Re: Writing jargon
- From: Sea Wasp <seawaspObvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 08:07:46 -0400
Jonathan L Cunningham wrote:
Of course, one way to get convincing jargon (but not necessarily
terminology) is to do detailed world-building. Apart from the dangers of
dumping all this info into the WIP, this is also good way to get very
dust-free cats. Perhaps, sometimes, it's good to put in a bit of
convincing jargon *without* necessarily knowing what it means?
If so, how do you come up with convincing jargon, what makes it seem
realistic, and when does it become technobabble? (Or the fantasy
equivalent, is there a word for that?) Can the "average" reader tell the
difference anyway?
And what are the dangers? I'd guess it's risky to put together words
with real meanings, if you don't know those meanings.
The requirements are, at least for me, very different for SF than for Fantasy -- althought there are, of course, the borderline cases.
In SF, your jargon is determined at least partly by the real world. Unless you're reinventing the entirety of language for effect (such as the story (if I recall the title correctly) "Uncleftish Beholding"), discussions which talk about engineering or devices or concepts that are even vaguely related to what we know today will have terminology not very dissimilar from that of the real world.
There's an advantage to this, of course. If you choose your terminology WELL, then the terminology itself can serve many of the purposes of a longer infodump, or at least serve in place of one until a more appropriate place comes along to trickle the info into the story. One can even mix-and-match from different eras to get the right effect; David Weber did this with his "Warshawski sails".
To some extent, you can use the same technique in fantasy settings -- although if you use terms that "feel" too much like scientific ones, you may ruin the atmosphere. This may not be a major issue, of course, if you don't have a particular atmosphere you're going for, but if you want, say, an epic fantasy feel to the world, you probably want to avoid the characters using terminology that's too closely analogous to SF or space opera.
I think that it is in general a very bad mistake to use any form of jargon without at least having some idea of what it means, and if it's in anything but a throwaway context, you'd BETTER know what it means. Unlike real life, what you put on the page is almost always meant to be relevant to the story. The reader will assume that your jargon implies something about your world.
Some readers aren't very analytical, of course, and thus it really won't MATTER what you do with your jargon for them, as long as you don't overdo it. But many readers will look at how you use the jargon, and -- since the jargon will acquire at least some meaning via context, if nothing else -- interpret this as telling them how your magic, biology, tech, whatever, works, and if later events in your book don't jibe with those implications, the resulting dissonance can cause anything from a niggling feeling that something's not quite right all the way to total destruction of the WSOD.
Another thing that can add versimilitude to your jargon is if SOME of it -- preferably in some plot-significant field -- is backed up by fact or worldbuilding. This is a technique especially useful in near-term SF (including the subgenre of "technothriller"); if you can carry weight and believable authority in one technical area, using right-sounding terminology in other fields where you may, perhaps, not be quite as well informed will still gain some additional "feel" of versimilitude from the prior material. There are of course limits, and the tolerance of every reader is different. One author who has successfully (with respect to me, and apparently a number of other readers) managed to pull this trick off in rather extreme ways is Clive Cussler. The author is in fact an experienced marine salvage expert, and his details on underwater work ring diamond-hard true. This allows a sort of faux-believability to OTHER high-tech stuff in his novels which -- to put it very charitably -- is not nearly so closely in line with reality.
Jargon becomes technobabble (or, in extreme cases, treknobabble) when it is clearly -- even to the audience -- there just to make it sound like the characters know what they're doing. Part of what makes Trek so bad at this is that the audience has had sufficient experience with the universe to know that, with very few exceptions, the writers really don't have a single clue about how their universe works. Thus, any technical terms are there only to be used by tech characters to make them sound like tech characters rather than thugs. We KNOW there isn't any consistency in Trek, and thus any technical jargon that shows up automatically is assumed to be meaningless window-dressing.
Your jargon has to earn respect, so to speak, and it will do so to the degree that you, as an author, ALSO respect it. Jargon is a tool. It can be misused, like trying to use a screwdriver as a chisel, or the handle of the screwdriver as a hammer, and detract from the unified world-feel of your world -- or it can be used correctly, and make your world feel far more real than otherwise.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
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