Ok, so here's a thread about how I use words in worldbuilding. (1/?)

Words are super important, and their connotations are going to vary across languages and cultures, and across people. When I'm trying to convey how a given culture thinks, words are a super nice shortcut. The names of things, the similes, the metaphors people reach for (2/?)

I'm a big fan of the background exposition, which is that I throw a couple words at the reader, which are meant to evoke a world without actually stopping and pausing the narration for a complete exposition. Small details, needed to flesh out the world and make it feel real (3/?)

An example from In the Vanishers' Palace
"They were the youngest of the elders, ascended to the council because their family still had the wealth of their scholar-magician ancestors, and their wife’s relatives held most of the land around the river." (4/?)

I never explain what a scholar-magician is (not in this sentence, and not in the book). The context tells the reader that it's an important position, and that it brings wealth. It tells you that magic and scholarship are intricately linked (which is important for later) (5/?)

Another example from "Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders":

"An investigation? Into matters of disloyalty? With powers to ignore the constraints of the law?" Asmodeus looked like a child who'd just been handed a red envelope full of unexpected money. (6/.)

Here again the context is doing a lot: I don't need to explain that in this culture children get red envelopes for New Year and that they contain money. I've carefully phrased the metaphor so that the text tells the reader, unobtrusively. (7/?)

The word "unexpected" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting. It says that the red envelopes are a custom, it hints that kids usually get them, and that it explains why Asmodeus is so satisfied: a very large gift handed to him.
(I rewrote the sentence a LOT to get there) (8/?)

There's a limit to this trick: it's not unlike translating, in what it transplants one set of words from one culture (the one in the book I'm writing) to another (the reader's culture). So it relies on existing connotations. (9/?)

I get away with "scholar-magician" because it's not completely at odds with the idea of the wizard/magician in SFF. I lose meaning as well: a scholar in Vietnamese thought is... a valued position, a way of life, a set of values that doesn't translate to a western reader (10/?)

There's some expressions I find harder to put in a narration: for instance, "em ruột", lit "little sister of one's guts" which means "younger sister by blood" (but you can see how the English doesn't put the accent on the same meaning and how I've had to work to get there)

So you can see that I'm picking carefully what I can and can't do, and that some sentences end up being rewritten a lot of times to get across meaning in a sneaky fashion. (12/?)

One more from "Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders":
"All the society need to do is imply bad fortune."

"Like what?"

"I don't know! Like making all the banh tet be rotted inside, or the tray of five abundance fruit fall to dust on the ancestral altar." (13/?)

I never tell you what banh tet is, or what the five abundance fruit involve (it's this: https://vietnamlawmagazine.vn/the-five-fruit-tray-at-tet-4307.html ). I don't need to, again because the context, and the deliberate choice of "abundance" as a qualifier makes it clear it's a custom for good fortune. (14/?)

So anyway, this is why I'm often on twitter pulling my hair out about certain words and certain translations: because sometimes I need just the right word and just the right set of connotations to avoid a hell of a lot of needless exposition. (15/?)

It's particularly effective, but it has to be done just right. (16/?)

If you enjoyed this thread, I have a book out that's all of metaphors and sneaky references to Vietnamese culture, and it came out just yesterday:
https://www.aliettedebodard.com/dragonsfeasts