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Not being able to take my heating and hot water for granted made me think about what we take for granted in the use of language.
In everyday life and speech we use idiom all the time. They are short cuts in speech to help us convey an idea or make ourselves understood. Every idiom has its roots in some past or common experience, even if we don’t always know what that experience is or it isn’t a common experience today. For example, if I say ‘hold your horses’ you’ll understand that means slow down, don’t race into some activity without thinking. It comes from a time when transport was by horse drawn vehicle and ‘holding your horses’ meant keeping excited horses still while something else happened. Few of us would have that experience today.
Idioms often don't translate literally, either. What works in one language doesn’t work in another due to different cultural experiences and history. If you’re writing fantasy and building a different world you have to be particularly careful about idiom. You can’t have a character say ‘avoid it like the plague’ if your world has never experienced a widespread plague. Readers will find it jarring because your characters won’t have the personal, cultural, or historical experience for that to have meaning. You can’t ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ if your world doesn’t have dogs, or be ‘poor as a church mouse’ if it doesn’t have churches.
In Thread of Hope, the second book in my Choices and Consequences series, Andrew says “…this is the one that has knocked you for six?” That cliché comes from cricket, where hitting a ball over the boundary scores a six. Cricket isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the series, but it does exist in that world’s past. So I hope I’ve got away with that.
In Cloth of Grace we’re introduced to a phrase that is specific to the world I’ve created, in the quote below:
He just shook his head and Lady Eleanor answered, “Many years ago, something happened and as a result, Gabriel took a vow not to leave the campus. ‘Until the four seasons meet,’ he said. That was the condition.”
I recognised that phrase. It was a Trader one, meaning something that will never happen because the four seasons go in a cycle, never meeting together.
But each season has a colour assigned to it – although there is some dispute as to which colour means which season.
“White for the winter snow, green for the spring growth, blue for the summer sky, red for the autumn leaves,” he said. I knew that as red for the summer heat, blue for the autumn rain…
Only each colour also belongs to one of the four biggest ruling Great Houses – and two of them are arch enemies so they’ll never meet either…will they?
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