What the smeerp

Language. Always fun in SF.

I was writing a test paragraph in my head, feeling out what are the elements I want to stress in this book, and how to bring them to the reader. The heat, the beach, palm trees...shit.

Always a problem. SF and fantasy has long wrestled with the question of what you do when the creature in question fulfills the role of chicken in your fantasy medieval village, but clearly can't be a chicken because this is some other land with purple trees and elves taking out the garbage.

Calling it a "chicken" invites the Luke Skywalker response above.

Calling it a "smeerp" invites the Blishian disdain. And then there's the half-arsed of "pseudo-chicken" that ends up satisfying nobody. Besides, the further you get away from naming it as a chicken, the more work you have to do to explain that this is a small not terribly smart farm animal bred for meat and eggs.

(Or "space-eggs," if you must.)

I've been reading a light space opera series lately (it was mostly free) and the author has chosen to give the idea of linguistic drift over time by changing the spelling of relatively common words. That confused me at first; there was a creatively spelled version of "coffee" that had the flavor of being a brand name. First chapters are always fun because this is when the reader is trying to figure out what kind of world this is (and what kind of writer) and I wondered if she was going for a The Space Merchants kind of super-consumerist society.

But no, it is just drift. The really odd thing is that the author italicized them.

And, sigh, I get it. Because if you just left "Donut" as "Donot" then the reader (especially that particular cranky kind of reader who loves getting aggravated by what they consider laziness around language) would decide this was instead just really, really poor proofreading and throw the book over the shoulder of disdain.

Italicizing is a signal to the reader from the writer, a sort of "STET" in typography, telling them it is supposed to be that way. Which means, of course, it is also Doylist, external to the world, and after the lesson is absorbed, can pull the reader out of the text.