Inkless

establishing a setting for your story without making it seem dated

When Anthony Burgess created his masterwork A Clockwork Orange, he didn’t get his slang by simply transcribing ideas from high schoolers. He created a lexicon for his near-future hoodlum based on a reasonable assumption (in 1962, when it was written) that the Soviet Union would remain a powerful force far into the future, and that rebellious youth might integrate Russian into their slang as part of their rejection of the society around them. This makes the book tough to get into at first, but rewarding enough to earn a great deal of critical praise (I particularly like how they could put The New York Times followed by Roald Dahl on the back cover).

Used well, slang can not only add to your story, but become a major part of both plot and character.

However, if you do create your own slang, don’t cut corners. I recently finished the children’s book Dragon’s Milk by Susan Fletcher, and the author clearly tried to give the story a quickie fantasy makeover: all her characters talk with ploddingly normal diction, with the one exception that every time they use the word “not” they put it at the end of the sentence. Always “I know not” or “I like it not”, and never “I don’t know”, “I don’t like it”. Even worse is the naming convention: the main character’s two sisters are named Lyf and Mirym, step-mother Ryfenn, grandmother Granmyr, and three young dragons she takes care off named Synge, Embyr and Pyro before handing them over to a dragon named Byrn. Rather yrrytatyng.

Fletcher may have been able to get away with these sneaks—her primary audience in 1989 was made up of girls around eleven or twelve—but these ticks don’t add to the story.

So what principles could we follow to create work like Burgess’s? To me, it seems our goals should be very similar to those of the Do-It-Yourself movement.

Simple, Cheap

The materials DIYers work with are not exotic or expensive. A DIYer is, by definition, not a professional, and a DIY slangmaker is not a linguist (except if the slangmaker is Tolkien). When crafting slang, a DIYer should not get too fancy, at the risk of creating slang that detracts, rather than adds, to the meaning of the story (even Tolkien could probably have cut down on the number of times the elves busted out grandiloquent songs of mourning).

A few subtle and smooth changes to diction can sometimes produce a much greater effect than major grammatical changes: see my entry “Speaking in Tongues“. (logo done by me using a free gif from this site)

Repurposed, Recycled

If you have any foreign language knowledge, and Anthony Burgess had a lot, you can draw on a wealth of foreign ideas and usages in creating new jargon. Don’t create from scratch when you can borrow. For some of the fun words I’ve found in other languages, see my entry “No Direct Translation“.

Useful

One of the greatest strengths of the DIY movement is the emphasis on utility: eschewing flashy and wasteful features. This is the core value for DIY slang.

If you have read much speculative fiction, you have probably come across stories in which the warlike race has a language with way too many consonants. Well, Polish and Czech are pretty consonant-heavy languages, and the Poles and Czechs don’t seem any more warlike than the rest of us.

As an alternative to repeating the “harsh sounds-bad man” stereotype, try looking at language from a utility standpoint. Ask yourself this question: Would this word or this usage be of value to this character? Better yet, start from your character’s daily life, and find something for which there is no word in English and name it. But don’t stop there. Also create some set phrases and “translate” them: this allows you to produce alien ideas without adding too many italicized unpronounceables to your work.

For example, you could give the warlike people eight common words, twelve more slang words, ten euphemisms, and a couple dozen signature phrases all describing killing. Having different kinds of words, as well as phrase- and sentence-level constructions about killing will add more to your story than having one slang word you repeat over and over. If some of them even sound pleasant, all the more sinister.

Good luck with your DIYalog!

using language to give your story a foreign context

In writing, adopting the perspective of a foreigner can give you an angle on a story that may provide you with much more insight. Particularly in speculative fiction, but also in other fiction, alien or unworldly characters can be very satisfying. And if you want to create truly foreign characters, you need to be able to think in a foreign way sometimes, and that will require research.

Rich Words

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you may notice that every so often you run across a word in that language that requires a long cultural explanation to define, or that illustrates a funny difference in the way people think, or that sound just perfectly right for what they mean. I’ve run into words like this in Russian, and (to a lesser extent, reflecting my weaker speaking ability) in Ukrainian and Japanese. An equally fun discovery is when there is not really a good word in another language for something in English.

Here’s a few of the words and phrases and expressions I enjoy. I’ll be adding to them periodically, as I encounter or remember more. If you’ve got one in a language you know, feel free to drop it in the comments!

Russian

• Blatt (блат): It means a combination of corruption related ideas like “inside connections”, “pull”, and “under the table deals”.
• Krysha (крыша): literally “roof”: one’s connections in high places that protect one from being persecuted by government officials or gangsters.
• Tovarishch (товарищ): The word Russian Communists actually used that was translated as “comrade” in English. Funny enough, the word originally meant “business associate” and comes from a Turkish word for “businessman” or “merchant”. The Communists were insulting each other all this time!
• Khaltura (халтура): This can have the innocuous meaning “side-job” or the more derogatory meaning of poorly done work.
• Belaya Vorona (белая ворона): literally, a “white crow”. In English you have a “black sheep”—the one strange, out of place person in an otherwise OK family. In Russian you have a “white crow”—the one good person in a group of bad folks. Perhaps “diamond in the rough” would be a better comparison.
• Khomyachit’ (хомячить): Literally “to hamster”. In the US, we wolf down our food, in Russian-speaking areas, they’re more disdainful of the practice.
• Seroburomalinoviy (серобуромалиновый): literally grayish-brownish-raspberry colored. It means motley or of no particular color.
• Privacy: While there is a word уединение (Uyedineniye) that gets translated as “privacy”, the word is more closely translated as “solitude”. There are significant implications if a person can express the idea of being alone, which is the main meaning of “privacy”, but not the idea of a right to be alone that is often the implied when this term is used in English (for example: “This reception is great, but I feel like we really ought to give the newlyweds some privacy!”—it doesn’t quite work with “solitude”, particularly since there are two of them).

Ukrainian

• Rozsmakuvaty (розсмакувати): The word “smakuvaty” (смакувати) without the prefix means to eat with gusto (a word with resonance by itself). With the prefix it means to eat something enough to get a taste for it. For example, it often takes people a while to get a taste for alcoholic drinks, so new drinkers usually try flavored mixed drinks instead of straight liquor until they have rozsmakuvati-ed alcohol.
• Kumivstvo (кумівство): A “kum” is a parent of your godchild, or a godparent to your child. Therefore, this is literally something like “godparent-ition”. It means the same thing as blat does in Russian: the corrupt use of one’s connections to obtain advantage.

Japanese

Many of the most fun words in Japanese are from among the astounding collection of onomatopoeias in the language. Not only that, but they have lots of ideophones (gitaigo in Japanese: 擬態語）, what I call resonances, words that sound like the ideas they represent. Lots and lots and lots of resonances.

• TsuruTsuru (つるつる）: This word was described in my class as meaning “very smooth—smooth as the head of a Buddhist priest”.
• DabuDabu (だぶだぶ）: This means baggy.

This is the second of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. It is concerned with those quick descriptions: the handful of words that can sum up an idea in a way that is immediately understandable by reader. The category includes such elements of writing as: simply descriptive metaphor (as opposed to more complex, story-wide metaphor, which is more of a thematic element), oxymoron, as well as turns and overturns of phrase.