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.