I love these quotes too, but while reading them a funny thought struck me. Fantasy terms like “elves” and “orcs” seem normal to us now, but Tolkien basically invented their modern usage. At the time he was writing to his son they would have been very new and only used that way by Tolkien himself.
Substituting Tolkien’s terms with equivalents from Starcraft makes one of these passages sound ridiculous:
An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Kerrigan with the Hivemind. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Kerrigans, and slowly turn Terrans and Protoss into Zerg. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Zerg on our side … Well, there you are: an SCV amongst the Hydralisks.
Why is this, and would the passage have sounded just as goofy back in the 1940s?
Is it just because the Starcraft terms are less mainstream? Perhaps sci-fi terms are generally less graceful than fantasy ones? Or maybe Tolkien had a special sense for phrasing and names like “Sauron” and “Urukhai” would have sounded just as profound then as they do now?
Tolkien invented their exact usage, but he didn’t invent the words. “Elf”, obviously, goes way back, but “orc” also goes way back, with meanings similar to the Tolkien usage.
“Zerg”, “Protoss”, & “SCV”, are all neologisms; notably, the least weird ones, “Kerrigan” and “Terran”, are quite ordinary words. (‘Hydralisk’ is a bit in between. ‘Hydra’ as a prefix is familiar, albeit increasingly hopelessly overloaded with SF/comic connotations, but ‘lisk’ as a suffix is a very unfamiliar one: ‘obelisk’ is the only one that comes to mind, and that appears to get ‘lisk’ as a butchering of Greek and then French.)
An interesting comparison here would be Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which does something similar: it uses old words in place of neologisms, and for that reason, despite being stuffed with weird terms (so much so you can publish a dictionary of it), words like ‘pelagic argosy’ or ‘fuligin’ or ‘capote’ nevertheless worked as well in the 1980s as they do now, despite not having achieved the cultural currency of ‘elves’ or ‘orcs’, and so demonstrating that the ‘use old words’ trick works in its own right and not simply by mere familiarity.
(But conversely, writing old-timey is no surefire solution. Wolfe’s dying-earth fiction was influenced by Hodgson’s The Night Land, which is imaginative and influential… and the style is almost ludicrously unreadable, whether in 1912 or 2025.)
Now, why is that? I suspect that it’s a mix of unrealized familiarity (you may not have seen ‘destrier’ often enough to consciously recognize it as a real word, much less define or use it*, but unconsciously you do) and linguistic ‘dark knowledge’ in recognizing that somehow, the word ‘autarch’ is valid and a plausible word which could exist, in a way that ‘Zerg’ or ‘Protoss’ could not exist. It somehow respects the laws of languages and etymology and spelling, and you recognize that by not immediately rejecting it like most neologisms. (And to some extent, Tolkien’s own conlangs, by having their long fictional history to justify various twists & turns, gain a hidden realism that a tidy rationalized hobbyist conlang will not. Something something greebles fractal dimension worldbuilding pattern language something something.)
* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words ‘stick’ will reflect your intelligence’s efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy
“* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words ‘stick’ will reflect your intelligence’s efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy”
It’s still a weird efficiency, especially b/c it can be “gamed” by studying for SATs or by midwit infovoreautists who don’t have high working memory.
And yet, despite the SAT being so studied for, it remains a pretty good IQ test overall, and SAT-V or the GRE verbal parts OK. I think that’s because there are so many words (500k+ in English, and the GRE-V has no compunction about mining the obscurest just to f—with you), and you would have to study so many in order to meaningful inflate your scores (because after all, while there may be only a hundred ‘vocab words’ on any given SAT test, you don’t know which hundred). Let’s see… Here’s an interesting-looking reference: “How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age”, Brysbaert et al 2016
an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days.
So, if you wanted to boost your score from the mean to the 95th percentile, that seems to imply that you’d have to memorize 10,000 ‘lemmas’ (“Uninflected word from which all inflected words are derived”). That’s a big number, and then you have to ask how much work that would be.
If you did this in the optimal way with spaced repetition (ignoring the time it takes to figure out the 10k you want to memorize in the first place or the time to construct the flashcards or any penalty from needing to inefficiently cram them for an upcoming SAT instead of life-long efficient review), which of course still few students do, as spaced repetition systems remain a niche outside of medical school & foreign language study, the SuperMemo rough estimate is a long-term investment of 5 minutes per flashcard, and we’ll assume 1 lemma = 1 flashcard. That means you have to invest 10,00 * 5 = 50,000 minutes or 833 hours of studying! Meanwhile, hardly anyone is doing more than 8 hours of studying for the SAT as a whole (among the kids I knew at a prep high school, many didn’t even do a weekend course, which would entail about 8 hours of classwork & study). 833 hours for vocab alone would be insane.
That’s why people generally learn vocab from passive exposure rather than targeted study. Because no one, not even the most teacher’s-pet student, wants to do that. And so vocab measures keep working.
It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times.
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all…
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)
I would assume that his children in particular would be quite familiar with their usage, though, and that seems to be who a lot of the legendarium-heavy letters are written to.
I also think that it sounds at least slightly less ridiculous to rewrite that passage in the language of Star Wars rather than Starcraft. Conquer the Emperor with the Dark Side. Turn Jedi into Sith. An X-Wing among the TIE fighters. Probably because it’s more culturally established, with a more deeply developed mythos.
Edit to add: Just thinking about the converse, you could also make it sound more ridiculous by rewriting it with more obscure parts of the legendarium, too.
Conquer Morgoth with Ungoliant. Turn Maiar into balrogs. Glamdring among the morgul-blades.
I remember reading that Tolkien once observed what a beautiful sound the phrase “cellar door” makes; and that this is the kind of awareness it takes to use language like Tolkien. ;-)
I love these quotes too, but while reading them a funny thought struck me. Fantasy terms like “elves” and “orcs” seem normal to us now, but Tolkien basically invented their modern usage. At the time he was writing to his son they would have been very new and only used that way by Tolkien himself.
Substituting Tolkien’s terms with equivalents from Starcraft makes one of these passages sound ridiculous:
Why is this, and would the passage have sounded just as goofy back in the 1940s?
Is it just because the Starcraft terms are less mainstream? Perhaps sci-fi terms are generally less graceful than fantasy ones? Or maybe Tolkien had a special sense for phrasing and names like “Sauron” and “Urukhai” would have sounded just as profound then as they do now?
Tolkien invented their exact usage, but he didn’t invent the words. “Elf”, obviously, goes way back, but “orc” also goes way back, with meanings similar to the Tolkien usage.
“Zerg”, “Protoss”, & “SCV”, are all neologisms; notably, the least weird ones, “Kerrigan” and “Terran”, are quite ordinary words. (‘Hydralisk’ is a bit in between. ‘Hydra’ as a prefix is familiar, albeit increasingly hopelessly overloaded with SF/comic connotations, but ‘lisk’ as a suffix is a very unfamiliar one: ‘obelisk’ is the only one that comes to mind, and that appears to get ‘lisk’ as a butchering of Greek and then French.)
An interesting comparison here would be Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which does something similar: it uses old words in place of neologisms, and for that reason, despite being stuffed with weird terms (so much so you can publish a dictionary of it), words like ‘pelagic argosy’ or ‘fuligin’ or ‘capote’ nevertheless worked as well in the 1980s as they do now, despite not having achieved the cultural currency of ‘elves’ or ‘orcs’, and so demonstrating that the ‘use old words’ trick works in its own right and not simply by mere familiarity.
(But conversely, writing old-timey is no surefire solution. Wolfe’s dying-earth fiction was influenced by Hodgson’s The Night Land, which is imaginative and influential… and the style is almost ludicrously unreadable, whether in 1912 or 2025.)
Now, why is that? I suspect that it’s a mix of unrealized familiarity (you may not have seen ‘destrier’ often enough to consciously recognize it as a real word, much less define or use it*, but unconsciously you do) and linguistic ‘dark knowledge’ in recognizing that somehow, the word ‘autarch’ is valid and a plausible word which could exist, in a way that ‘Zerg’ or ‘Protoss’ could not exist. It somehow respects the laws of languages and etymology and spelling, and you recognize that by not immediately rejecting it like most neologisms. (And to some extent, Tolkien’s own conlangs, by having their long fictional history to justify various twists & turns, gain a hidden realism that a tidy rationalized hobbyist conlang will not. Something something greebles fractal dimension worldbuilding pattern language something something.)
* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words ‘stick’ will reflect your intelligence’s efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy
I think in case of hydralisks it’s analogous to basilisks, “basileus” (king) + diminitive, but with shift of meaning implying similarity to reptile.
“* this is why vocab can be a good IQ test: word use frequency is the original power law, and because you have been exposed to many more words than you consciously know, and how many of those words ‘stick’ will reflect your intelligence’s efficiency at learning from 1 or 2 uses of a word, and thus provide a good proxy”
It’s still a weird efficiency, especially b/c it can be “gamed” by studying for SATs or by midwit infovoreautists who don’t have high working memory.
And yet, despite the SAT being so studied for, it remains a pretty good IQ test overall, and SAT-V or the GRE verbal parts OK. I think that’s because there are so many words (500k+ in English, and the GRE-V has no compunction about mining the obscurest just to f—with you), and you would have to study so many in order to meaningful inflate your scores (because after all, while there may be only a hundred ‘vocab words’ on any given SAT test, you don’t know which hundred). Let’s see… Here’s an interesting-looking reference: “How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age”, Brysbaert et al 2016
So, if you wanted to boost your score from the mean to the 95th percentile, that seems to imply that you’d have to memorize 10,000 ‘lemmas’ (“Uninflected word from which all inflected words are derived”). That’s a big number, and then you have to ask how much work that would be.
If you did this in the optimal way with spaced repetition (ignoring the time it takes to figure out the 10k you want to memorize in the first place or the time to construct the flashcards or any penalty from needing to inefficiently cram them for an upcoming SAT instead of life-long efficient review), which of course still few students do, as spaced repetition systems remain a niche outside of medical school & foreign language study, the SuperMemo rough estimate is a long-term investment of 5 minutes per flashcard, and we’ll assume 1 lemma = 1 flashcard. That means you have to invest 10,00 * 5 = 50,000 minutes or 833 hours of studying! Meanwhile, hardly anyone is doing more than 8 hours of studying for the SAT as a whole (among the kids I knew at a prep high school, many didn’t even do a weekend course, which would entail about 8 hours of classwork & study). 833 hours for vocab alone would be insane.
That’s why people generally learn vocab from passive exposure rather than targeted study. Because no one, not even the most teacher’s-pet student, wants to do that. And so vocab measures keep working.
It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
How could you possibly know something like that?
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)
I would assume that his children in particular would be quite familiar with their usage, though, and that seems to be who a lot of the legendarium-heavy letters are written to.
I also think that it sounds at least slightly less ridiculous to rewrite that passage in the language of Star Wars rather than Starcraft. Conquer the Emperor with the Dark Side. Turn Jedi into Sith. An X-Wing among the TIE fighters. Probably because it’s more culturally established, with a more deeply developed mythos.
Edit to add: Just thinking about the converse, you could also make it sound more ridiculous by rewriting it with more obscure parts of the legendarium, too.
Conquer Morgoth with Ungoliant. Turn Maiar into balrogs. Glamdring among the morgul-blades.
This is probably a larger part of the explanation, given his background in philology
I remember reading that Tolkien once observed what a beautiful sound the phrase “cellar door” makes; and that this is the kind of awareness it takes to use language like Tolkien. ;-)