Do you prefer it when every day words are changed? Does it make the fictional world feel more real?
Or is it simply a barrier to entry, and to the extent there are fantasy words you would prefer them to be limited to the stuff that is really different – the magic system, different magical races, etc.
Special thanks to The Bone Ships by RJ Barker for inspiring this question.
by thearmadillo
6 Comments
I enjoy it when it’s used in a non-obstructive way to give a fictional world depth and layers.
By non-obstructive, I mean I still instantly understand what the author is talking about and it feels natural to the culture of the world.
For example, a fantasy world where individual birthdays aren’t a thing, and instead everyone’s age is counted by how many winters or summers they’ve lived. If someone is referred to as “thirty summers old”, we still know what they’re talking about. We still get the information, the person is thirty years old, and we learn something about the culture this person comes from in a natural way.
I gave this question a minute of genuine thought and came to the honest conclusion that I couldn’t possibly care less one way or the other.
If the book is well-written, then no dash of mundanity is going to kill it for me, and a badly written book could call the Sun “Lord Snaggletooth’s Butthole” for all I care. It’s still a bad book.
Mostly I want it to be done for a reason.
If the sun is called sklerith’s eye–well, who is sklerith? Are we taking this as an opportunity to flesh out the mythology or religion of the setting? Should it be taken literally?
Things being changed just for the sake of sounding different I think just adds complexity.
What I often see in sci-fi and also narratives from an animal’s POV is fancy words for regular things, like the sun, and regular words for fancy things. “We celebrate the ritual of emergence when the great yellow eye is at its height” kind of thing.
When it’s done as a reflection of the world the characters are inhabiting, it can be good. It shows the culture that the author has created as opposed to just explaining it. (And I really enjoyed that particular series)
Its good in the Book of the New Sun. They talk about the sky in a heliocentric way. So instead of “the sun rises in the morning” they say “the horizon dips below the sun in the morning”