Comments on: Enrich Your Word Power

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 05:06:28 +0000

What words did I learn from comics? I was a big Superman fan in the 60s, the era of pots of red and green kryptonite in every garage. My words were Permanent and Temporary.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 20:39:51 +0000

The F/SF genres are so alien at first encounter that I am not surprised the uninitiated could not get to grips with Gaiman. I think children who began with fairytales (read to them at first) found it a lot easier. The transition book in my case, at about 11, was T H White’s The Sword in the Stone, which is an imagining of the boyhood of King Arthur (“Wart”) during which Merlin guides him into the occult mysteries. A beautiful book. Nevertheless, when I first discovered pulp science fiction—Amazing Stories, Weird Tales and other mags—I found it almost terrifyingly strange. Some of the best SF writers of the Golden Age were in those pages: Sturgeon, Pohl, Kornbluth, Van Vogt, and many more. I knew one thing: this was electrifying and my parents were scandalised by it. (The covers tended to feature scantily clad wenches being molested by BEMs (bug-eyed monsters). So my SF reading was Samizdat until my later teens. As for eldritch: Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch takes cunning advantage of its associations with comic book prose … The point about Harry Potter is that the books just aren’t F/SF by genre. They are typical stories of British boarding school life spiced up with fantasy elements (see Blyton, Enid). The world of Harry Potter is mundane and yet magical (and renders magic mundane). No eldritch etherealities here.

By: ash

ash — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 20:40:45 +0000

‘Lyn-ucks’ is one of the outlier pronunciations. The more popular one is ‘Lee-nucks’, but Torvalds pronunciation is closest to ‘Lie-nucks’. Um, they had file up with him actually saying it outloud, which seems like years und years ago, but is probably something like four years ago. >Just out of curiosity, is Cat Yronwode a CT reader? I expect not, but she does post to alt.magick, and she has a bunch of web ventures running: http://www.luckymojo.com/cat.html ash [‘Defenders #78!’]

By: Keith

Keith — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 18:44:04 +0000

I’ve seen Mjolnir pronounciations in both the 3 and 4 sylable versions, in different authoratative texts (alas, I can’t recall which ones). I think Old Norse is really quite a bit more fluid than Modern English, so both are valid, along with half a dozen other variations. But I think the fact that we here in the 21st century know what Mjolnir is (and nottice, no one here has asked, we all know it’s Thor’s Hammer) is notable.

By: cafl

cafl — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:55:02 +0000

Linux is pronounced “linn-ucks”.

By: cw

cw — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 13:27:47 +0000

Great post & thread! I had a few word pairings – probably from comics – where I thought there were two different words, one I’d seen spoken and one I’d read. Two positions in the army, for instance, kernel and “coll-o-nell”. To this day, since I read more geek than I speak, I get confused about how to pronounce Linux. Does the “i” say it’s own name (as my five year old would say)?

By: Danny Yee

Danny Yee — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 11:30:17 +0000

I had the same problem as Jacob with “indict” – for years I thought there were two words, one “indict” that I read, and one “indite” that I heard on the radio and television…

By: Constant Reader

Constant Reader — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 05:17:07 +0000

Oho … Asterix. There were all the Gaulish names ending in “ix”—but don’t forget the Romans (Marcus Ginantonicus, for one) and Egyptians (Ptenisnet and Nastiupset), who also had parts to play. I learned druid, potion, obelisk, menhir, some Roman army terminology which stuck with me for the following 25 years (legion, OK, everyone knows legion, but also cohort, maniple, and century, from which centurion), and I believe also the word gruel. Which makes the sound “flotch” when it is poured into your bowl. I think. Someone upthread mentioned Sherlock Holmes. I remember learning from his adventures the word “revenge” at about age seven, also its German translation, “rache”—along with Afghanistan, perceive, hansom, carbuncle, sahib, and the expression “to stay true to one’s salt.” And for oddity’s sake, though probably a couple of years later, the word “dolichocephalic”—which describes Watson’s skull, long, and narrower side-to-side than front-to-back. I learned about anarchosyndicalism from Ursula LeGuin too, and for quite a while thought “propertarian” was an English word. Is it?

By: Peter Murphy

Peter Murphy — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 04:03:26 +0000

One of the nifty things abour Asterix (mentioned twenty posts above) was that pretty much all the names were buried puns. Three that come to mind are “Getafix”, “Unhygienix” and “Fulliautomatix”. So this 12-year old had to work out what the puns were. It helps that the translators often chose to make up new names, and generally improved on the original French. For example, the original name for our seller of antiquated fish was “Ordralfabétix”, which just means “alphabetical order”.

By: clew

clew — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 03:35:37 +0000

I know I learnt ‘tilth’ from LoTR’s description of the fields around Gondor. I was very annoyed when Jackson had armies charging across half-bare scrubland instead.

By: Justin Slotman

Justin Slotman — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 23:54:58 +0000

I’m pretty sure I got “cretin” from Dr. Doom, or someone like him.

By: limberwulf

limberwulf — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 23:42:25 +0000

I wonder if the difficulty in following certain novel forms comes from a reading speed issue. I have found that some books I find hard to follow are much easier if I complete the story in a shorter period of time. Large pieces of the story must be hung on to for some time, logged into memory, for later explaination or use. A good novel may be a heavy data stream with a lot going on in it, but it is not the same as processing multiple data streams. The gamer mentality and the movie mentality process a lot at once but only for a short period of time. Reading english is one thing, being able to read enough of a novel to get the complete thought before forgetting much of it requires some decent reading speed or very good retention and memory. I would coach the kids having trouble on their reading speed and retention, rather than trying to explain the format.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 23:24:46 +0000

Ah, the joys of reading fantasy and myth from an early age—some helpful books had pronunciation guides in the back, especially helpful for learning the interesting -bh and -mh and -wll kinds of words. Living in the US, it’s best to ask how to spell Siobhan—I’ve seen it spelled Chevaun …

By: fyreflye

fyreflye — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 22:55:01 +0000

On second thought, I do recall a couple of words I learned from comic books: “Zap!” and “Pow!” For sme reason they’ve slipped out of my vocabulary recently.

By: Anderson

Anderson — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 22:53:47 +0000

“Dweomercra(e)ft.” A sure sign of an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons veteran. (Had always thought “eldritch” indicated the same, but I’m underread in the comics genre.) (And here’s a thought: I started to write “meant” not “indicated” just now, but realized that was ambiguous. Semioticians take note!)