#just use the words
Everytime that Tumblr post about “You can’t use the word bungalow in fantasy worlds!” or whatever and then it’s all the fucking reblogs of all the words that have “specific origins” that you “can’t use” because “those people don’t exist” or “those places” or whatever.
Do you know how many fucking basic words we use to describe the world are derived from very specific people and very specific events? Or are stolen from languages in which those words come from VERY SPECIFIC PEOPLE and events? If you get rid of one, you might as well get rid of them all! Because just because YOU don’t know the VERY SPECIFIC HISTORICAL ORIGINS of this word, doesn’t mean your AUDIENCE doesn’t and wouldn’t that break immersion??
No. No it fucking wouldn’t. Not if you, you know, make it work.
What else would you do? Write in a god damn conlang? Because all I’m hearing is “because I know the origin of this word, therefore it can’t be in fantasy” and honestly fuck off.
I’m gonna go put bungalows in my fantasy now.
This is how you get Uncleftish Beholding, a very clever sci-fi short essay by Poul Anderson, written in English without any loanwords. E.g. you can’t use the word ‘science’, that’s from Latin - so it’s called ‘worldken’. You can’t say ‘atom’, that’s Greek - it’s an ‘uncleft’. You can’t say ‘theory’ because that’s also Greek - so it’s ‘beholding’. The title, therefore, means ‘Atomic Theory’.
The entire text is available here.
There are other books, even novel-length ones, that have taken similar restrictive or highly theoretical approaches to the use of language - Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is one of the more famous, with its opening sentence of, “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”
They can be fascinating but extremely challenging to read, and I can only imagine writing one is an enormous task, simply because you have to think about every single word as you go. It’s not something you do casually on a whim, it’s a huge part of the construction and worldbuilding of the story itself.
So sure, maybe don’t say “French braid” in a world that doesn’t have France, that might throw someone out of the immersion, I guess. But if you start trying to limit words back down to their original meanings and saying you can’t use them because whatever language they originally come from doesn’t exist in [fantasy world], you’re going to end up with a ridiculously limited vocabulary.
