black cats are wonderful because you can stare into the void and not only does the void stare back, sometimes it trots up to you happily and begs for pats
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Linguistics georg aka Tolkien named a place Avallonë in his world and cherry picked some of his character names from old ass literature and yeah, you could invent a whole new word and a whole history of the concept…..or a French braid in a world without France could be a Frànchë Brædë, which is actually Elvish for Cool Ass Hair. It’s your world, make shit up.
Also, if that’s not your speed, try another trick linguistics georg used, aka pretending that your fictional story is just a translation of an ancient historical record, and that you use the term French braid because that’s what We The Modern Audience call it ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Headcanon that even in the twenty-first century, Maglor still makes untranslatable Quenya jokes
“What do you get when you fish with a teakettle?”
“Hamsters.”
… and he just laughs as everyone else stares blankly at him.
Just imagine if he’s finally been dragged into Gondor because no one has any idea who he is, and he’s annoying the guards by making all these horrible jokes when Aragorn walks past and just cracks up. Because Elrond had used to tell that joke all the time and explained the Quenya behind it, and he remembers it.
So there’s these two poor guards staring in confusion between this ages-old elf, who is cracking up so much he’s almost crying, and King Elessar, crown and all, who is just lying on the ground laughing into the floor.
Mashups and Exports 