Friday, June 17, 2016

Books Influencing My Words

I think most readers learn different words - usually the less common/more difficult - from books they read. Reading can help expand your vocabulary. Which I think is great.

To me it's a lot of fun to come across a word I don't know and either figuring out the meaning from the surrounding text (which, admittedly, is the most common for me) or, occasionally, having to look up the word in a dictionary.

So, yeah, I do find a growing vocabulary great. But to be honest, I don't tend to use most of those words in daily conversations. Or, really, even think in those words.

However, there is book terminology that has influenced the way I think.

Slang words.

Lately I've read several books that have developed their own slang terminology.

I always find it so much fun when the setting is so different than ours that the slang words have changed. After all, slang has changed so much in sixty years. Imagine how much it would change in another hundred or more.

Sure, the slang can be confusing at first - and even sound kind of cheesy - but they're fun.

You get new words that you have to puzzle out what they mean and the part of my brain that likes strange names and places in fantasy books, is glad for a bit of a distraction in a story that's more sci-fi. (Which, oddly enough, is where I've been finding this.)

What I find kind of…odd though is how I actually pick up some of the slang. Not a lot of it, usually, and it usually wears off after a day or two. But often I'll find myself thinking something using the slang terms.

At least I haven't started saying them!

(Then again, I am the person who, after she watches a British or Japanese show, tends to think she should talk with an accent. And then my American shows sound like they have a funny accent.)

But there's this one series that I recently finished that took place in like year two thousand two hundred eighty-five and I find some of the slang terms lingering in my mind well after I finished the book.

Does anyone else have this happen to them? (It can be totally made up words, or slang from a country other than the one you're from/live in.)