It is Friday so we saw our Muslim neighbors emerging from the mosque and it is also Good Friday so we know that our Christian neighbors will have congregated in the Priory Church, the Cathedral etc. The rest of Easter Weekend may be busy so let's try for one more post this evening.
Words
"'...ceratopid...'" (p. 259);
"...peristaltic..." (p. 262);
"...carnosaur..." (p. 263).
Both the word ending and the context make clear that a "carnosaur" was a kind of dinosaur but it remains one that I had never heard of before, despite there having been an sf film with that word as its title. Do some authors naturally have a more extensive vocabulary than their readers or do they research new words while writing?
Walking carefully through a herd of titanosaurs, Marc knows "'...what it feels like to be a mouse.'" (p. 264) Not a bad perspective for a human being to experience. This scene is well observed because we are told that:
the biggest dinosaurs hardly notice anything as small as a human being so that it is unnecessary to hide or keep quiet;
cow- or horse-sized dinosaurs are more dangerous because they are "...close enough in scale to see humans..." (p. 266) and also more agile;
it is hard to gauge where the moving titanosaur legs are going to come down;
it feels as though the legs are always toppling down;
the footfalls like rumbling thunder cause mini-Venusquakes;
a man can walk under a titanothaur without stooping;
the 'saur's cat-sized lice are dangerous.
That is what it would be like. All of these effects would have to be reproduced in any screen dramatization of The Sky People - and let us haste to see it.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
You asked: "Do some authors naturally have a more extensive vocabulary than their readers or do they research new words while writing?" My personal experience and memory was of how often I browsed thru dictionaries as a boy and reading extensively. So, I expect many writers to already be familiar with some of the more unusual words we may see in their books. But, I think it's reasonable to expect they picked some of the more technical words from researches in various fields.
Sean
ceratopid - I already knew triceratops was one of a group of dinosaurs with horns & a bony frill at the front for protection.
peristaltic - I knew peristalsis is the contractions of the digestive tract that pushes food 'downstream'.
carnosaur - seemed obvious, carnivorous dinosaur
I'm not sure if Stirling coined them himself or read them elsewhere
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