The neologism that never was

[desperance]

There is of course a long list, an uncompilable list (because the rules are different for everyone, because everyone has to write their own) of Words That Can't Be Used In Fantasy. They're modern constructs, or they're eponyms taken from the names of people or places that don't exist in this particular fantasy world (alas! no sodomy, ever!), or whatever.

I just thought I'd hit another one. I have people trekking through rainforest, and I wanted a word for that kind of rain that is barely more than a fine suspension of water in air; and of course I have the word, and it is mizzle. Which I thought I couldn't use, because I've always understood it to be a recent concoction, a jocular admixture of mist and drizzle.

I looked it up, though, just to be sure of my disappointment - and no! How wrong I was! We have it via the Low German - miseln, mist - and it is a perfectly proper word, and technically I can use it without further hesitation.

Please to note that 'technically' - because the problem, of course, is that if I thought it was a modern invention, chances are that other people will too, and if I use it they will trip over it anyway, rightly or wrongly, and so fall out of the story for a moment, which is of course the reason why I thought I couldn't use it in the first place...

Comments

Scots have a word for it.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

"Smirr". It's the sort of rain that almost isn't there until you walk forward through it. It's not the same as mist, per se, it's more particulate but way less dense and pretty much invisible to the naked eye.

Coincidentally I encountered it this morning on the way to work. Way to go, July.

Re: Scots have a word for it.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Nice. Maybe a bit too local/dialect to use, though - not exactly in Scotland, here. More like Imperial Taiwan...

It is a lovely word. And yup, just what I was thinking of. I'll trade you, word for word: 'serein' is a word we took from the French, for that fine rain that sometimes falls after sunset in the Tropics from an apparently clear sky...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Why not use the German word?

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

So, you can't use mizzle when it's a recent conflation of two older words, but you can if it's borrowed from another country's language? I can understand the scruples, but I'm not sure I quite understand how the rules work. Anachronisms in another reality don't have to work the way they do in ours.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I have just had *exactly* that same problem with "amok", which is apparently a late 17th century word, when I was hoping to use it in a book set in the late 16th century. Damn, say I! (Although the word it came from was apparently, er, discovered, in the 1520s or so, so /possibly/ I could use it...but no, y'know?)

Writing fantasy isn't paleo-etymological forensics

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

I'm with Humpty Dumpty on this.

The readers can take your word for your words being valid, or they can read something else. (The old "Kick them and give them their money back" policy, as we say in Customer Service)

[pennski.livejournal.com]

I am your archetypal reader and I like the word mizzle. If you like it, use it. It's not like "body-popping" (which might well stick out a little).

PS Posted the book yesterday.

[fastfwd.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow! Mizzle, for shizzle!

(Hey, somebody had to say it.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...and I'm so pleased it was you...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Accepting the preamble about how there is no rhyme or reaon to this, it is all about what feels right to the individual writer, I still don't see the problem with mizzle; as long as it's a combination of two words that existed at the required period, there's nothing to say that they couldn't have been combined at that period. Especially if you see it as jocular, that's the sort of word that people can go on thinking they've just invented for centuries before the dictionaries catch up with them (if you follow this tangle of sentence). Informal usage, not written down: who's to say it didn't exist?

What jolts the reader out of the narrative is as much to do with the reader as with the narrative.

Once heard Gillian Linscott talking about her Nell Bray books (suffragette sleuth, for those who haven't met them). She'd found a letter from William Morris in which he referred to his children as "the kids", and was frustrated not to be able to use it.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

What jolts the reader out of the narrative is as much to do with the reader as with the narrative.

Of course. I said that. It's still my story, and they're still jolted; responsible by negligence is still responsible.

I think the feeling that my characters shouldn't have been playing word-games, neological or otherwise, inheres partly in the Chinesiness of it all. Obviously they don't speak English on any fantasy world, we know that, everything's a translation; but here the English that they don't speak is actually Chinese, and those sorts of games don't work.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

Taking responsibility for the idiolect of every reader is impractical: the very words some find most appropriate will sound wrong to others. In the William Morris example, some will hear his word "gossip" as 'horrible rumour spreader', not as the endearing contraction of god-sibling that his original audience heard.

To be able to fix this in your writing you'd need an audience who all speak exactly the same language, which you're not going to get in the post-Babel world. Generally it's best to write with precisely your own ear for words and let the audience adapt to it.