The Tonitruator is Leaking Again: On writing setting terminology that you can take seriously
I've written before about how to come up with good names in fiction, but an adjacent problem I've been thinking about lately is how to develop good setting terminology.
By setting terminology I mean the names that are used, throughout a work of speculative fiction, to refer to fictional concepts within that universe. This can mean naming creatures ('clickers' in The Last of Us), technology (Like Le Guin's 'ansible'), or even more abstract concepts (like the Pale in Disco Elysium).
This is one of those tasks that you can agonize about when you're developing a new setting or extending an existing one, because it carries the future burden that it's going to come up again and again as you write actual stories in that setting. Like most things in writing I don't think there's a formula for doing it, but I do think we can try to take some examples and approach a method for thinking about it.
First things first: why we use terminology
I'm a big proponent of, before doing something, taking a moment to stop and think about whether it needs to be done. I think there's an impulse for some new writers, or just writers who are new to speculative genres, to try and avoid any off-the-shelf genre words - words like 'zombie' or 'orc' or 'spaceship'. This can quickly get out of hand, eg:
Viola eased the impulsors as she watched yellow orblight crest over the surface of the habi-stat, her travelsphere a small speck steadily approaching the vaccugate.
Did you catch that this is someone's spaceship approaching the airlock to dock with a space station? There are reasons to go for this kind of disorienting effect, but it's also extremely easy for your writing to turn to soup.
Still, writers do use terminology all the time in worldbuilding for good reasons.
The concept being named is genuinely new: there's no real-world analogue or commonly-known fictional antecedent to Disco Elysium's Pale; it's just a novel idea, and so it needs to be given a name in order to be expressed.
Emphasizing your take on something: The Last of Us' 'clickers' are zombies, but they're specifically cordyceps fungus zombies that make a creepy noise, which the name helps emphasize.
In many cases an idea has been done before, but it hasn't really ossified into the kind of repeated trope that has a generic name; see for example the many different names for a portal used to travel through space: stargate, mass relay, jump gate, and so on.
In other cases, you purposefully want to keep the audience from bringing specific assumptions. If you're writing a fantasy crime novel, maybe calling your detective an 'adjudicator' or 'inquisitive' might be useful to convey that the status of their role in that society isn't exactly analogous to a police detective in the real world.
In a similar vein, making something ownable. They're not mechs, they're mobile suits. Having your own name for something that's central to the story's identity can help imprint that a given piece of writing belongs to that universe.
Diverting from self-awareness: Which is to say, preventing characters from saying things that take the reader out of the story by emphasizing that they're genre tropes. This is where The Walking Dead gets its studious avoidance of using the word 'zombie'.
Conveying the voice and tone of the setting: In the Warhammer 40k universe, set in an age of obscurantism, all the technology is renamed in semi-mystical terms; a radio is a 'vox', an enslaved cyborg is a 'servitor' and so on.
How people talk about something tells you a lot about how they relate to it; there's a very different tone to calling a space station an 'orbital', a 'habi-stat' or a 'voidstead'.
Approaching a methodology
For me, the easiest way to solve this type of issue is to approach it as a writer: by telling a story. Which is to say, think about how this terminology came about in-universe. When this thing was invented or identified, who did it? What kind of naming convention might they have applied to it?
I don't suggest sitting down and figuring out the specific details of this, just roughly sketching something along the lines of:
- This concept is the product of a specific corporation; the name is a brand name
- This concept is the product of a specific corporation, originally, but the name is now a generic trademark
- This concept was discovered at first by scientists who have a formal term for it, but the working class space miners who come into contact with it on the daily have a slang-ier name for it
- This concept will be named by the characters in the story as they encounter it, as it's a new phenomenon to them. They'll come up with a nickname that reflects their way of speaking.
And as you can see these kinds of stories then begin to suggest approaches we can take.
Word formation and dictionary trawling
It's useful, just as a background to this kind of exercise, to go ahead and review the actual linguistics of word formation, which for English are not all that complicated.
A lot of terminology invention for fiction consists of repurposing a perfectly good existing word, but it's almost always worth thinking through some of the general word formation phenomena to see if a good possibility jumps out.
Particularly, a lot of good terminology consists of a compound word that exists, but is very rare. The term 'rampancy' in the Marathon trilogy, for example, is a real term formed (obviously) from the word 'rampant' and the adjective-to-noun affix '-ancy'; M-W attests it all the way back in the 17th century.
It's the kind of word that you can independently form out of its components; even though it already exists, it's very rarely used. A great fountain of these types of words is just finding words that are out of place from their usual part of speech; 'rampant' is very common as an adjective, but 'rampancy' as a noun is marginal.
Looking for a common word that's semantically adjacent to what you want and running it through at thesaurus can give you candidates there.
Different types of word formation tend to suggest different histories for a word. Literary, formal, or scientific contexts tend to form words using existing roots with established affixes: rampancy in Marathon, verdance and animescence in the Fallen London setting.
More slangy terms tend to use portmanteaus or 'neologistic' affixes. An example of a neologistic affix is using -gate to designate a scandal, or the various uses of -washing as in greenwashing, pinkwashing, etc. In a near-future setting, we might call purposefully overloading someone with information 'noobombing'.
Multiple layers of these processes can happen, leading to words that are a couple of steps far afield of where they started. For example, 'doxxing' comes from 'documents' being shortened to 'dox' and then verbed with the '-ing' suffix. This process of applying different layers of word formation is very productive; it allows 'doxxing' to stand apart from 'documenting.'
In some contexts, especially slang, words just form out of nonce words that have no clear origin point. It is sometimes reasonable to just make up sounds to name something.
Scientific terminology
How do scientists come up with new terminology? They make it up! The usual practice is to borrow a word that has a broad meaning and define it to mean something very specific within their field.
This can lead to the same word getting used over and over again in different fields of study with different but sorta-adjacent meanings; you can find a lot of examples of this by looking at Wikipedia disambiguation pages. Words like 'valence' and 'cline' are good examples of this phenomenon.
Slang terms
The ways in which slang forms are sometimes very obvious ('bestie' is of course just a standard English suffix applied to shorten 'best friend') and sometimes very obscure; slang words often begin life as nonce words or extremely shortened phrases. M-w's best guess for 'rizz' is that it is 'perhaps short for charisma'.
Keep in mind that slang doesn't just mean street slang or subcultural slang; pretty much all strata of society are constantly developing slightly novel ways of speaking. When a new concept encounters slang words, sometimes the slang becomes crystallized as a long-lasting term for something; this is why, even though us cinephiles call them films, all your uncouth friends go to da movies.
When coming up with terminology, it's worth thinking about what register that terminology fits in. Are the people mostly talking about this in formal contexts? In hushed tones? As a part of everyday life?
Mythical and poetic naming
How do you approach this when writing fantasy, or just taking a more fantastical tone? There really is a lot of sensitivity to tone when solving these kinds of writing problems, and a lot of the strategies I've outlined so far aren't appropriate to, say, epic fantasy.
Part of this is of course that neologisms feel new, definitionally, and so they feel out of place in your typical fantasy setting which is conceptually 'antique' to the reader. In most fantasy the tendency then is to take solid, existing words and recontextualize them or join them together into loose compounds. Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire loves doing this: white walkers, the hand of the king, milk of the poppy, and so on. For some reason, that 'x of the y' construction just comes off as old-timey.
Another strategy is to employ word formation affixes that are old or even disused; in English, this generally means Anglo-Saxon ones. While 'halfling' is a real word with a history of usage that predates Tolkien, its use there and in later fantasy media definitely plays into that; see also 'wildling' and even 'zergling'.
If all else fails, there's always kennings.
On-the-fly or provisional terms
Finally, a common occurrence in horror stories and weird fiction in general: your characters have just encountered some unfamiliar phenomena. They need to talk about it in the story; what are they going to call it? 'That weird thing' gets unwieldy after half a scene's worth of dialog.
In this case, we are not inventing a widely-used word that is part of the setting's language; we are figuring out how our specific characters will talk about what's happening to them. Questions of their own voice and inclinations matter a lot here.
This is probably one of the hardest types of terminology to write, because it can so easily become forced; see, again, the Walking Dead's insistence on 'walkers', which begins to feel like a branding exercise after a while.
In many such cases it's worth letting the characters say the obvious thing, at least on a trial basis. See how it feels if they can actually say 'ghost' or 'zombie'. I think as writers we often want people to seem interesting and we want them to sort of avoid calling a spade a spade in that way; but if you go and read about people who believe they actually encountered supernatural phenomena, they are often very eager to put a familiar label on whatever weird thing they saw. You can treat this kind of dialogue in a relatively naturalistic way and still have people call the werewolf a werewolf!
But of course, sometimes that's not possible. In these cases, a common approach is to latch on to the first, most salient feature of the thing. See, again, the 'clickers'.
This is actually a generally useful way of naming things in a setting, especially as it can then lead to a name that's odd or off-kilter because whatever the namer latched on to isn't really salient to what the thing ended up being. A classic example of this are Pierson's Puppeteers, an alien species from Larry Niven's books; the eponymous Pierson named them because he thought they looked like hand puppets from a tv show he liked, and the name stuck.
Sanity checking and tone matching
As with any exercise like this, you probably want to write a list of a few possibilities and then whittle it down. When doing so, it's worth putting a possible in-universe term through a few tests.
You can write this shit, but can you say it? If you need to talk about something often, the tendency will be to make it short and distinctive. Long words can be shortened by dropping affixes or syllables, through initialisms, by slurring syllables, and so on. This is where 'ansible' comes from; it's 'answerable' squeezed down in the same way that real sailors squeezed 'forecastle' down to 'fo'c'sle'.
Does this actually match the tone? Great terminology feels situated in where it comes from in-universe but is also tonally resonant with the work itself. A great example of this is all the terminology in Control, which feels very much like it came out of a government bureaucracy in how it is constructed, but where all the word choices point to a specific foreboding tone: the Federal Bureau of Control, the Firebreak, the Black Rock, and so on.
If these writing articles have been helpful to you or you have mailbag questions about interactive narrative or writing in general, feel free to reach out.