Made-up words in Fantasy

 I guess I’ll preface this by saying that I like XKCD. It’s generally a pretty funny comic, there’s a relevant comic for most situations, and it makes the occasional good point. However, sometimes people are wrong. Sometimes they’re so wrong it actually angers me that someone can go around being this wrong (incidentally, there’s an XKCD strip about this). In strip 483, Randall Monroe is painfully wrong, and I cannot let this injustice slide.

The strip in question is a bar graph, with the y-axis reading “Probability book is good” and the x-axis “Number of words made up by author,” with a negative slope. The text under the picture is “The elders, or fra’as, guarded the farmlings (children) with their krytoses, which are like swords but awesomer…” The alt text is “Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.”

 The assignment I wrote this for didn't allow pictures, so I had to describe it

I read a lot of fantasy. Judging by the comic, I can only assume that either Monroe doesn’t read fantasy (although he’s a fan of Tolkien, so we can rule that out) or has somehow managed to avoid most of the big names. The simple truth is that Monroe is wrong.

            Of course, I should probably explain why he’s wrong, and to do that we’ll have to look at why people would make up words. Monroe’s straw man has a point; replacing words for no reason does seem like bad writing. The problem with his argument is that good fantasy writers make up words all the time, and there are a few different reasons to do so.

            Fantasy generally deals with world-building. The author makes a new world with various races and technologies, and sometimes magic and new animals. They’re going to want to use words to explain what these new ideas are. A myrddraal, from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is a monster, but it’s a special monster with its own special rules in Jordan’s universe. It’s a new monster, and it needs a name. Tolkien invented orcs and balrogss; other writers invent other monsters.

            New words are also useful if you’re explaining things that are similar to a real world item, but different enough that you want a new term. It could have connotations that English doesn’t have. This helps the world feel different. Let’s go over Monroe’s straw man argument. He uses “farmlings” to mean children. It’s not too hard to assign a new meaning to that. We’ll say that until a certain age, everybody works on the farms until the day they are assigned into a caste. Now there’s a reason for “farmling” to be a word. Maybe a krytos is a magic sword that can turn into something else. Neither of these are particularly good definitions, but now we have meanings for words Monroe specifically invented for the sake of mocking a genre. A farmling has different connotations from a child, and a krytos is different from a sword. Add some children who aren’t considered farmlings, throw in some swords that don’t transform (to show how krytoses are different), and we’ve got ourselves some new words.

            You can also use new words to show different cultures. In A Song of Ice and Fire (the books which were turned into the show Game of Thrones), the main culture of the book is based off of Europeans. They use swords. There is another culture, the Dothraki, who are based off of the Mongols. To show them as a foreign culture, George R. R. Martin makes up words. Dothraki don’t use swords, they use arakhs. This shows that they are a different culture from the main cast, and it shows off that they’re foreign. There’s also the fact that in real life there’s more than one kind of sword. A katana is different from a claymore. Another example of fictional swords would be a lightsaber, from Star Wars. It’s not a sword; it’s a sword with a retractable laser blade that can cut through anything. It is indeed “like a sword but awesomer,” yet different enough to warrant a new word.

            The alt-text is also just patently stupid. I know that ad hominem is as bad an argument as Monroe’s straw man, but those two authors are known for making up words. Monroe’s argument is that the more made up words a book has, the worse it is, unless it’s by someone who made a lot of words, and then it’s okay for some reason. I just… I just don’t know what he was doing here. I don’t know how anyone could think this makes sense. Is he saying that they’re good enough writers that they’ve earned the privilege to make up more than five words? There are a lot of good fantasy authors, and a lot of them make up more than five words. Is there something about these authors’ 5+ words that make them better than Robert Jordan’s 5+ words? Where is the committee for judging fictional words? I also feel like Shakespeare fans might have an issue with Monroe saying that making up words is the mark of a bad writer.

            XKCD is generally funny, and I generally agree with it, but sometimes Monroe completely misses the mark. Fortunately for him, I’m here.

Sam Goes Horseback Riding

            As many of you know, my family moved to Austin, Texas this January (from Brookline, Massachusetts). I went down to visit them this week, as did my grandmother from Boca Raton (Florida), and they decided to show me real Texan things. We ate a lot of barbecue, watched a University of Texas Volleyball game, and we also did the manliest, most Texan thing of all: we went horseback riding.

            The last time I had been horseback riding was in 1999, so I wasn’t really sure what to think about this expedition. I’ve lived a good life without riding horses, and I wasn’t particularly interested in changing that. I’m not opposed to the idea of horseback riding; I’m pretty indifferent. But, I also wanted to do cool Texan things, and I kind of wanted to see what had happened. Although they’ve adapted to Texas pretty well, my family (myself included) is still a bunch of city slickers who can’t tell one end of a horse from the other. I thought this had the potential to be a very interesting day. We all got in the minivan (a teal Honda, very manly and Texan) and drove off to some ranch where there were people waiting for us with a trailer and horses surrounding it.

            So first off, they had a horse that was big enough for me. This was a pleasant surprise. I mean, I’m huge (6’10”, for those unaware). Fortunately, the horse was huge too. The other thing I noticed was that riding a horse is really uncomfortable. They tell you to sit up straight, which is honestly borderline painful. I managed to kind of slump down in the saddle and find a pose that sort of worked, but I realized something. All the horsemen throughout history—the Mongols, knights, cowboys, etc—they all had asses of steel, a quality mine lacked.

            Riding a horse is different from riding a bicycle or driving a car. The controls aren’t as tight. It seems that way at first, when they teach you how to pull on the reins to steer, or pull back to stop, but you’re still on an animal, not a machine, who will only usually do what you say. My horse didn’t really want to stop at times, because he wanted to keep up with all of his horse friends. I was told this was normal, and to just kind of roll with it.

            So, there I was, rolling with it. We rode around the ranch, going up and down slight hills and through shallow streams. We took our picture next to cows and tried desperately to get the dog to stop barking at bulls. It was a good time. I had come to two conclusions. The first was that horseback riding was pretty fun. It’s not something I would go out of my way to do weekly, but I enjoyed myself. The second conclusion was that I was good at it. I had to be corrected much less than the other members of my family; this obviously meant I was a prodigy. I was a badass cowboy. I was The Man With No Name. I had mastered riding my horse, and I was ready to start shooting people who laughed at my mule.

He don’t like people laughing at him, you see

  

          The problem is, I was not actually The Man With No Name. I had a name. My name is Sam Notelovitz, and I am not, in fact, a badass cowboy. Near the end, one of our instructors decided to go a different route. Unfortunately for me, my horse was best friends with the instructor’s horse, and he was not about to get separated from his best friend, not while he was forced to carry some big, heavy city slicker with delusions of grandeur. He decided it would be in his best interests to turn around, leave the group, and follow his best friends, and he ignored my attempts to suggest otherwise.

            Being abducted by your horse is not a pleasant feeling. You realize very quickly that you can’t get off and walk back, because it’s a long way and also you probably can’t dismount a moving horse. You can’t tell the horse what to do, because if he gets mad he might be forced to take drastic measures. You kind of just have to sit there on your horse and hope that something good happens. Sure, a trained horse… rider… would probably be able to manage something, but those words do not describe me very well.

            My horse caught up to his friend. The instructor looked surprised that I had followed her, then kind of laughed it off. She told me that my horse didn’t want to be separated from his friend. This was sweet and all, but I still got abducted by my horse.

            I suppose that’s the most interesting part of the story. After that we rode our horses back to camp, dismounted, and eventually went home, everyone sore but not talking about it. All in all, a fun time.

12 Years a Slave

            I watched 12 Years a Slave last night. 12 Years a Slave is the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man who gets kidnapped and sold into slavery. It’s a true story too; Northup wrote his autobiography, 12 Years a Slave, after his ordeal, and this movie is an adaptation of that. It draws comparisons to Django, due to superficially similar content, but I don’t think they’re really warranted.

            I’ll start off by saying that it was a great movie. Chiwetel Ejiofor does a great job portraying Solomon. Benedict Cumberbatch plays “benevolent” slaveholder, William Ford, and Michael Fassbender is the sadistic Edwin Epps.

            12 Years a Slave had an interesting pacing and tone. It wasn’t written as a movie; it’s based off a book, which is based off of real events. As such, the plot is a bit meandering at times; real life doesn’t have a main plot, antagonist, and shoehorned love interest. There’s also much less justice in the movie. This isn’t Django, where a slave kills his masters and does cool cowboy stuff. This is reality, and reality is never that poetic.

            I’m going to be honest here; I was made uncomfortable by some of the content in 12 Years a Slave. However, I also recognize that the movie is supposed to make you feel that way, and I wouldn’t change a thing. The rampant use of the n-word is much more hard-hitting here than in Django, because this is real. At the risk of redundancy, slavery was horrible, and this movie confronts us with that fact. We brush over the fact that the United States had slavery drive a large part of its economy. This shows us the full face of slavery, and it should make us uncomfortable. We’re watching people on screen be whipped, watching them be raped, watching them be dehumanized. This is a movie where a woman begs the protagonist to kill her, because she can’t stand living anymore. It’s awful stuff. It’s a powerful movie.

            On the more cinematic aspects, the pacing didn’t quite feel like a movie, but that’s because it was based off of real life, as I said. Cumberbatch made for an interesting character: a “benevolent” slaveholder. He treats Solomon relatively well, accepting his suggestions for how to make the plantation more efficient, and he gives him a violin, which Solomon knows how to play. He almost treats Solomon like a human. When buying slaves, he tries not to break up a family. However, he’s still a slaveholder. Regardless of how he treats Solomon, he owns people, and he treats most of them like animals. He also does break up the family, because it’s what he can afford. I thought he made for an interesting character. Can someone be moral if they’re in an immoral position? Can you have a good slaveholder? I say no, but it was interesting to watch.

            Michael Fassbender makes for a good villain too. He’s a truly deplorable human being; he whips his slaves for fun, justifying his actions with scripture. He has a perverse obsession with one of his slaves, and there’s a scene where he rapes her. However, as mentioned earlier, 12 Years a Slave has a very different tone from other movies. This isn’t a villain who you love to hate, or who is so cheesy you almost root for him. This is real life. This is a vile man who does vile things. When I say he was a great villain, I don’t mean that I enjoyed his performance. I mean that his character made me feel uncomfortable, and that means Fassbender did a good job acting.

            Overall, 12 Years a Slave is a pretty good movie. It’ll definitely be nominated for a few Oscars, partially because of the subject matter, but also because the movie and performances really are quite good. I recommend it.

Sam's Adventures in Parkour

I suppose I’ll start this off by saying that I’m not an especially athletic person. Working out is kind of alright, but I would never play sports or go running by choice. That being said, parkour is universally acknowledged as being really cool. I signed up for the Parkour club in my freshman year at club fair (remember signing up for way too many clubs as a freshman?), but have never actually gone, because it sounded too similar to running.

I finally decided to go to parkour a few weeks ago. I figured it was probably about time. I mean, I’ve been in the club for three years now, I might as well make an appearance. After struggling to find the room where we met, I went inside. There was a fairly large gathering of people (I’d say around 30) and we all divided into groups of whose car we would take to get to the gym.

The gym was pretty cool. It was the kind of gym used for gymnastics, not working out. There were a few balance beams in the corner, and there were trampolines built into the floor. There were several soft obstacles, but the most fun part was a squishy floor. The main floor was raised slightly and bouncy. I‘m not sure how it worked, my guess is springs under the floor, but the floor was slightly bouncy, which is helpful if you’re going to be doing flips on it.

Anyway, it turns out that in addition to being really cool, parkour is pretty fun too. We started off by running laps to warm up, then we practiced breaking our fall by rolling. You know in how in action movies or in video games, the main character will dive into a roll, then be back on his feet? We practiced doing that. It was kind of jarring at first; I was a complete novice, and this looked like an advanced technique, but it really wasn’t that hard, and now I can do badass stunt flips (disclaimer: I can do awkward stunt rolls on a soft floor).

After that was jumping over blocks. There are several different cool jumping techniques in parkour (henceforth referred to as “vaults,” since that’s what they’re called). They’re pretty hard to do as an amateur. I only did one-handed vaults, since I found that the easiest; that is, I put on hand on the obstacle and used it to push my legs over the side.

It’s kind of hard to describe, but this is a picture.

 Pictured: not actually me

Then we just kind of did our own thing for a bit. I practiced doing flips off of a trampoline into a foam pit, and doing flips off a model house they had into a foam pit. Flips are fun and cool, and an important life skill to have.

We finished it up by playing parkour tag, which is really just “the floor is made of lava” with pushups involved. More specifically, we put obstacles all over the floor, then we played tag where you were only allowed to stand on the obstacles. If you touched the floor, it was a 5 pushup or crunch penalty.

Parkour was a lot of fun, and also probably a good workout, which got me thinking. As kids, we do a lot of this stuff naturally. Running and jumping is fun. As we grow older, we stop enjoying ourselves so much, or our parents tell us to be careful, and we eventually develop a proper sense of fear; not being afraid of monsters under the bed, but fear of hurting yourself doing physical activity (which is honestly kind of understandable; my risk of being eaten by a monster is 0, my risk of spraining an ankle by landing on it wrong is a bit higher). A lot of this is just learning as an adult to do what felt natural as a kid, and also attaching numbers to it. The fact that parkour is fun is good; the fact that it’s fun and probably counts as exercise is better.

I feel like I should also point out that people who are good at parkour are amazing to watch. Sure, we don’t have any pros or anything, but the more advanced members would dive over blocks, then sort of hand-walk over them while in the air. It’s insanely cool, and sort of feels wrong; you think to yourself that it shouldn’t be possible, somehow. But of course, it is; you watch your friends doing flips and flying through the air, and all is right with the world.

I dunno. I’m kind of rambling here. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that parkour is cool.