Fifty Shades of Why

Thanks, Collins Dictionary!

Ana will do anything Christian wants. We already knew that, but now it seems she’s conscious of it herself. She doesn’t seem to mind.

I don’t know about everybody else, but I find the idea of being in someone’s thrall to the point where I would do anything they said unnerving.

[1] Anastasia’s anxiety and hypervigilance lead me to wonder if she has some past trauma of her own.

Writers: if you find yourself beginning a sentence with ‘clearly,’ ‘obviously,’ or ‘as is patently obvious to the most casual observer,’ you may want to reconsider including that sentence.

Nobody I know in real life blushes nearly this often.

[1] Not everyone agrees on this particular grammar dilemma. Grammar Girl has a good article about it here.

Nobody ever says anything in this book. They stammer it or mutter it or whisper it or croak it.

They have names now! Names like Blonde Number One.

It sounds like we’re going to meet the Attractive Male Lead soon. I’m excited.

[1]This is another one I had to look up. Apparently the Stepford wives were a bunch of women who got turned into robots Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers style in a novel from the seventies. Most of the literature on these fictional wives casts them as submissive.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it sounds like Anastasia is in for an interesting transformation.

[1] You’re using this phrase wrong, E.L. You can’t just use ‘with terminal velocity’ to mean ‘really really fast’. An object moves at its terminal velocity when it’s falling, for one. To quote Wikipedia, “A free-falling object achieves its terminal velocity when the downward force of gravity equals the upward force of drag. This causes the net force on the object to be zero, resulting in an acceleration of zero.”

So not only would your elevator have to be falling instead of rising (is the reception desk on the fiftieth floor? Is the twentieth floor underground? Is it really the negative-twentieth floor?), it would have to be falling for long enough for air resistance to balance with gravity. It would also be falling at terminal velocity, not with terminal velocity. Terminal velocity is a specific velocity. For example, the terminal velocity of a human being is about 176 feet per second. You don’t say someone is driving with 30mph, you say they’re driving at 30mph.

Now, I don’t know enough physics to calculate the terminal velocity of an elevator, but given how massive an elevator is in comparison to a person, I am willing to bet it’s pretty fast. 

Of course, it’s quite possible that you just didn’t know what the phrase meant. That could be it too.