How old does a word have to be to be acceptable in fantasy?

[Zebra Wizard]

I've been freely using words that may or may not sit well with readers, due to their origins and slang. Though i have often read british slang words and phrases when it comes to fantasy.

Now I have quite a fair bit of profanity in my dialogue, and I do have a very british feel which is intentional. And one example of the words I use is twat. which started being used in the 1600

This question also extends to slang, where do you cross the line. "What in the bloody hell is that?", "Cannot be arsed", "That fella is a dodgy sort."

I know, as time moves forwards so does the modernisation of how we write and how dialogue is written. But when does it start becoming unacceptable?

 

[HareBrain]

But when does it start becoming unacceptable?

When readers start noticing it, I guess. So if a word isn't obviously modern, I'd wait to see if your betas pick it up. (You'd be doing well to have words more jarringly modern than Steven Erikson, whose more-or-less medieval characters throw around words like "sociopath" with abandon.)

 

[Brian G Turner]

Most fantasy writers appear to take no trouble at all over the issue. Those who take care that their words are relative to the period are very much a minority.

Although word choices can throw a reader out of the prose, it's going to have to be a pretty sucky story in the first place if that kills the reader's interest in it.

(Btw, "twat" is listed as from the 1600's - but only as a term of abuse since the 20th century...
Online Etymology Dictionary
)

 

[Ashleyne]

It's relative to the target audience and the setting. If it's set in the 1800s, you can use words that were around in the 1800s. If you're writing for a more laid back audience (comedy, spoof, satire), you can use whatever words you feel are in keeping with the tone of your story. If it's set in a completely different world, you dictate the language that world.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

When readers start noticing it, I guess. So if a word isn't obviously modern, I'd wait to see if your betas pick it up. (You'd be doing well to have words more jarringly modern than Steven Erikson, whose more-or-less medieval characters throw around words like "sociopath" with abandon.)

Yeah, I was watching a movie about Vikings recently, and, when one of the characters asked another 'are you OK?' I had to stop and wonder 'when did people start saying OK?' Pretty sure it wasn't in Viking times.

 

[Zebra Wizard]

I understand that if its set in a certain time period then those rules may apply. but when it comes to alternate world fantasy, I getting the feeling anything can go. Unless i start using really modern slang like hench, miffed, wank.

Yeah, I was watching a movie about Vikings recently, and, when one of the characters asked another 'are you OK?' I had to stop and wonder 'when did people start saying OK?' Pretty sure it wasn't in Viking times.

They wouldn't be using english either thats the point, it a strange balance, im sure that there is no rule of what can and can't be. But there are likely some things that are more acceptable than others.

I wouldn't really think much of a drunk hobbit saying "Thats bloody stupid." even though the word/phrase is tied specifically to an english queen.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I think it comes down to how blaggable the word is, as @Zebra Wizard says above re hobbitses saying bloody.

It's funny because some words and turns of phrase you'd think are modern are actually quite old.

On a separate note two things in Star Wars always jar with me: when Owen Lars says, 'He better have those droids working by morning or there'll be hell to pay.' and in ESB when Han tells the tauntaun handlers 'then I'll see you in hell!'

I thought the concept of an Abrahamic religion's place of damnation seemed out of place in a universe that reveres The Force.

pH

 

[The Ace]

I still remember David Eddings' concentration on leagues.

How Garion and Belgarath could make the 60-mile round trip to Upper Gralt in a single day on a horse-drawn cart always made me knit my brows a bit.

As for the farm hands nipping down to the village for an end-of-day pint....

Different things worry different people. I get really annoyed when an outsider attempts Scottish dialect - Terry Pratchett tried it for the Nac Mac Feegle, and even he makes me want to punch something. One author used modern English names, which jarred a bit.

Get someone else to read over your dialogue, or even read it aloud - if it doesn't sound right, rewrite it.

At a re-enactment, I added realism (and sparked a complaint) when the Centurion barked an order as I was speaking to some members of the public and I muttered, "Oh, Seth's hairy b*ll*cks !" under my breath, before excusing myself to comply.

 

[Mirannan]

All stories set earlier than maybe 1500 are translations from the current idiom, and fantasy stories certainly are. I think that worrying about anachronistic slang terms misses that point. Try reading Chaucer to see what I mean about mediaeval English, for example.

Tolkein explicitly noted this problem. He pretended that the whole of The Hobbit and LOTR were actually written in the common tongue of the time, Westron, and that he was translating both works from the original; said originals would have been written in Tengwar, the Elvish script, besides.

 

[tinkerdan]

Well if you use some of the phrases here::

I've been freely using words that may or may not sit well with readers, due to their origins and slang. Though i have often read british slang words and phrases when it comes to fantasy.

Now I have quite a fair bit of profanity in my dialogue, and I do have a very british feel which is intentional. And one example of the words I use is twat. which started being used in the 1600

This question also extends to slang, where do you cross the line. "What in the bloody hell is that?", "Cannot be arsed", "That fella is a dodgy sort."

I know, as time moves forwards so does the modernisation of how we write and how dialogue is written. But when does it start becoming unacceptable?

Some of us on the other side of the pond might not notice the anachronistic nature of such: so much.

 

[The Judge]

I'm one of those who is easily thrown out of a story by anachronistic language, because to me it's a failure of the writing.

The problem with saying "anything goes, it's a translation" is that words don't originate in isolation -- they arise through what is being thought and done, and from the society that is thinking and doing in that particular age. To write without considering why a word came into use, and why it wasn't coined earlier -- and therefore why you should reconsider its use in your fantasy society -- is as lazy as not doing any other kind of research eg as to the kind of clothes they should be wearing or the ships they would have built.

But it isn't only a question of words alone. It's possible to use words which have an old pedigree but which put together form compounds which would never have been used by an older society because they simply didn't think the way we do eg theology is C14th, liberation is early C15th but no one before the C20th is going to be talking of "liberation theology" -- it just wasn't in anyone's mindset before that.

As ever the rule is think about what you write. If the word is modern, but fits, use it. But think about why you're using it -- if it's just that you can't be bothered to find an alternative, then that for me isn't good enough.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

It's particularly important to use historically suitable words in dialogue, but I think you can get away with it more in prose.

 

[Boneman]

Read Angus Watson's Age of Iron Trilogy... does become amusing, his use of modern idiom in 55bc... Some will find it downright distracting, but I can't make my mind up, tbh. Cracking good story, though.

 

[galanx]

Most fantasy writers appear to take no trouble at all over the issue. Those who take care that their words are relative to the period are very much a minority.

Although word choices can throw a reader out of the prose, it's going to have to be a pretty sucky story in the first place if that kills the reader's interest in it.

(Btw, "twat" is listed as from the 1600's - but only as a term of abuse since the 20th century...
Online Etymology Dictionary
)

The original meaning of 'twat' had fallen totally out of middle-class usage, so when Browning used it in "Pippa Passes" along with the more famous passage

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God’s in His heaven
All’s right with the world.

It passed totally unnoticed

"Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!"

Source uncovered at the Language Log

The first response only came forty years later when the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, collecting examples of usage, like Johnson before them, and interested to find a contemporary use of “twat,” wrote to Browning to ask in what sense he was using it. Browning is said to have written back that he used it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns, comparable to the cowls for monks he put in the same line. The editors are then supposed to have asked if he recalled where he had learned the word. Browning replied that he knew exactly. He had read widely in seventeenth-century literature in his youth, and in a broadside poem called “Vanity of Vanities”, published in 1659, he had found these lines, referring to an ambitious cleric:

They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat;
They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.

If you are sufficiently delicate and sheltered, it is possible to take the last word as meaning something like a wimple, and Browning did. A fugitive and cloistered virtue can get into difficulties that even Milton didn’t think of.

Language Log: More on Browning, Pippa and all

 

[Ursa major]

He pretended that the whole of The Hobbit and LOTR were actually written in the common tongue of the time, Westron, and that he was translating both works from the original; said originals would have been written in Tengwar, the Elvish script, besides.

Which still doesn't explain the bit where the firework dragon -- seen during Bilbo's birthday celebrations -- is compared to an express train (assuming I've recalled this correctly).

 

[galanx]

It may have been translated like that by Tolkien to replace a reference unfamiliar to modern readers: "passed like an express train" might have substituted for "passed like a mail coach" which substituted for "passedlike a King's messenger" which originally read "passed like a...um...dragon".

 

[galanx]

Then you have the opposite as in the TV series "Spartacus" where they sound like they're doing bad copies of Shakespeare.

 

[Ursa major]

It may have been translated like that by Tolkien to replace a reference unfamiliar to modern readers: "passed like an express train" might have substituted for "passed like a mail coach" which substituted for "passedlike a King's messenger" which originally read "passed like a...um...dragon".

But the thing is, he didn't use a comparison that might have made sense to both those living in Middle Earth and those reading in mid-twentieth-century Earth onwards -- such as lightning bolts (fast and bright) -- but one that had no relevance (or, indeed, meaning) to anything before the early nineteenth century Earth**. It isn't the language that's incongruous; it's the express train.

The point -- an extension of the one HareBrain made earlier (with regard to sociopaths***) -- is that authors use, and have used, words that make sense "only" to their readers and in many cases, no-one bats an eyelid.


** - Give or take stampeding mules (and very badly-behaved, very long skirts...), neither of which are noted for their dragon-like properties, particularly with regard to flying and breathing fire.

*** - Who have always existed, but without that particular tag.

 

[prizzley]

It's possible to use words which have an old pedigree but which put together form compounds which would never have been used by an older society because they simply didn't think the way we do eg theology is C14th, liberation is early C15th but no one before the C20th is going to be talking of "liberation theology" -- it just wasn't in anyone's mindset before that.

I find OED online very useful for this. OED I've been surprised how many words that feel modern have been around for a long time.

 

[James118]

On a separate note two things in Star Wars always jar with me: when Owen Lars says, 'He better have those droids working by morning or there'll be hell to pay.' and in ESB when Han tells the tauntaun handlers 'then I'll see you in hell!'

I thought the concept of an Abrahamic religion's place of damnation seemed out of place in a universe that reveres The Force.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure there are offhand Christian references like that, in Star Wars and most adult popular fiction... I noticed Threepio say 'Thank the maker!' in TFA, so there's that too.


A little more on-topic, I occasionally do etymology research on words that sound a little more modern, just to try and keep most of the dialogue in my current medieval high fantasy saga time-relevant, and not too out of place. I also like to throw in my own invented idioms for them, depending on their class, job, etc.