The extent of Stirling's research is shown by the number of italicized non-English language words in his text. I have stopped googling them because this was interrupting the narrative too much.
-copied from here.
To some of the guys I was at school with, reading a text with unfamiliar words would have been not a welcome learning experience but an unacceptable chore. Probably some of them never read a book after leaving school although, if they had been able to afford it, then they would have put their sons through the same expensive, single sex, denominational, boarding school, presenting a social facade of "good education."
Neil Gaiman's Rose Walker, reading an out of print fantasy novel, notes words that she will need to find in a dictionary whereas the woman sitting beside her in the plane says:
"That's why I like Judith Krantz, really. You don't have to look up any words with Judith Krantz."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones (New York, 1996), 10. p. 22, panel 7.
I intend no insult to Judith Krantz with whom I was previously unfamiliar but not having to look up any words would have been a strong recommendation to some of my school acquaintances at the time when I was starting to read Poul Anderson.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Many of the books I like best, such as the works of Anderson, Davidson, Tolkien, etc., frequently used strange, unusual, unfamiliar words. Altho it was not my habit to stop reading and look them up, I think I mostly got the gist of what was meant, from context. Gene Wolfe, in works like THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, used some REALLY odd words!
I take some satisfaction in thinking I may even have affected how Poul Anderson used some words and phrases. He started using "usurper" and "tying up loose ends" after I used them in letters I sent him. Well, he did use "usurper" once, in ROGUE SWORD, many years before.
Sean
I try to make words understandable in context... tho' not always successfully.
A word has a wide range of impacts besides its bare dictionary meaning; there's the sound of it, the associations of its penumbra (cultural, historic), and its relation to the characters, just to start with.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Quite true! For example, some words or kinds of words are more likely to be used by educated persons than by men/women who are not well educated.
Sean
Fletcher Pratt, in The Well of the Unicorn, had the variant practice of sometimes using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. The usage that particularly got on my nerves was "wage" as a verb meaning "hire": "Belike he'll wage you into his men-at-arms." (That's not a precise quote, but approximates what someone told the protagonist early in the tale.) I found The Canterbury Tales easier reading than Pratt's Well.
One thing about Gene Wolfe's far-future books is that a word may be employed for a meaning rather different from what you'll find in dictionaries. Mention is made of troops with lances, for instance, but then the "lance" turns out to be a directed-energy weapon that leaves craters in the landscape hundreds of meters away.
Kaor, DAVID!
Well, I don't think it's that implausible to think "wage" might change its meaning. In Poul Anderson's "A Tragedy Of Errors," we see what happened on Nike when "friends" and "doing business" changed from their original meanings. And the same happened as well to other Anglic words like "fish" and "cave."
Sean
Pratt is referencing a Scottish/North English dialect term, "fee", in which that word means "the process of paying" as well as the more familiar "payment for a service".
Eg., You "fee the loon" -- "pay the laborer".
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