Hello!

It’s record-breakingly hot as I type this in the dark in my un-air-conditioned apartment. Too hot to think, but the month is almost over, so I need to get this newsletter out.

I will be at Eurocon/Metropolcon this week. I’m on a couple panels, one of which is a book launch of European Science Fiction #2, which includes my translation of Aiki Mira’s Utopie27. (Which was rejected by many fine North American establishments several years ago. It was also the first piece of fiction I translated.)

Eponyms

There was some discussion recently about words that throw people out of historical fantasy or secondary world fantasy/SF because they’re named for someone on Earth in the real world. For example, boycotts are named for Captain Charles Boycott. Which is something I only knew because it’s always in listicles of “10 words you didn’t know were named for someone!” 

Some comments I saw (probably on Bluesky, probably never to be found again) were to the effect of “Well, if they use this word, that implies all the things that led to its existence in this world.” And, while I’m sure there are plenty of people who read and/or write science fiction and fantasy who are highly aware of the etymology and cultural history surrounding a lot of words, for whom reading “boycott” in a story set in an interplanetary science fiction story where Earth plays no role is jarring, I posit they are not the majority.

Readers get thrown out of a story for idiosyncratic reasons all the time. Lord knows I get hung up on all sorts of random things when I’m reading, but mostly things like “huh is that a regional variation I’ve never encountered?” or something like that. I would argue it’s not the writer’s job to prevent every reader from getting thrown out of the story.

This has a cousin, which Jo Walton called the Tiffany problem, where a name or word in a historical setting sounds anachronistic, but it isn’t. Like calling a character in the Middle Ages Tiffany, which was a name in use at the time, because it sounds too modern (because peak Tiffany occurred in the 1980s). Or a classmate of mine in grad school remarking that a character in an adaptation of the Völsunga Saga/Nibelungenlied (this one) was named “Eric,” when … girl, have you never heard of Erik the Red or his son Leif?

(The current discourse is about someone saying writers should use “easy words” that their readers should know, which sounds like the end of the slipperiest slope to ever slip, but it’s real.)

So … what?

I wrote an entire book about using language in your worldbuilding, which includes creating proverbs and idioms for your non-Earth cultures, but I don’t cover anything like this, because I honestly don’t think it matters all that much, with an important caveat, of course.

If you’re writing a secondary-world fantasy and out of nowhere talk about the Bayeux tapestry or Agincourt or Robin Hood, that’s going to be very jarring, right? These are real world items, places, and legends with very real historical and cultural significance that has not been bleached from the words. A secondary world can have a tapestry depicting the story of a famous battle, and a reader can draw a connection to the Bayeux tapestry, but if it’s called something else (I am terrible at naming things, unfortunately), people won’t care.

This is an extension of the proverbs and idioms, which I called “cultural touchstones” in my book. Doing this sort of worldbuilding can add layers to your world and lend it verisimilitude, and readers may or may not notice you did it, but it’ll add to their experience. You’ve probably had this experience as a reader, where a book talked about fictional poets or composers or movies. (Murderbot, anyone?)  It added to the real-ish-ness of the world, right?

How is this different from boycotts and saxophones and muslin and sleazy? These words have lost their connection to the real-world originator of the item or term. They’ve been bleached of their etymology. (I don’t know if anyone else uses that term of if I’m just making it up here, and a quick search is mostly turning up the etymology of bleach.) It probably happens through a combination of use and time. 

Side note: You could argue that decimate has been etymologically bleached, because it no longer means (in common usage) “reduce by 1 in 10,” as it did in Roman days, though you get plenty of pedants popping up whenever people say something was decimated.

Muslin, for example, has been produced since at least the 10th century, and the etymological connection to Mosul (or possibly Masulipatnam) has long since been lost. Boycott, though much more modern, has been applied to the act of shunning a business that acts in a way we find abhorrent so often that only dedicated historians (of English or actual history) would know.

The saxophone (and the sousaphone, for that matter) are different. Most people haven’t heard of Adolphe Sax, but they know the instrument he invented. Sousa is a slightly different story; I don’t know if most people have heard of him, but people might recognize his name even if they aren’t particularly into marching band.

Quite the conundrum

You’re the writer, and only you can decide what works best for your story and how much time you want to dedicate to worldbuilding. If you don’t want to think about it that hard, the easy answer is to avoid obvious real-world terms and names (Robin Hood) and invent equivalent folk heroes should the need arise, but use the bleached words (boycott). Or you could use a synonym or related phrase (not do business with X until they Y). There are ways to get around it, but they might be more effort than they’re worth. It’s up to you!

Until next time!