This is RPG-ology #80: Words, for July 2024.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Words, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
In the movie FX, the police detective is looking for information about someone who works for the Justice Department. “He’s a floater,” the Justice Department chief says. “That’s our word for someone who does odd jobs for us, wherever he’s needed.”
“Funny,” the detective replies, “in our business it means a body pulled out of the East River.”
Every profession, every geographical area, every social and economic group, has its own language. We call it jargon; and although that’s a relatively modern word, it’s an ancient concept. It’s the idea that if you are part of a particular niche of the world, you will share a common vocabulary with those with whom you share that niche.
Lawyers call it terms of art, words which have special meaning in a legal context that those outside the legal world don’t understand quite the same way. The reason you need an attorney to help write your contracts, your wills, your important papers is because simple words like property and sale mean something very precise when they’re read by courts that they might not mean to those not in the know.
Doctors and nurses discuss things in medical terminology, and they keep changing it. Years ago I was co-hosting a medical talk show with a Doctor John Madara, and I teased him about how doctors used their secret language and changed it regularly so that laymen wouldn’t be able to figure out what they were saying. Each week he would teach about current medicine and take questions by phone; but if he needed a week off, he would arrange for another doctor to share the mic with me. One week before he left he announced that the next Thursday show would be with a guest from the radiology department of the local hospital, who would give us the latest information about Computer Axial Tomography–CAT scans. A week later as I introduced the guest, I said, “And I understand we’ll be talking about CAT scans today.”
He replied, “Actually, now we call them C-T scans.”
You know that the following week I teased Dr. Madara about the terminology changing so quickly even he could not keep abreast of it.
Technical language is used by technicians; scientists use scientific labels, and these are different from one field to the next. Artists have their words, musicians draw terms from half a dozen languages, and mathematicians from twice as many. But we’re only scratching the surface. Rock music fans have one set of words, rappers another; skateboarders use words the rest of us don’t fathom, and surfers are so well known for their speech it’s regularly parodied. Different ethnic and social groups living in the same town and attending the same schools will have speech patterns that are at times barely comprehensible to each other; and children will develop a lingo opaque to their parents. Words used in one group or generation can have a completely opposite or completely unrelated meaning when used by another. In the late ’80’s I ran a D&D game for a group of teenagers, who only recently told me how funny they found it when I would refer to their discovered treasures as booty. And this doesn’t begin to touch our modern alphabet soup, in which the same sequence of letters can mean a dozen different things, depending on who you are, where you live, and what you do.
Decades ago I was singing on tour in Romania, and playing my electric guitar. In rigging the amplifier to use the European standard two hundred twenty volts (instead of the American one hundred ten for which it was designed) I used something called an autotransformer, and found it necessary to sever an important connection between the chassis and the power supply. I would have to rely on an external ground to provide shielding to the circuits. Most of you have no idea what I just said; and to enter a country where few spoke English and have to ask something as technical as where to connect a wire for an external ground may seem daunting. But in fact all I had to do was draw a few lines of circuit diagram symbols on a piece of scrap paper, and anyone who understood electronics at all could see exactly what I needed: an electrical ground. I never had trouble getting it.
These specialized languages enable us to communicate quickly and clearly with people who are on the same wavelength as we are in particular fields. I couldn’t ask my Romanian hosts where the men’s room was; but I could find an electrical ground without any problem. The guest conductor from Italy might not be able to ask directions to Carnegie Hall, but he knows how to get the orchestra to play pianississimo and to accelerando at the right moment. They share a language for that purpose.
I want to acknowledge that Dungeons & Dragons™ did tip its hat to this concept. Thieves throughout the traditional realms spoke Thieves’ Cant, a set of terminology which enabled them to talk about criminal activities, stolen property, and other misdeeds without being understood by anyone who happened to overhear. There was also a Druidic language which was spoken by druids, and philosophical languages which expressed the ideas and ideals of the nine alignments, the true religions of the game. But there was so much more that could have been done. My wizard probably understands less of your fighter’s talk of weapons and tactics than I do when my mechanic tries to explain what’s wrong with my car; yet as Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts show, every swordsman in the world understands exactly what he means. Do you know what a curb bit is? If you do, you probably ride horses. Perhaps it can be said that to truly understand something is to have a vocabulary for it, shared by others who also understand it.
Sometimes your characters will encounter people with whom they can communicate, in some limited way, because there is some common link. Sometimes there will be confusion because a couple of words which obviously mean one thing to the hearers meant something different to the speaker. If I’ve got a rifle in my boot, either my car is registered in London or I think I’m likely to need to sharpen my scythe out in the field. They will also encounter people whose language is so peppered with unfamiliar jargon that it will be very difficult to work out what they are saying, even though it appears to be the same language. ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. As Alice said, It puts ideas in my head, but I don’t know what they are.
Even when we all speak the same language, we misunderstand each other often enough. I recall a classmate of mine transplanted from New Mexico to Massachusetts who was looking for an apartment, and received directions from the owner to turn at Dawk Skwaya. He searched for hours for this place, and never found Dark Square; finally when he asked directions he discovered it was not Dahk but Dawk–what he would have called Dock (and pronounced dahk). He had attempted to translate the pronunciation of the Boston-born speaker to his own vocabulary, and had failed. My wife recently asked why I always say koo-pahn where she would say kyoo-pahn, and the only answer I have is that we are each recalling what our respective mothers kept in their purses. If we speak the same language, why do we so often misunderstand each other?
Part of that is because we don’t really all speak the same language. Linguists call it an idiolect–the language as uniquely spoken by a single individual, as it differs from every other speaker in the world. Yours is made up of bits of jargon from jobs you’ve had and friends you’ve known and places you’ve lived, with strange pronunciations and mispronunciations you’ve picked up along the way which make some words sound like others when you say them that would not sound the same at all to me. Does this ever touch our characters and the people they meet? Why not?
Next week, something different.
Previous article: Faith.
Next article: Wizardry.
In the original Game Ideas Unlimited series the article Vivid was interposed between Wounds and Words. That concept was addressed in very similar terms in this series, RPG-ology #15: Vivid, and when the original was recovered it was decided that this was not different enough to include in the same series, but did go beyond the new version in ways that suggested it should be saved. It thus has been posted as mark Joseph “young” web log post #497: Game Ideas Unlimited: Vivid Recovered.