Footnote: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

The arcanely hilarious xkcd.com recently posted a line graph of relevance to my recent Anathem review.

Mousing over the image on the xkcd site reveals the following tooltip:

“Except for Lewis Carroll and Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I’m looking at you, Anathem.”

I’m not sure if I necessarily agree with this graph’s assertion, but it makes interesting food for thought. I think a good rule of thumb is that made-up words that play a functional role in the story are almost always acceptable, while made-up words that simply strive to add “local color” to a story walk a fine line between necessity and absurdity. I think another distinction involves the quality of the made-up words in question. A scholarly type like Tolkien or Stephenson can get away with made-up words because they have the linguistic chops to make the words resonant and convincing. On the other hand, dozens of fantasy or science fiction writers lazily throw together a few consonant clusters and apostrophes and call it a day.

What do you think? Post your comments!