[ajdude]

I was just watching Tom Scott's latest video, he mentioned firing a trebuchet and the guide pointed this out that you don't "fire" a trebuchet since it doesn't involve gunpowder, you launch it.

Tom's commentary later was that he disagreed with that sentiment. "I disagree with those potential comments. Words change their meaning overtime. In modern English, you can fire an arrow, you can fire a torpedo, we were gonna fire that trebuchet"

[dn3500]

In the US Navy at least, you don't "fire" a torpedo, you "shoot" it. The lore is that "fire" has a very specific, very urgent meaning on a warship and you don't use that word unless there actually is a fire.

[0xffff2]

There are lots of these hyper-specific "reserved keywords" in the military. Another one from the US Army is "repeat", which is the command for an artillery battery to fire again with the same parameters as their previous barrage. Therefore on the radio we only ever used "say again" to ask someone to repeat their last transmission. Even if no one on the radio had ever or would ever be involved in artillery operations, I imagine it's easier to just train the entire force on a single uniform standard.

[kriro]

There's a decent argument for using today's words even for settings that are no the current world. But for fantasy specifically I find it breaks immersion quite a bit. I'm not convinced by the "language changes over time" line of argument. If you take it to a bit more of an extreme it would also be fine to have characters say "cool" or even use some gen-z-ism etc, because hey words change meaning over time after all.

However, I'm also aware that I'm kind of a hypocrite because I'm totally fine with current world grammar and punctuation for example.

[short_sells_poo]

You raise a good point, but where would we stop? Should movies depicting medieval events use medieval English? It was the lingo at the time after all.

[arjie]

I suppose it’s just a matter of the audience and balancing legibility and plausibility depends on whom you’re writing for. For me, if Legolas was aura farming while Gimli rizzed up Galadriel while Saruman wants to hop on a palantir call that wouldn’t work but perhaps a day comes when that’s enjoyable for someone.

The market for these variations is controlled by IP law, not by demand for writing them or reading them. Emily Wilson’s controversial (for silly reasons, in my opinion) translation of Homer demonstrates what’s available in this genre.

Perhaps one day Gimli will rizz up Galadriel and Sam will say “bye-eeee” as Gollum falls into Mt Doom. One might even get to the stage where an LLM sits in place of the text and translates live into your own hyper-personalized idiolect or more usefully into that which will never take you out of the scene.

[gherkinnn]

As an example, "Hitting it out of the park" has no business in a medieval setting.