(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

The eternal tension between "a culture in which magical and psychic abilities are, if not necessarily the norm, certainly encountered at least as often as (say) transgender people: certainly a culture that has a vocabulary for magical and psychic abilities that doesn't rely on metaphor, any more than the vocabulary concerning transgender people relies on metaphor" and "a culture that doesn't actually encounter magical and psychic abilities all that often, contrary to popular belief, and thus doesn't have any vocabulary but metaphor that a generic representative of that culture would be able to easily comprehend". That is, between the culture I'm trying to write and the culture in which my readers live. I could make shit up with reasonable etymological backing (and it'd probably originate in metaphor anyway, truth be told; most English does, afaict), but I'd have to explain all the vocab to the readers.

Comments

[syntaxofthings]

Intriguing.

[alexseanchai]

Well, it's a valid concern. We've got RL terms like "second sight"; everything about that sense is described in terms of the vision metaphor. There isn't vocab specifically for that sense.

[raze]

Hmmm. Yes. I can see where this could be challenging.

[silveradept]

You might not have to. Leave it as a Bilingual Bonus, as it were - many readers won't get curious about etymology, and if you hand enough plot examples, they'll get a good working at of definitions just by reading.

[alexseanchai]

Nodnod