Details matter

[Ocelot II]

2. Yup, I've run into a few of those and it's distracting.

It tells me the author was sloppy about their research. A related thing that bothers me is when the reader of an audiobook mispronounces things. I listen to those quite a bit when I go for walks, and silly mistakes pop up rather often. I listened to one that was set in the area where I lived and the reader kept mispronouncing local place names. Maybe you wouldn't know the correct pronunciation if you didn't know the area, but if you're going to read an audiobook for general circulation you'd damn well better find out. Today I was listening to one where the reader pronounced the word Wunderkind (correctly pronounced "voonderkint," with a short i), as "wonder-kynd," with a long i. It's a German word, but one that's so commonly used in English that the mistake was startling and took me out of the story.