Like: posttragicmulatto

I love words. I love common words, complicated words, obscure words, archaic words, and I especially love made-up words. As Dr. Csiscery-Ronay points out above, one of the foundations upon which all fantastic genres (and, in the book cited, SF in particular) are built is invented words in some form of fictive neology. In science fiction there is a lengthy (sometimes rich, sometimes irksome) history of neologisms, while in the fantasy genre there are plenty of invented words, some of which could be described as pseudowords, "a pronounceable word-like item (letter or sound sequence) that lacks semantic or pragmatic content (i.e., meaning)." Of course, there is overlap in these tendencies; plenty of SF stories have characters and places with strange names, and some fantasy work create neologistic vocabulary. Both utilize chimerical names and terms, and this is something that readers of the literature find pleasurable. But why?

The urge to make myth, to try and redeem humans who commit immoral acts under the flag of moral causes, is understandable. It's understandable in those who look at Jesse James and see not the straight white supremacist, but the scourge of greedy bankers and acquisitive industrialists against whom, it seemed, none could stand. And it's more understandable among a people disproportionately brutalized by the police who look at Christopher Dorner, and see not a murderer but a plague on a police force that is, itself, above the law.