Kevin's Watch

When I first read Stranger in a Strange Land, I was enthralled by the word "grok", and I became a fan of stories that give us new words.

I'm not talking about Quenya and Klingon. I'm talking about adding words to our English vocabulary. I'm talking about how using new words can help us understand things better than we probably ever could otherwise. The new words become an integral part of understanding the story, and when you understand them, the author has shown you a new way of seeing the world.

Here are some of my favorite words coined by storytellers. What are yours?

From Radix (a story with a rich invented vocabulary):

timeloose - an ability or a person not constrained by linear time

causal collapse - a measured miracle; when something that happens isn't connected to something that happened before. A sign of a godmind that can be detected by sophisticated instruments.

teeth dreams - primal fear; anxiety arising from instinct or base impulses.

From Gojiro:

The Evoloo - the universe of evolution, consisting of all the world's species, their interconnections, and the processes that shape them.

reprimordialization - the mysterious, mystical process where individuals' learned traits become inherited traits; an individual's priceless contribution to his species.

From Neverness:

cark - to modify someone in an unnatural way, or through advanced technology; for example by changing their genes or the use of prostheses or nanomachines.

vasten - to enlarge one's mentality beyond it's ordinary bounds; to become godlike. (E.g. Ede vastened himself by carking his brain into a computer.)

Damn, I can't think of any off hand. Oh, a few from Clockwork Orange maybe.

Not sure those other examples (or most of them) have really entered our vocabulary in the same way as "grok" did though, although I'm not sure why.

--A

Don't remember timeloose from Dune.

Noticed fuligin in TLD as the opposite of argent. Seem to recall Wolfe saying all his words were real. (Fuliginous - Late Latin - Colored by or as if by soot.)

--A

Yes, all of Wolfe's words are real, but I credit him with re-introducing us to such great words as fuligin and lictor and autarch and alzebo and monomachy and ...

I can't think of any words coined by the Dune series. Which seems odd.

Donaldson isn't big on the notion himself, but I do give him credit for bio-retributive[/i]. Is Earthpower[/i] a coined word?

(Interestingly, it appears that RADIX is available entirely online on some Russian guys website. I stumbled upon it looking for reference to "timeloose". [link]

Following a bewilderment of rootbridges, he found the lonely soul of the place: a tarn among giant cypress. The immane screeches and caws of a startled rundi split his hear­ing as he pushed through a witching of grass, stooping here and there to collect plant fragments. He came to a slurry ridge where a pool spooned sunlight into myriad reflections, and he sat on a sponged log.

Instructed by vague lusk-memories, he arranged and rearranged the plantshapes he had gathered. From a mentis pod, geepa stalks, weed-scrim, and a curve of hawkwood, he fashioned a crude devil harp. He held the harp to his mouth, and though he had never played, his breath spun out of the voor instrument in music lovely and indifferent as spirit.

The song turning in his breath surprised him. He had never thought that there was music in him. A day-blue moon rose through the bramble of a moose maple while he musicked everything that he saw: silence moving up the trees with the afternoon, clouds folded like truffles. . . .

The wind sizzled in the bleached grass, and in the bends of his brain the sound was almost a voice. Corby's. But not really Corby. Not even the memory of him. Just a feeling: love; the desire for one-with even with nothing left. Corby was dead. And Sumner wasn't sure if he was alive himself or still demon-bound in Rubeus' trance. Memories of Bonescrolls, Dice, Zelda, and all the haunts that had held him, from his old car to Dhalpur to Iz, were compacted like a matchhead in his mind, ready to burn. But since leaving Ausbok, a peacefulness had dilated through him. Gradually, as the evening's red shadows lengthened among the crosiers of grass, lifelove was making his memories seem far away and unimportant.

For several days, Sumner played. He was happy, smok­ing kiutl and raising the earthdreaming. The lifeforce streamed through him with a gentle strength. And in his mind, even death deepened, beyond fear and desire, to flow. This is long ago, he realized then, feeling the brevity of all life. Every­thing he looked at seemed to be floating thinly on a vibrant blackness. All is nothing. He laughed a lot during that time. And he thoroughcomposed his first song...

wayfriend wrote:
I can't think of any words coined by the Dune series. Which seems odd.

Gom Jabbar?

--A

Avatar wrote:

wayfriend wrote:
I can't think of any words coined by the Dune series. Which seems odd.

Gom Jabbar?

--A

Yea.
I suspect that quite a list exists.
What definitely exists is the combining/altering/mixing of things...many ancient and/or "foreign" to generate interesting concepts.
[zensunni, weirding [which has some interesting overlap with SRD's usage of weird] prana-bindu I think he invented...oh, and an actual WORD I believe was chaumurky.]
I don't recall any that have made it into ordinary folk's vocab ATM.