Fiction Rule of Thumb

by submission

Image Text: Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.

This explanation is by Harm. Harm is a reader of xkcd and explainxkcd. Harm writes explanations. Harm wrote that sentence mentioning that he writes explanations. Harm didn't write the previous sentence.

Here the author remarks on the trend of making up words in a work of fiction. Since fiction often takes place in other worlds, it makes sense that the natural language would be something other than English (or whatever language the book happens to be). Some writers will attempt to make up words to add a false sense of depth to their stories. Since those stories are told in English, there's little reason to over-use a fictional language when it doesn't serve the plot (hence allowing a few words for when they're required).

Lewis Carrol is the author of many works, but is most famous for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its sequel which have heavy use of intentional nonsense (his other works use a similar style), as well as "Jabberwocky" which in itself is a made-up word.

J.R.R. Tolkien is known for his "Lord of the Rings" series, which cover the MASSIVE world of Middle Earth. These books have many different races of fantasy creatures (elves, dwarfs, orcs, etc.) and each have their own (fictional) language and writing system.

Anathem is a fiction novel by Neal Stephenson that references quantum mechanics and philosophy, and uses many made-up words. Taken from Wikipedia (enjoy your citogenesis): "most of the technical words used in Anathem are derivations or puns on Latin words." Some examples include "auts" (rituals), "praxis" (technology), and "convox" (conference). To illustrate the comic author's point, reading through the article alone proved difficult due to the sheer volume of these words, and it would likely make any spell-check software cry.