Listening to Dune, and it's a full cast recording, great acting, Simon Vance narrating and he's the best.
Listening to Dune, and it's a full cast recording, great acting, Simon Vance narrating and he's the best. But geeze Dune has made up fantasy word diahhrea. My patience for that is very low these days.
Fantasy word diarrhea is the real gom jabbar.
ReplyDelete“We’ve been training you to be a Trumorgiph since you were born.”
ReplyDeletePaul’s guldish sense kicked in, a gift from his rimalirph mother’s abilities.
“The wellingfudgh emperor won’t like that!”
“He is the buddlehump quistorach!” said the furdlesnap desert nomad.
My Sardaukar are gonna gom jabbar your kwisatz haderach up his Fremen ass
ReplyDeleteThat's a large part of what's cool about it.
ReplyDeleteI think Dune is one of the few to actually pull this off, but I totally get where you're coming from. I'm usually not a fan, either.
ReplyDeleteThe world of Dune is a far future where "there's a German word for all sorts of complex feelings" got wildly out of control.
ReplyDeleteLike a charmless Harry Potter novel
ReplyDeleteThere's a charming Harry Potter novel?
ReplyDeletetrey causey I’d argue there’s a pleasant childish charm to some of the earlier novels! What else am I supposed to read on the loo?! Oh yeah G+ 😝
ReplyDeleteHarry Potter certainly has its charms....
ReplyDelete......there's even a professor for oh god I can't keep going with that it's too depressing.
I felt better after I realized a bunch of Dune's archaeotechnobabble was just Arabic, and the Empire was kinda sorta cod Dutch.
C'mon! The Landsraad won't want to give up their C.H.O.A.M. profits.
ReplyDeleteCHOAM company? More like CHOAD company, am I right?
ReplyDeleteThe art of Kanly ... vendetta, in the ancient tongue ...
ReplyDeleteI'm a few hours in so I'm past the worst of it. I think audio makes it harder.
ReplyDeleteI disagree on some level. Yes there’s a lot of chrome, but none of it is violates Chekhov’s gun principle. It all matters on some level. True worldbuilding diarrhea comes from flooding the reader with crap that has no or low value to the story.
ReplyDeleteThis is the story of Pall Agamemnides, the Kumkwat Haagendazs, known to his followers as Mauve'Bib, and how he used the Freedmenmen of the planet Arruckus to take over the galactic empire by controlling the planet's vital export: beer.
ReplyDelete"What sort of man was Duke Lotto Agamemnides? We may say he was a brave man, yet a man who knew the value of caution. We may say he was possessed of a highly refined sense of honour - yet, like all leaders, was he no less capable of acts duplicitous and sleazy. We may say this, we may say that - indeed, we may say anything we want. We may say, for example, that he was not a man at all, but a highly evolved bicycle. See? We may say just about anything. - from "House Agamemnides: Historical Perspectives and Worthless Digressions", by the Princess Serutan
obXKCD: xkcd.com - xkcd: Fiction Rule of Thumb
ReplyDeleteEric Boyd
ReplyDeleteyoutube.com - A Bit of Fry and Laurie - A word, Timothy
Always good to see Berwhale the Avenger on my timeline.
ReplyDeleteYeah, this is hard hard to pull off.. OTOH Dune is a pretty big book... Maybe we should be looking to percentages instead of absolute numbers. And Herbert was successful enough that fremen, Muadib, Bene Gesserit are easily recognizable... not unlike JRRT and GRRM.
ReplyDeleteBut overall I agree - I wrote a campaign setting with, I kid you not, half a dozen made up terms - everything else is "the heralds", "the immortals", "Titans", "aberrations", etc.
Eric Diaz I not only made up new words, I made them up in languages that didn't properly exist, as in they mostly just had vocabularies and not grammar or sentence structure.
ReplyDeleteCraig Hatler Like I said, if you can pull it off, that's great!
ReplyDeleteI thought at one point I could pull it off, then I kind of realized that people I think will connect more with the English versions instead.
ReplyDeleteIf you really want to bake your brain, John Barnes’ One for the Morning Glory is a fairy-tale fantasy full of made-up words that just happen to be real English words that mean something completely different. (But you can still understand it completely from context.)
ReplyDeleteIs that the one that uses Gilbert & Sullivan's snickersnee for a beheading sword?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a teenager I got really stoned and tried to watch dune. As soon as the narrator started referencing the kwizatz haderach, we busted out laughing and couldn't watch the rest of the movie.
ReplyDeleteWe called him the Nutzack Haderach in college.
ReplyDeleteCasey G. You take it back Casey! T_T
ReplyDeleteI can definitely see this being much more of an issue in audio than in print. In print you can pause on a weird word and kind of dissect the connotations, and it's more easily recognizable if it comes up later.
ReplyDeleteBut I think I just really like most of Dune's neologisms. They sound authentic and grounded in the world in a way most fantasy jargon doesn't.
ReplyDeleteCasey G. His Nutsack is a killing word!
ReplyDelete