there are *two* different systems people may be following in British English; there's one that does indeed just use -ise for everything, but there's another system that uses some of both, and it was something about different endings depending on the derivation of the word?? (Latin vs. Greek, I would assume, but I really can't remember at this point...)

Sorry, this wasn't a rant at you, SCFrankles (or iwantthatcoat, or rachelindeed)! I just find it amusing but also frustrating how every time I think I've mastered a rule of British English, it turns out there's another more complicated rule lurking inside it. ;-)