Avoid Making Up Words for Your Setting

Even Tolkien left Monday alone.

Have you ever noticed how a lot of settings use the same words for concepts they share with our world? Like cardinal directions, days of the week, basic concepts of time, the contents of the kitchen, or things in the natural world. It allows those concepts to flow freely from the creator to the audience, as it should be.

Sometimes though, you encounter worlds where the creator has changed the name of a mundane concept. Usually this concept features heavily in their world, and that’s probably not a good thing.

It’s one thing to describe a totally alien concept, or even a big twist on an existing one, to your audience and give it a name. It’s another simply to rebrand an existing concept.

Have you ever had a friend who suddenly wanted to start going by another name? Was it hard to remember sometimes? Imagine doing that for every day of the week, or every hour of the day, or every month of the year. Needlessly changing words makes it that much harder to dissolve the barrier between your audience and your setting.

I’m going to guess the answer is no. If you didn’t change the names for plate, tree, castle, spaceship, etc., why did you decide to change the name for boat to sldufisdajfla sdjfisadjfiasdjflijs jsdifjasidfj s? How does that tie back to your themes? How does it contribute to the story? How does it draw the reader into your world? If you can’t justify changing the word for something to the person most disinterested in your setting, you should probably just call it a boat.

The purpose of a word is to communicate an idea. The reason parts of your setting need new words is to communicate new concepts to your audience. I don’t think there’s a way around this.

And making up words new words for new things is good. It immediately lets the audience know that…

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