Writing Blog Number 2

20240524 Words: Cultural Differences/Neologisms

Words: Cultural Differences/Neologisms

Sticking with suggestions for the blog from WdC users!

This is about using different words. I have already covered using foreign words ("20240516 Using Foreign Words" ), so what is this about? Two things.


Cultural Differences
People who read my newsfeed posts are often confused by the way I put things. This is because (in case you weren’t aware) I am from Australia. As I have put it before, we are two nations separated by a common language. And add UK English into the mix, and the same words can mean three different things, especially when it comes to slang.

Now, I am not going to list the specific differences here; they are too numerous to bother with.

However, you need to be aware of it. For example, a biscuit in Australia is a cookie in the USA, and is a baked cookie in the UK. One word, three different things. We don’t use the word cookie. The UK uses the word cookie for US biscuits. The only place you see cookies in Australia is in a Subway. What you in the US call a biscuit we call a savoury scone. The British tend not to have savoury scones. In Australia we have a pumpkin scone which has no comparison anywhere else. One language…

Now, because Australians are inundated with UK and US pop culture, we understand what these things mean. It does not work in the opposite way, so when USians try to write Australian characters, they often get so much wrong it is actually embarrassing.

If you are writing another English-speaking culture, do not assume that we are all the same. Would someone from New York like to be called the same as someone from Salt Lake City? Really? Well, it’s the same with us. Don’t be afraid to ask.

It becomes even more interesting in countries where English is a second language and the way English has evolved over time in those countries. Hong Kong is a great example. HK English has a lot of differences that come across as idiosyncrasies, and yet are simply cultural differences.

As a final thing, if looking at an international audience (which I do), try to avoid local words and phrases unless in direct speech. And, I say again, do not be afraid to ask. Most people from other countries don’t bite.


Neologisms
A Neologism is when you coin a new word. Shakespeare did it. A lot! Many science fiction writers do it. So… why do some seem right and some not?

Okay, I am going to sort this into four fields:

Nonsense Words
Made famous by Lear and Carroll (think Carroll’s Jabberwocky), nonsense words are whatever you want them to be, and their meaning could be anything, sometimes gleaned through context and sometimes left hanging. Whatever sounds right can be used. Or not. It is nonsense, after all.

Contemporaneous Words
I have done this in a published story and got away with it. How? Because for a word to be accepted it has to come from three bases:
                   1) an indo-European language; I use Greek and Latin and the words tend to make sense;
                   2) an Asian language adapted into a more Anglicised form (a lot of scifi neologisms come from this base); &
                   3) named after a person or brand name (e.g. band aids).
         For the word to work in a contemporaneous setting, the meaning of the base words needs to make sense. For some examples, see "St Patrick's Day Celebrations" , and at the bottom I have explained where the words come from.
         If using a person’s name, it must make sense in context. In Australia, a furphy is a bad rumour; this comes from the family name Furphy because they owned water trucks around which people would talk and gossip. There is nothing etymological about it, but it makes sense in the context of Australian culture.

Future Words
This is, of course, for those with a science fiction base. First, adding “star” or “space” to something is not going to happen; we have space stations, but we just have artificial satellites, not space satellites; Voyager and Voyager II were interstellar communications craft or man-made satellites, not space bots.
         There is a good chance that the culture which develops the future tech will name it, or it will be named after the company. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the vessel that takes the people to space was the Pan-Am Orion II Spaceplane (yes, space, but it was the 60s). But it was first named Pan-Am… a company that no longer exists (be so aware of that!).
         There was a craze for calling things like plexiplas for see-through plastic in science fiction in the 50s and 60s (and, let’s be honest, 70s and 80s as well). Looking at what we call things now, it would be clear plastic. Plexistrong was the name given to spaceship glass in a Lionel Fanthorpe novel; today it’s called toughened glass. So, don’t be too different.
         I did mention already that more and more science fiction writers use Asian language-based words, especially from Japan and, more and more with their expanding space programme, from India. All of that makes perfect sense.
         Having said all that, there is no reason why your space opera can’t have adapted names to make it futuristic. Personal drink dispenser became PDD or Personal DD in the space shuttle programme. It was basically a water bottle with a straw that directed the water to the back of the throat. Important tech, but the fancy name was not anything out of the ordinary. Oh, and space programmes use initialisations all the friggin’ time.

Fantasy Words
While some people take these as nonsense words, and that can be fine, there must be a rhyme and reason to the use of words if it is based on a language you have created.
         Give your towns a common ending or beginning or even syllable, for example. This not only gives an in-world reason for the names, but helps the reader identify if something is a town or person. If a word means something and a person’s name means the same thing, then a variation of that word should be there somewhere. It’s little things that make your world feel more fleshed out.
         Personal example: In a recent novel, the family of scribes all have a name starting with Zac, which tells you not only are they related but when a word for communal story came up, I called it a zacal. In the world’s context, it makes sense.
         So, yes, you can make up words and languages, but languages do follow rules and have an internal logic. And I can point you nowhere better than Tolkien’s languages in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. He developed entire systems, with vocabs and declensions and conjugations. Not everything he created was included in the books, but it was all there in the background.


So, I think that covers cultural differences and neologisms. Just some things to make your stories come more to life.