I dread this, but it's for the best

[ritaxis]

I have to find and replace a word that has been bothering me from the beginning, which I have used maybe hundreds of times . . .

There's a particular wooded wetland that is central to the early part of the story, and another one which is central to the last part of the story. The English word for this type of wetland, which is an upland forest only seasonally flooded, is "carr:" but people don't really know that word, so it doesn't add anything to comprehension to use it, so I'm not attached to it though I have been using it for 165 thousand words worth of story. But it's been bothering me more and more because it doesn't conform to my orthography rules for place names. I have eliminated the letter C and the letter J because they are too confusing in my context, and replaced them wherever they show up with less unruly letters, because fantasy novel readers can be heavily distracted by questions like this (witness my discomfort with this word, for example).

I thought of spelling it Karr instead of Carr but I decided that wasn't really accomplishing anything except making it look German, which is not a tragedy but not at all useful. So I had a flash of genius and asked the Prague contingent for a word, and now I have one (luh), and now I have to at least eventually change the many many occurrences of Carr to Luh.

This is not the first time I have had to do this, but the other times I wasn't so deep into the book.

At least I'm having fun again, now that Yanek is Discovering His Real Heritage and so on.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Actually you did. I had never gotten a screened reply before -- some setting somewhere has changed things -- and I was curious how that happened.

As it happens, I ran into that immediately. Two characters had "luhed" things into places.

I believe I'm going to have to replace one by one, alas.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

What word processor/editor are you using, and are you comfortable with regular expressions? Even without regular expressions, surely first doing a global replace on "carr" (and "carrs?") with only whole-word matches would deal with most occurrences without fear of accidental changes?

(Sorry if I've made this kind of comment before.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I use a somewhat old version of word perfect andf I don't know if it supports only whole word matches. Also I don't know if I'm comfortable with regular expressions because I am not certain what they are. (in other words, is it possible I've used them informally sometimes without knowing it?) I am comfortable with learning new things, though, so if you tell me what it is I am happy to consider it.

My current thought is that my global search has a way of showing me the next one, and the next one, etc. and letting me make the decision each time. I can do that. I'd have to do it for "Carr" and "Carr's" because apostrophes break the search and replace function.

Another method I could do is to globally replace "Carr" with "luh" and then go back and globally replace "luh," "luhied," "luhies," and "luhiage." It's more lengthy to describe but might be faster than the first method. Though if I haven't thought of everything, it would be less accurate too.