Words. They’re kinda important. You’ve got to understand them to read and write. All your life you’ve been inundated with words, ones that you may not have known how to properly pronounce or spell until…well, maybe even until today. Like the word tsunami. I didn’t know how to actually speak the term until I went to college. I always twisted it out with a little spittle…tuh-soon-nammy. Something like that.
Well, think about how weird words can get when they are describing or defining something that doesn’t even exist, so far as we know.
This way cool link not only defines common words found throughout the science fiction genre, but it also give the earliest cited use of the word in known literature. “Mind control” for instance didn’t show up until 1954, in T.S. Eliot’s “Confidential Clerk.” “Terraform”? Not until 1942, in Jack Williamson’s “Collision Orbit.” “Cyberpunk” (now a subgenre of sorts in itself) didn’t show up until 1983.
It amazes me how we throw these words around, making them a foundational part of so many science fiction stories today and people understand them all without a second glance. It makes me wonder as well…would a modern science fiction story–content and morals aside–be understood if it was sent back a few decades? Or would there be so many confusing and unknown terms involved that it would take too much work to explain them as the story moved along?
And what, pray tell, are some of the words being invented and inserted these days? What words have you read lately that you’ve never heard of before, but just might make their way into the vernacular?
I see that smile.