Pet peeve: “minute”
This is a really minor thing, but I just saw it again in a published story, so I figured I might as well try to recruit y'all in the campaign to stamp it out.
In both published and unpublished fiction, I fairly often see lines like this:
We fell silent. A few minutes later, she said, "Sure, why not."
Or:
I handed the cashier my money. A minute later, he handed me my change.
Most brief interactions between people take place on a scale of seconds, not minutes. A minute is a fairly long time to (for example) sit silently with someone in the middle of a conversation. A few minutes is a much longer time.
Authors often like to use phrases like a few minutes to mean "a short while." In many contexts, that makes perfect sense; in fact, one of the dictionary definitions of minute is "a short space of time: MOMENT." If you say "just a minute," you don't mean "please wait exactly 60 seconds." If you say "it took us a few minutes to get ready" when it actually took under a minute, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
But when I'm reading fiction in a reasonably formal narrative voice, about an interaction taking place in realtime between two ordinary humans, it's a lot harder for me not to read minute as literally referring to a period of about 60 seconds.
This may just be another example of Jed's unfortunate penchant for literalism. But it does irritate me, and it's really easy to fix; just substitute moments or seconds for minutes. That's clearer and more accurate and generally doesn't hurt anything.
