Words you didn't know you knew from sword&sorcery

Cafe Society
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It took a game of hangman to make me realize just how much vocabulary fantasy fans take for granted.

We were at a restaurant, my family and my roommate. Like we often do when waiting at a restaurant with paper table cloth/place mats, we played hangman to pass the time. I challenged the rest of the table to come up with the hardest words in the fewest letters.
My roommate is brilliant, and she carried the day with the four-letter SCRY.
My dad was bemused, near-flummoxed. “Scry? What on earth is a ‘scry’? That’s not a word!” (Google Toolbar’s spell check hasn’t hard of it either). We explained, and explained, and at home I found a panel from Start of Darkness which used scry in a sentence. I’m still not sure he believes me. He still teases me about it when we play hangman, or when he comes across unfamiliar fantastic lexicon. Such as:

-Rune- It never occurred to me that the word ‘rune’ was not as widely known, for example, as the word ‘sandwich’ or ‘percussion’. Of course, your average bear wouldn’t know that runes were an actual alphabet used by ancient Germanic tribes, but still, it’s not like the word was made up by Tolkien. Now that I thought about it, of course, it was probably popularized by… one of those people. Tolkien or someone else. I e-mailed my dad a link to the Wikipedia page on runes, but he’d forgotten about it by the second time it came up.

-Familiar- This time my dad came to me. I explained about witches and black cats and roosters and goats and how those bloodthirsty morons with too little to do would torture cats to death (and witches, too, but my view on history is fairly feline-slanted).

-Paladin- And this one has nothing to do with my dad at all. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what the original paladins were. But in sword & sorcery and Dungeons & Dragons and all over fantasyland, they’re the distilled virtues of knights in shining armor (and the occasional whackjob, but even paladinhood can’t be perfect).

-Medieval weaponry 101- It’s amazing what you pick up about longswords, broadswords, bastard swords, rapiers, crossbows, long bows, and whadjamacallits. Okay, the details of use may not have been written by someone who’s so much as swung a stick in their lives, but the terminology is there and probably sound. Whereas your reader of post-modern satire on the emptyness of modern suburban life might not know what a scabbard is.

Others?

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Knights in Charlemagne’s court, the word probably deriving from a Latin word for a type of government official.

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Grimoire; book of magical spells and knowledge.

Glamorie (also spelled Glamourie, etc); enchantment, fascination.

Merlon; the square “teeth” atop many fortifications.

Cantrip; minor spell.

Thaumaturgy; one of the many terms for magic.

Glyph; symbol or mark used in writing.

Pells: Practice target for striking with a sword or such.

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Everyone knows “centaur,” “unicorn,” and “griffin,” but only fantasy readers are likely to know “manticore,”* “golem,” “hippogriff,” “basilisk,” “kraken,” or “wyvern.”

  • Dark Angel fans don’t count. Unless they’re also fantasy fans, they don’t know where the name comes from.
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And if you play fantasy games, you may be more likely to know the verb form of “buff”–and its inverse, “debuff.”

Also, “psionic” & “psion.” Maybe “wight” (though it means something quite different in Tolkienian fantasy than in regular English). Oh, and both “goblin” & “kobold” were redefined by the likes of Tolkien & Gygax.

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I was around 10-11 when the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons set came out. And the DMs Guide included a random Harlot table. Along with Harlot I was able to add all the following to my vocabulary: Trull, Strumpet, Trollop, Tart, Wench, Doxy, Courtesan, Madam, Procuress, Pimp, & Panderer. I can’t say it made me popular in 6th grade. But it certainly helped.

God bless you Gary Gygax.

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Geas

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demesne
glaive
pauldron
buckler
melee
phylactery
geas
dais

Gary Gygax was a major player in my vocabulary development.

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Malleus, Incus, Stapes! writes:

> My dad was bemused, near-flummoxed. “Scry? What on earth is a ‘scry’? That’s
> not a word!” (Google Toolbar’s spell check hasn’t hard of it either). We
> explained, and explained, and at home I found a panel from Start of Darkness
> which used scry in a sentence. I’m still not sure he believes me. He still teases
> me about it when we play hangman, or when he comes across unfamiliar
> fantastic lexicon.

Please, I don’t mean the following question as an insult. I’m genuinely baffled by your description of how you showed your father that it really was a word. Doesn’t anybody own dictionaries anymore? That’s how traditionally one shows someone that something is a word. Even if someone is going to tell me that no one owns books anymore but only looks up things online, wouldn’t the proper procedure here be to go to an online dictionary? One could look it up as follows:

I would be dubious too if someone tried to defend a word by referring to something that’s a comic. I guess that’s what Start of Darkness is anyway. It’s apparently available mostly online with some of it only available in print:

My reaction if someone used a comic for a reference would be to wonder if the writer of the comic just made up the word.

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Coven was on my SAT, and you can bet I nailed that one.

More recently, in been dating a non-nerd who was studying for the GRE, I’ve learned that Chimera, Crenelation, and Quern are not, in fact, commonly-known words (actually, props to Dwarf Fortress on Quern, I’ve never encountered it elsewhere). Lots more that fail to come to mind, too.

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“Staves” as a plural form of “staff”

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A lot of people seem to distrust Internet dictionaries. I know I’ve seen people cite them here, just to be told that they don’t mean anything.

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First day of grad school, I went to lunch with my new housemate’s crowd of established students. For some reason they were trying to remember “the thingies that you drop to stop someone on horseback from following you, it’s like a nail with four sides, one of which is always up, and the horse steps on it?”

With no hesitation I said “caltrops”. Instant cred. Thanks Gary.

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Likewise, I got “tome”, as a large book. And you better believe everyone else taking that practice test was all “That’s not a real word.” Sorry, it was.

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BigT writes:

> A lot of people seem to distrust Internet dictionaries. I know I’ve seen people
> cite them here, just to be told that they don’t mean anything.

If Malleus, Incus, Stapes!'s father had distrusted online dictionaries, I presume that he would have demanded to look in a regular dictionary. I wonder then why neither Malleus, Incus, Stapes! nor his father then looked in one.

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It was by a roundabout way, but… at a young age, I’d deduced that a petard was surely some sort of polearm, and wondered why EGG hadn’t included it alongside the ranseurs, halberds, tridents, awl pikes, bill hooks, corseques, fauchards, military forks, fauchard-forks, voulges, glaives, guisarmes, guisarme-glaives, lochaber axes, bohemian earspoons, … Well, you get the idea.

It wasn’t a polearm. But now I know what it is.

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I was playing some sort of trivia game with some co-workers a few years ago, and the question I got was about “glyph” (it used the symbol which Prince used as his name for a while as an example). Thanks to years of playing D&D, I knew the word, of course…but none of my co-workers had ever heard the term before.

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I knew that “claymore” was a sword long before I learned about its military definition.

Whenever I discuss gaming with an older generation, I need to explain things like “experience points”, “armor class”, and even the varied concepts of “level,” “questing,” and “avatar.” (And don’t even get me started on “Let’s Play”…)

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From Magic: The Gathering

Mana
Bauble
Orb
Shade
Lotus
Steppe
Alabaster
Stasis
Counter
Djinn

A bunch more too.

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bec de corbin

(Thanks, Gary)