Kevin's Watch

We could speculate on whether Covenant's Unbelief was strengthened or mitigated by encountering all these people in the Land who spoke archaic English sprinkled with obscure words.

DrPaul wrote:We could speculate on whether Covenant's Unbelief was strengthened or mitigated by encountering all these people in the Land who spoke archaic English sprinkled with obscure words.

Covenant was a pulp fantasy writer. He'd expect the fancy words and made-up terms. We must assume from his insistence that it's all his imagination that he used the same thesaurus as Donaldson to write his 1.5 books.

Some of Donaldson's vocabulary definitely seems like he was influenced by his father's work as a physician. Some of the terms (febrile, paroxysm, purulent, etc.) are commonly used in medicine.

shadowbinding shoe wrote:

DrPaul wrote:We could speculate on whether Covenant's Unbelief was strengthened or mitigated by encountering all these people in the Land who spoke archaic English sprinkled with obscure words.

Covenant was a pulp fantasy writer. He'd expect the fancy words and made-up terms. We must assume from his insistence that it's all his imagination that he used the same thesaurus as Donaldson to write his 1.5 books.

Actually I am surprised by this because he has often said that his experience with his father being a doctor definitely influenced his work.

Skyweir wrote: Actually I am surprised by this because he has often said that his experience with his father being a doctor definitely influenced his work.

That's surely part of it. As Nano noted a fair amount of his vocab has medicine-related usages.
But really, almost everything in his environment leads that way, unless I'm mismembering things.
Like---the school he attended while in India as a kid had Christian basis...and at that time, most of the Bibles and related religious lit. used older language---not so much was in everyday language versions then.
Medical and Biblical lit. both have more complicated structures, more necessary and obvious connections to the root languages and intermediate evolutions to modern vernacular.
Simply reading [heh...simply...right] isn't enough...as with Shakespeare and such, it ain't words and punctuation to really get it---it's half way to translation and history at the same time.
And then...maybe partly because of those things...the literature/authors he came to admire and study.
And the surrounding culture in his early years had deep and complicated thought/history/narrative structure, too---even limited exposure to that can have impacts at that age. [especially easily at that age, I should say].
The surprising thing, to me, is that that background ended up with him being able to write something like the Gap series. In many ways, the Gap is more creative, original, than any of his fantasy. Though I haven't seen the new yet---and won't until at least two are out and a third on its way.

Yeah and his religious narrative that he introduces to the Chrons story is illuminating ... but yeah he has talked about that part of his upbringing.

The new fantasy work?

Skyweir wrote:
The new fantasy work?

Yea...it was out Oct. or Nov. But I'm not getting it or visiting the thread about it until the second is out, purchased, and read at least.

Oh is that the Great Gods War? Yeah seen it and am avoiding it for the same reason

A brilliant post and very much nesessary.

This to me is the 1st and 2nd chronicles is a few of SJD's favorite words...

"He was adamantine and alabaster, smelling of attar and brimstone and needed to succor so he let out a wail."

When you listen to the books as I am the last word always brings to mind large ocean mammals.

Most of these words mean nothing to me and have never ever used any of then in speech.


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Sir Francis Bacon wrote:- "There is no utter beauty that has not some strangeness to it. So we are in good company"!