CALLING A RABBIT A SMEERP

People love to create curse words for their speculative fiction.  When I was a kid, I came up with “Garaknoid.”  It was “a word to be used like ‘bitch’ but for men” and I peppered my juvenilia with “He’s a garaknoid” or “she’s the daughter of a garaknoid.”

This instantly stands out as juvenile.  The reader instantly knows what word is being substituted for, and that draws attention to the artificiality of the writing.  That’s fine in a humor story, but in a serious piece, it derails the tone and is like the author turning and winking at the audience.

Speculative fiction writers, if they are not writing in the here-and-now, don’t have the luxury of relying on the words of the here-and-now, and the easiest solution is to encode it, to come up with your own word.  The purpose of this article is to encourage you to not do that.  Because, like my childish attempt at creating a slang term, it will stand out as a find-and-replace, a wink at the audience.

SOME SMEERPS WORK

Wait, you say, you Straw Person you, Mercedes Lackey came up with an in-universe word for “gay” in her famous Herald Mage Trilogy!  Well, yes, like all rules, this is not an absolute one, but we’ll talk about what Lackey does to make it work.

Let’s revisit my slang example.  What does “bitch” mean?  I don’t mean how it came from a term used for dog breeding, I mean, how do we use it today?  Sitting quietly with my thoughts, to me it means a female-presenting individual who does not conform to society’s expectations of female submissiveness, or a male-presenting individual who does.  There’s a lot more to the word than “I want an insult that’s just for boys, too” which was all the thought I gave it when I was eleven.

In a way, curse words are jargon – they are shorthand.  The habitual users of that shorthand understand the layers of meaning behind it, but to the uninitiated, well, it’s a noise of displeasure.

JARGON

What is jargon?  Official definition: words or expressions used by a particular group that are difficult for others to understand, for example, “legal jargon.”  As a computing professional, I know we use a lot of jargon.  “Click the mouse” is technically jargon.  “Identify solutions” does not mean what you think it does if you’re not in our industry.

When we use jargon, we think of it as a tool, a shorthand for larger concepts, so that we can move them around, let X stand for this equation, now we can add or subtract it.  But in reality, jargon is most often used as a way of identifying in-group and out-group membership.  “We call women Betties,” serves no purpose other than “We.”

LABELS

Labels are a form of jargon.  Official definition: a classifying phrase or name applied to a person or thing.  Fun fact: researching for this article, I found that searching for “Quotes about Labels” or “Definition of Label” netted a barrage of anger at labeling – and I realize that the label “label” is mostly used to mean being unjustly or unfairly reduced, dismissed, or marginalized.

It makes me think about how interesting it would be to present this concept in a story, but for this article, I’m looking at a kinder, gentler form of label. Like with jargon, sometimes it’s handy to reduce the complexities of identity to a single word so we can talk about it in relationship to other complexities.  “Minority” or “working-class” or “queer” are labels.  So is “majority,” “middle-class,” and “straight.” And labels aren’t just for people.  “Rural” towns or “urban” ones.  “Ethnic” neighborhoods.

Labels can be helpful, and some people find them validating.  I know how relieving it was when my doctor announced I had Crohn’s Disease – a label for my pain other than “something is weird with how my body does the whole eating thing and maybe I’m a hypochondriac because I’m always vaguely sick?”  While any individual middle-class person is going to be very different from another, we sometimes need to talk about them as a whole, as in questions like, “How will climate change affect the middle class?”

SO WHY NOT DO IT?

Problems occur when we use jargon and labels without examination.  Sometimes we even forget what they fully mean.

Why did Mercedes Lackey’s “shaych” work as a term for gay?  Well, for one thing, the first time it is introduced, the main character is not familiar with it and has to have it explained.  And that explanation, “One whose lover is like themselves” is clear and gets to the heart of the meaning.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD?

If you have a complex idea or an identity you want to label in your fiction, try explaining what it means to someone who isn’t initiated.  If you don’t have a character like that, ask yourself, how would people in this world talk about this concept if they didn’t have that label?  There was a time when we didn’t have the label “ADHD” – that doesn’t mean there weren’t people suffering from attention control issues.  They just didn’t have that word, they had to work around and without words to explain their actions or thoughts.  Their success or failure at this is a whole branch of literary theory.  The more honest and clear an author was, the more they based their characterizations on first-hand knowledge or observation, the easier it is for modern readers to “diagnose” characters who behave just like our sister-in-law.

There are cringy examples of fiction from the recent past using labels that were at the time acceptable.  You know what I mean.  It’s most obvious in fiction that deals with psychiatric disorders.  Language that is now problematic but at the time was considered correct.  In most cases, the authors could have avoided dating themselves simply by not relying on the ever-changing labels.

Try writing without labels or jargon.  This will force you to confront the deeper truth you are trying to convey, and it will time-proof your story.