I've been reading a lot of fan fiction-turned published fiction recently (e.g., The Path of Ascension, but also a lot of crappier books that I get 10% through and put down), and there is an emergent hole in the new books on the (self-published, Kindle) market; despite having no editor, they generally have pretty good spelling, complex narratives, and not especially bad writing styles; they certainly do more writing than I ever managed. But they don't know their vocabulary. A 'overstuffed bag' becomes a 'teeming bag', 'nuclear deterrence' becomes 'nuclear dissuasion', 'unscathed' inexplicably becomes 'unchecked'. Some cases are maybe spelling errors, like when 'hotels' becomes 'hostels', or honestly not caring, as when failing to notice that a rapier is not a double-handed war-sword.

My theory is that spellcheckers and/or Grammarly give people the feeling of having proofread without having actually proofread. My other

A village in Perthshire, Scotland.

"There's the castle, the distillery and the moorland, that's about it"
— a local, during my visit

It was the only dry day during a winding road trip up to the Isle of Skye many years ago. We'd driven from Kelso in the rolling Scottish Borders countryside, through Edinburgh, stopped in Dunkeld to visit Dougie Maclean's pub and camped

In ancient Rome, when a woman married, her family or other persons acting on her behalf would pay a dos (dowry) to her husband's family, as a preemptive financial compensation to their household for having an additional mouth to feed. Following the transition of the Roman empire from the pagan Religio Romana to Christianity, the customs and legality of transferred wealth and property changed as the religious connotations of marriage changed. In pagan Rome, divorce and remarriage had not