There's more to correct combination than adjective + noun. Not all pairs are possible. Try to imagine a soft diamond, or hot ice, for example - and I mean hot as in temperature, & ice as in frozen water, not a stolen diamond.
Well they're logical impossibilities, but I would have to know more of the context to be sure that a "precarious body" was a logical impossibility.
Brown uses adjectives which are inappropriate. E.g. "the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet". Enormous? I'm not exactly tall, but I've been in an aircraft cabin the same width & height as that of a Falcon 2000, & found it narrow, with an oppressively low ceiling.
No, sorry - that's at worst unrealistic, not incorrect use of language. A falcon 2000EX might not be big - but it quite easily could be.
If it genuinely is a small plane then that's simply an unrealistic description - not fundamentally inappropriate on the language level.
You dont' actually get monks called Silas with guns and who whip themselves in italy as well, and freemasons and the illuminati doesn't
really exist - but that doesn't mean it's bad use of language.
If you're presenting simple unrealisticness as 'incorrect use of language' and expecting me to believe you then why should I believe you can't have a "vaulted archway"?
I know what he means, and I suspect most people do, as well. Even if you can find a rule that contradicts it - language evolves, that rule might be outdated. Language is purely a human construct, things that are regarded as perfectly valid language now may not have been 50 years ago. Dan Brown may be an evolver of language, as Shakespeare was.
Many people I know can't stand upright in it. It's very small compared to a narrow-body airliner, which is what I think most people would use as a reference point for aircraft cabins.
I haven't been in one - so I don't know that. That's not incorrect use of language - it's simply unrealistic.
I imagine if you actually tried it you probably couldn't
actually handbrake turn a smart car in reverse on the narrow back streets of paris but that doesn't take anything away from the story.
The point is that it's a private jet with a make and model name, and it's quite large inside. That's all.
Dan Brown obviously hasn't been in one either, but that just makes him unknowledgeable on aviation matters, not a bad writer.
He uses adjectives which are irrelevant, e.g. "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery". He throws in irrelevant details (& sometimes gets 'em wrong), such as the fuel consumption of a car, or a description of a watch, & who gave it to its owner & when, when a character checks the time. These are typical of hack writers paid by the word, or writing to a target book length & needing to add filler.
This is diverging from fact, back into the realms of opinion, preference and taste. It's not
fact that they're irrelevant - that's just your opinion.
The thing about a body not being able to be 'precarious' is the only charge I've seen that's
verging on factual incorrectness, but I'm still not convinced it is - I would have to read more around the context to be sure.
And given that most of the beef with the "20 worst Dan Brown sentences" (which is being touted as 'proof' he is a bad writer) is 'unnecessary description', which on closer examination is purely a matter of opinion, there is a clear precedence for opinion masquerading as fact (or, rather, the charge that he is a bad writer being purely opinion. Hence snobbery. Which like I say is fine - but we're not really getting very far off the ground in establishing it as concrete fact.)