Seriously Geeky Sundays – Words Maketh the Fandom

Happy Sunday (or not Sunday, if you’re catching up)! It’s time once more to take on that most exciting of weekly writing challenges, Seriously Geeky Sundays!

This week, our provider of themes, Just Geeking By‘s truly unstoppable Heather, has delivered a real corker into our hands, as we speak all about words, quotes and languages from the world of fiction! There’s lots to talk about, so let’s buckle in and bloody well get to it, shall we?

There are so many word and language-related events in April that this theme was begging to happen. In two days time on the 13th it’s National Scrabble day, on the 23rd it’s the bard himself’s birthday and rounding out the end of the month is the day morse code was discovered. 

Question 1 – What is your favourite fictional language?

I always quite liked the Al Bhed tongue from Final Fantasy X, a language which you could learn by picking up primers as the game went on, which decoded the language letter by letter in the subtitles. If you really wanted to, you could fully translate what the universally-shunned scrap merchants were saying at any one time, a very cool touch!

The language itself also sounds very cool, one of angry sounding laguages, you know?

Question 2 – Language doesn’t always come in the form of words, as with morse code. What’s the most unconventional fictional language system you know?

Tough one, that!

I think any story involving empathic or psychic communication is always up there for me, where a written or audible language isn’t even needed, because it’s all going through people’s minds instead. Be it between twins, done via science, magical powers, struck by lightning, whatever, it’s always the best form of communication to have!

Stories featuring this would be Night Watch, Under New Suns and, let’s face it, many, many others…

Question 3 – Do you ever find yourself picking up words from fandoms and using them?

Not really, but this question did get me thinking of something along a similar line… how many words I’ve learned from reading! The amount of times, as a kid (for we have the internet these days) I had to ask my parents “what does X mean?”… off the charts! I learned ore words reading in my own time than I ever did at school!

I do also remember my dad laughing at my awful pronunciations of words back then too, for examples, saying “awry” like awe-ree. Do any of my readers have similar funny tales of words being said all wrong? Let me know!

Question 4 – What’s the best fictional curse word you’ve ever come across?

When it comes to turning the air blue, in a fictional fashion of course, you cannot go wrong with Dan Abnett’s fantastic Gaunt’s Ghosts saga, set in the grim, horrible world of Warhammer 40,000.

I know I’ve banged on about this one before, but these stories not only have science fiction, war, blood, guts and cool characters, they also have hilarious, made-up swearwords.

The original men of the Tanith regiment go with feth, the Vervunhivers that join later go with gak, and so on. There’s some top-end fictional malarkey going on in the world of naughty words, you just have to look…

Question 5 – What about poems and songs in fandoms?

Well, there was that poem from The Witcher 3…

Question 6 – What fandom quote is the first that always comes to mind?

There are a great deal of quotes from the books I’ve read over the years, all of them bloody excellent… and I can’t recall a single bloody one! I mean, seriously, how can you read things like Discworld and not be able to recall a single damned thing?

There is one quote from a book I have very recently finished (the excellent Behind Blue Eyes, by Sarah Mocikat), which has stayed in my mind since I read it. I think it is, in turn, a quote from Orwell’s Animal Farm, which the antagonist of the story quotes in a conversation:

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”

If that’s not peak-Orwell, Stalinist nastiness, then what is?

Anyway, there we are, another week is mission accomplished! Thank you, dear reader, for taking the time to browse through my words, hopefully you got some entertainment out of my ramblings! As ever, I urge you to look up the #SeriouslyGeekySundays hashtag, and check out all of the other amazing writers doing the same thing… only probably better!

See you next time, gang!