[ SECRET POST #6160 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6160 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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05. [SPOILERS for attack on titan finale]




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06. [SPOILERS for attack on titan finale]




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07. [WARNING for discussion of underage]

[Final Fantasy XIV]



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08. [WARNING for discussion of incest, pedophilia]

























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #880.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but making up a new word for everything on another planet even if it looks and functions like something back on earth is bananas.

[tabaqui]

No, it's...actually what writers do.....

[(Anonymous)]

Rarely. Do you know why? Because it sounds like:

Fargath put on his gharkazis and borkborks and climbed down the ziggatarin to the old gubnits where he raised a glak of kavva to his lips and took a deep drink. "Ahhh," thought Fargath, "There's nothing like a good glak of kavva to start the day. Where's my krajj? Maybe Vixalla knows where it is."

They don't do that. What they do is write a normal story using mostly recognizable earth names for things and sprinkle in a few made up words for local color.

[(Anonymous)]

You are Robert Heinlein and I claim my five pounds

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds fun. I would read that. I like it when alien or fantasy worlds sound like actual other worlds.

[tabaqui]

......which is what you 'made up word for bamboo' said.
Which doesn't seem to be what the OP is talking about. Which isn't what I said at all, and you know it, but seem to want to make a rather silly and totally out-there example as somehow the norm.

CJ Cherryh is an award winning author. Try reading her 'Foreigner' series. Amazingly - there are made up words! And it's still 100% readable!

Also, have you ever read 'A Clockwork Orange'?

[(Anonymous)]

... why would a word for a thing from another planet be the same as the word for a similar thing on earth?

[(Anonymous)]

Because that other planet might've been colonized by people from earth? That's not unheard of in sci-fi, you know.

[(Anonymous)]

For the same reason several unrelated earth species have names that imply they're the same: if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, people are likely to name it a duck even if it's really a type of parrot. Even if the story is about a nonhuman space culture, it's written in an earth language, so it's completely fine to give things names that speakers of that language might use.

It's also oftlen better for the flow of the prose to use familiar words unless it's important that something is unique to the setting. Just like a fantasy world might have quillotines despite having never had Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Unless you're making a Pratchettian joke about it, there's no point in stopping the execution scene cold to explain that it's named after the elven inventor quil-yoten, or alternatively called the ghizinbak, meaning "beheader" in dwarvish.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt - Yep. Here is a person who knows sci-fi and how it works.

[(Anonymous)]

*slaps desk* THANK YOU. smdh

[(Anonymous)]

Weird how many people here are talking like they know how sci-fi works and it seems like they don't.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Unless it's relevant to the plot, you don't make up alien words for everything. Not because it "doesn't make sense for aliens to use human words" because it doesn't. It's because the story is written for humans and if you make your story hard to get through PEOPLE AREN'T GOING TO READ IT. Unless the bamboo-adjacent thing has a special property that is a checkov's gun? Just call it fucking bamboo.

[tabaqui]

Unless the thing was named by an alien species and everybody uses their name out of politeness around them, or it takes place on their world with only a few humans around, or.....

Lots of reasons also to *not* call a duck a duck.