Judging vocabulary for fiction

[nancylebov]

Recently, this thread from ellen_kushner had a good long discussion of spinning, with a little about rodents [1] here and there.

The major question was how to indicate in a couple of words that Tiresias was utterly familiar with spinning, and some of the words suggested were what I'd call obscure. I don't think "plying the roving onto the whorl" would have conveyed a lot to me, even in context.

So, I'm wondering about different vocabulary [2] strategies. There's Octavia Butler, who stayed in the ordinary literate range, I think. (I'm doing all this from memory.) There's Scott Lynch, who gave enough explanations in the learning to be a pirate parts of Red Sails Under Red Skies that I didn't get lost. And Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, and E. R. Eddison, who gave enough context to make obscure words manageable, and used them to add a lot of flavor. Then there's Stephen Donaldson, who used weird words in the Thomas Covenant books and gave no help from context. I'm not going to say it worked well, but I'm not going to swear that it didn't work at all.

So, if you're writing, what sorts of decisions do you make about vocabulary? When you're reading, do you have preferences about how words are introduced? When you see an unfamiliar word, do you check on its meaning, or do you do your best from context and etymology and go on from there?

[1] When someone brought up chipmunks as a possibility in ancient Greece, I wondered if they existed in the eastern hemisphere. As it turns out, there are Asian chipmunks, but none in Greece.

I think the reason I was suspicious about the possibility of Greek chipmunks is that I haven't seen much mention of them in fiction, and I've read enough European stuff (ok, mostly British) that if they lived there, I'd probably have seen a mention.

Also, there's something about "chipmunk" that just doesn't sound European. Bingo. It's from Algonquian. They realized that chipmunks are related to squirrels, which didn't occur to me. Aha-- I'm familiar with relatively short-tailed chipmunks, but they aren't typical.

There's just one Asian species of chipmunk, but a slew of them on this side of the Atlantic. I bet they evolved here and migrated there over the land bridge.

[2] For calibration, I could get freerice up to 50, but I couldn't get it to stay there.

Comments

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

As a spinner, plying the roving onto the whorl is perfectly regular terminology to me. I wouldn't call it obscure at all!

[redbird]

I'm not a spinner, and "roving" in my vocabulary is a verb akin to "wandering," but that phrase reads to me as a description of someone doing an ordinary thing I don't know about. A piece of that, I think, is that those are all short words, and "ply" is brief and familar. (Whorl is as well, and has that "wh" beginning that I see on older English words but not on recent borrowings.)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I've made a conscious decision in the current story to use esoteric technical words, but then provide either an analogy or show the impact they have on characters, to let the reader understand them. Technical readers will understand them better -- and may quibble with the fast and loose shades of meaning I use for some of them -- but the goal is for non-technical readers be brought along.

In a non-fiction essay, I will almost always try to explain terms, or point them out in a canonical format so that people can look them up easily. "blah blah, called 'foo', tells us X Y Z." This is especially important as some of my technical fields use words that look perfectly normal but have alternate meanings (as with "roving" above), sometimes ones that are very *close* to their non-technical meaning.

As a reader I will usually hit the web if I find an unknown word. Therere a lot of words I know but can't articulate the meaning of...or have a slightly wrong meaning or absent meaning for (often, right connotation, unknown actual meaning). Playing freerice, I seem to hover at 45-50...but that's with a fair amount of guessing of various confidence levels.

[twistedchick]

Actually, plying the roving onto the whorl is possible, but it would produce very fluffy and almost unspun yarn. Roving is unspun; when it is spun it becomes a single.

I think Ellen's choice of talking about controlling the twist is very good, because that is a giveaway of how experienced a spinner is.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I liked it, too, even though I've never done spinning. It implied expertise very nicely even with my lack of background.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I think Gene Wolfe gets it about right: you can guess most of the obscure words right away, and the others become clear as you see them in more contexts, which is how we pick up most of our vocabulary anyway.

In my own novel, I'm trying for a range. If it's something the reader needs to visualise, then the words have to be either familiar or easily guessable (e.g. "blasting wand"), but sometimes it's nice to have a bit of mystery, something that says to the reader "This is arcane stuff that you don't understand at the moment."

[solri.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Gene Wolfe and Stephen Donaldson, I find it ironic that I rate Wolfe highly as a writer but never managed to finish the New Sun series, while my low opinion of Donaldson's style didn't stop me lapping up the Thomas Covenant books.

[gildedacorn.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what happened to me.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've read the Book of the New Sun twice, but never made it into the sequel series.

Greer Gilman is right at my limit. I've finished Moonwise once after many tries, and would like to make it through again.

Of course, this doesn't mean that Moonwise is harder for everyone than the Book of the New Sun, and if you like poetic writing and puns, it's worth a try. Or, for all I know, you've already read it.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Chipmunks in Greece? That's the sort of thing that would have sent me to the Britannica to check the zoogeography. I remember the catastrophic failure of my suspension of disbelief when I saw the live action "101 Dalmations," and Cruella had encounters with both a raccoon and a skunk, supposedly in the British Isles.

When I'm reading, if I run into an unfamiliar word, I try to figure out its meaning from the context; if I can't do that, I consider the writing to be bad. I'm assuming, here, a work address to the ordinary literate reader, and I make allowances for different standards of "ordinary literacy": It doesn't offend me when Dorothy Sayers writes about cricket as if everyone knew how it was played. On the other hand, when I'm editing, if I run into a word whose meaning puzzles me, I get out as many dictionaries as necessary to see if the word exists and what it means, because it's my job to make sure that the things I edit are written in accessible English. Though most of them also use technical vocabularies which I don't mess about with.