Round 130, Hour 9

[glinda]

We are in full wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey territory this weekend aren’t we?

By careful perusal of the charts and signs I have come to the conclusion that it might be hour 9?

Is there anyone else about with words to report or wisdom to impart? Or am I just muttering in the corner of the rush like a confused soothsayer?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I had typed out in a Discord server a whole long question about when a particular word was first on the internet, since I've got as far as it was coined no later than 11 September 2015 as the French translation of an English word that was coined no later than 2010 and I need to know if it's possible someone might know the word as of the start of that month

but then I realized it doesn't matter, because absolutely nothing about my setup suggests the magic amnesia wiped new vocabulary and I've already established clearly that she's kept her muscle memory (and promptly cut the scene, but most of it is going back in soon)

which means as soon as someone mentions one or another term invented for this setting or repurposed to add a setting-specific denotation or connotation, she will know what it means

(and my original bilingual pun plan lives happily ever after)

(and! assuming the word is one she must have learned during the years she can't remember! since the guy affected onscreen by the kind of magic amnesia other characters think is the likeliest one affecting her did lose the setting-specific vocab! I have another clue for attentive and canon-familiar readers who know she wouldn't have known the term as of the start of the show! brains are such wonderful things, aren't they?)

[glinda]

I love that as writers so often the deepest research rabbit holes are ones that impact only tiny bits of backstory that often only get a passing reference or end up being excised. I like the invisible bits of books that as readers we don’t see but that inform the stories nonetheless. Like, it may not in the end matter whether or not that character could have known that word, or would just understand it in context, but you had to go down that rabbit hole in order to figure out that it didn’t matter. *geeks out happily*

Also I love a bilingual pun.

[alexseanchai]

not only that it doesn't matter, that there's a reason it doesn't matter that is plot relevant 😸🥰