A Windy Weight of Words

Language. Writing.

• Doesn't the fact that, of the 402 million native English speakers, well over 3/4 are American, mean that American English should be the definitive variety of English? It's also changed less (all those big ol' words, like "elevator" instead of "lift"? yeah, it's a Renaissance thing, see also "multitudinous seas incarnadine" rather than "stain all the waves red").
  
  I mean, sure, most non-native speakers of English—in India, for instance—learn British English, but should we reward them for being consummate imperialists? Also, American English sounds like a language for grown men. E.g. "popsicle" vs. "ice-lolly", "truck" vs. "lorry", "hood" vs. "bonnet", "diaper" vs. "nappy". When terrifying scar-networked chavs use a vocabulary optimized for a nine-year-old girl, something is very wrong somewhere.


• This. Just this. It's an essay by one Tom Simon called "Superversive: The failure of subversion in imaginative literature", and it is really all there is to say on the matter, not that I plan to let that stop me.
  
  Then again, though, I am not quite as adamant against subversion: it currently being the former subversives that hold the field ('twas ever thus, since at least the Reformation). I hold that we may subvert the subversives, counter-revolt, counter-reform—and their edifice must first be undermined if we are to rebuild atop it.


• That same author has a discussion of how modern audiences don't like genealogies, and how the Silmarillion and its sequels go ahead anyway:

  The mediaeval audience of the Beowulf-scop, or even of the Gawain-poet, liked to know in advance who all the dramatis personae were, and how everyone was related to everyone else, and expected these things to be important to the plot. Modern readers, brought up as atoms in a society that hardly knows what a family is, have no patience for it. Regrettable as this may be, it is pointless to burden them at the outset with knowledge that they do not want.

  I don't actually do anything like Tolkien in my SF books—though I do explain why one felinoid character's clan is a member of the Imperial phratry—but I don't find it too troublesome, that my aliens use different family structures from modern Westerners. I mean, hell: Imperial Phratry? Also "affine cousin" (because "cousin-in-law" sounds goofy).
  
  I don't know, maybe it's because I went to high school with people whose introductions go "I am X of the Y clan, born for the Z clan"—i.e., my mother is Y clan and my father is Z clan (more formally, they also mention their grandfathers' clans). I just don't find complicated extended families, and huge importance attached to genealogy, to be odd.


• Then again I appear to be the only SF writer who's looked into alternative lineage systems (did you know ours is called Eskimo kinship?)...though I did decide to go with an extended version of Eskimo. Because Sudanese (marks for side of the family and sex, plus, often, relative age) is too complex, and the cross-cousin system used in Iroquois kinship and the "completely different system depending on the side of the family you're on" thing in Crow and Omaha are bizarre.
  
  Huh, I think my dromaeosaurs, or at least the one of their cultures that shows up a lot, are gonna use Hawaiian: all aunts and uncles are mothers and fathers, and all cousins are brothers or sisters. Because the economics of Polynesian societies involve the same gift element...not at all because Hawaiian is the simplest.


• I find it fascinating (I may have mentioned long ago, but I don't care to check) that the etymology of the word "elf" pretty much tells you what they're supposed to be like. The major sources of elf/fairie lore are Germanic, French, and Celtic; where the races are known as alfr, fatae or fée, and aos sidhe, respectively. That is, as "the Pale Ones", "the tutelary spirits who govern fate", and "the People of the Mounds". If the first and last one don't make your blood run cold, there's something wrong with you. These guys are not safe, and there's a reason the adjective derived from them, "eldritch", means "stepfatherin' spooky".
  
  But that middle one is interesting, because it give the other half of the equation, the half missed by writers like Terry Pratchett, who make the elves out simply evil. The elves are tutelaries, they guard and shepherd human fate: hence the danger of dealing with them. The actual English word for fate (fate and destiny are both Latin) was "doom", which I think says just about all we need to hear, about the normal human attitude toward the concept. Those who run fate are also those who administer the wheel of Fortune—did you know the yakuza began as gamblers?


• I find that Tolkien knew he was departing hugely from the elves of legends; there is apparently a letter where he tells someone the various occurrences of the terms "elf" and "dwarf" in the Old English corpus, and then he adds, "The gap between that and, say, Elrond or Galadriel is not bridged by learning." So good on him.
  
  Now if only everyone else would not simply rip off his halfway-between-man-and-angel elves, except reading in their own (much less intelligent than Tolkien's) version of "angel", we'd be in business. I speak without boasting when I say I've seen to it pretty well in my own house; my elves, remember, are the nobility of two empires, with human tributaries, and take votive offerings from their dependents as human lords would take rents. The etiquette by which their dependents deal with them is a religious purity code.


• It's interesting, Tom Simon (I am reading his archive of essays, that's why I keep bringing him up) says that, in essence, the fantasy he writes is science fiction where the sciences are theology and ethics. I find it interesting because I, myself, write fantasy that may be called science fiction where the sciences are alchemy, goety (limited to sub-angelic spirits, such as fairies), and necromancy.
  
  Well, and admittedly natural theoology (philosophical speculation about God), ethics, history, anthropology, and economics. You might find it odd that the purity code that governs human relations with elves is a part of their manorial relationship with their villages' tutelary/landlord, but I, for one, grow very tired of noblemen in fantasy stories not understanding their mutual dependency on their serfs.
  
  I'm also the type who can give you a very quick answer to "what if wizards could make gold?". Answer: the use of cold iron or silver coins, both of which metals are traditionally unworkable by magic. Conveniently, most medieval economies were silver-based anyway.


• You know the shopworn little saw that the villain in a story will "stop at nothing" to do or prevent X, where X is generally whatever the heroes are attempting to prevent or do?
  
  Well, balderdash. In the immortal words of the great Maximilien Robespierre, when one of his generals was offering the excuse 'I did all I could': "Did you die?" Now since Robespierre himself eventually went to the guillotine, we may conclude that he would stop at nothing for Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law, but then again, he wasn't a villain (maybe an anti-villain). But most of our heroes nowadays are not cut from that kind of robin's-egg-blue cloth.
  
  Since the villain doesn't want to be the one who winds up dead for his ideals, he's going to have to be subtle and sneaky, with labyrinthine layers of intrigue and, if things go pear-shaped for him, more bolt holes than you can shake a stick at. And he's going to leave the atrocities to the second-stringers—fanatics, dupes, and conscripts commit atrocities, and so do heroes when their will breaks, but evil masterminds are too smart to bother with the high-risk, low-return strategy of massacres.