Kevin's Watch

I'm a fan since 1977. Believe it or not, I only recently noticed that SRD likes to use subtle wordplay in his naming conventions. For brevity, I'll only example a few:

Orison: prayer

Amnion: membrane surrounding human fetus

Elohim: Hebrew God

Jehannum: Arabic Hell

Mordant: sharp, critical

Moksha: release from cycle of rebirth

I know of some few more but I wonder has anyone parsed his works in depth on this idea? Please point me to the relevent post or link if so; or please email me with others.

Thanks!

Be Welcome to the Watch, Kukulkan.
Be Well Come and True.

I am unsure where this is discussed on the Watch itself, though I know it has been broached. We even had a limerick contest featuring words SRD uses at one time.

However, have you seen the Stephen R. Donaldson Ate My Dictionary site? That may be a good place to begin as well.

Glad to see you felt comfortable enough to jump right in. Please feel free to come introduce yourself in the Say Hello in here thread in The Summonsing.

What Menolly said about the dictionary, check it out, but even it doesn't deal with the [actually, I think SOMETIMES it did] metaphorical and allusory [is that a word?] nature of some of them. I've never run across a thread entirely about that...but it pops up a lot in other threads time to time. SRD himself talks about this fairly often in the Gradual Interview...but if you haven't been there/haven't been keeping up, good luck finding them, literally thousands of questions and answers to sort through at this point.
[specific example...you mentioned moksha, but all three ravers "real" names (turiya and whatever the third is that's slipping my mind]
are, roughly, stages of enlightenment...and their other names have other references as well...like jehannum.

Samadhi? Anyway, welcome to the Watch. Look around, join in.

--A

Each raver has two names, and if I remember rightly,one is a word associated with hell or damnation in Jewish or Arabic faiths, while the other is a higher state of being in Indian religions.

Sounds right. It was Samadhi Sheol, IIRC.

--A

You guys all have alzheimers haha

It was one of the great joys of discovering SRD's books that there was so much more to it - like the wordplays etc.

(I still haven't figured out "Kevin" though )