19.21: Language as a Tool (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)
What cultural and worldbuilding information is embedded within the smallest of word choices? Today, we dive into three specific sections from throughout Martine’s “A Memory Called Empire”: the word for empire, assimilation and naming, and learning the word for bomb. We unpack how Martine uses language to establish important principles of how the world works.
Thing of the Week:
The Gilded Age – Created and Written by Julian Fellowes Julian Fellows (on HBO Max)
Homework:
Write a scene that describes a fictional piece of literature— whether that’s a poem, a song, or a story— that means something to the people in the story you’re telling.
Here’s a link to buy your copy of “A Memory Called Empire” if you haven’t already:
https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: Using language as a tool. In Teixcalaan, planet, city, and Empire are all the same word. It’s all ours. Outlanders, barbarians, foreigners, not us! Teixcalaanli naming. Aztec-ish. Arkady does not use the word meme. A bomb in the cafe? Make your worldbuilding do multiple different things.
[Season 19, Episode 21]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we’ve talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we’d revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
[Season 19, Episode 21]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: Language as a Tool
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette..
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[DongWon] So, this week, continuing our close reading series on Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, I wanted to dig into three very specific sections over the course of this book. Last week, we focused heavily on the opening. Here, I want to talk about how Arkady uses language as a tool. Both how she phrases things, or word choices, but also the way in which she uses the language of this culture, and then… Well, the culture of this culture, the literature, the poetry, the pop-culture, to communicate certain really important concepts about the book. So, the first one I really want to drill down on is on page 19, as she approaches the city. We touched on this very briefly last time. But there’s a moment where Yskandr, her imago in her head, says, <the world>, and he says it in Teixcalaanli. So the quote here is
He said it in the Teixcalaan language, which made it a tautology: the word for “world” and the word for the “city” were the same, as was the word for “Empire.” It was impossible to specify, especially in the high imperial dialect. One had to note the context.
This is such a fascinating idea to me. This communicates so much about this culture. I found, when I read this book for the first time, that sentence was dripping with menace for me. That was one of the scariest sentences in this book. Because the idea that this culture sees themselves as so important that their city is a tautology for the entire empire is fascinating. This is all ours. Right? Going back to last episode, we talked about how they were looking at the star chart, and there’s this moment where they’re like, “All the tiny pinpricks of light. That’s ours.” Then we see this concept not just in how they think about it, but embedded into the language. Because of the way language works, they can not think about it another way. There’s no way for them to linguistically communicate the difference between us and our Empire. They are the Empire, in the most fundamental hardwired ways into their culture.
[Howard] As an extension of this… I don’t remember specific examples from the book, but there’s this idea that words like human and people and other are defined in such a way that if you are not Teixcalaanli, you might not qualify as human. Just based on the word that gets used. You might not qualify as people. The inherent othering of everybody who is not a member of the Empire is also dripping with menace.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That’s one of the things that I marked, is that there… This happens with a lot of languages, that the word that they have for her, someone who is from outside the Empire, is barbarian. That’s… Barbarian, alien. There’s a point deeper in the book where someone corrects and says, “foreigner.” It was like, “No, no, no. That’s not the right… That’s not the language that we use. We say foreigner.” But it made me think of… In Icelandic, the word for foreigner is utlander, which is literally outlander. Someone who’s not from here. My family will say, “us folks.” To mean anyone who is connected to our family or friends. Like, us folks. This demarcation that she does in her worldbuilding with this… By identifying you’re either part of the Empire or you are less than human, is like… The way that the language is structured is so… Such really yummy worldbuilding.
[Howard] There’s an aspect of this we’re going to touch on in an episode I’ll be driving shortly, which is the line where she says, “What do you mean by us?”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] “What do you mean by we?”
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] “What do you mean by me?” We come back to that all the time as we are having arguments about grouping and alliance and identity. And it is delicious to me. So delicious.
[DongWon] Well, there’s that moment, also fairly early on in the book, where they end up playing a little game where they each have to tell a truth when asked about it, and Three Seagrass is forced to admit that she likes aliens.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And it is treated as this perversion, it’s treated as this embarrassing fact, of like, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe you like that.” I don’t know what the comparison is in our culture, but you can feel… When you establish culture in this way, when you establish language in this way, then, suddenly, the idea of liking on alien does suddenly feel perverse. You can suddenly see how inside this culture, if they don’t even have a word that isn’t exclusionary, that of course, it would be strange to want to be close to somebody that is not us.
[Dan] Yeah. You mentioned Three Seagrass. That’s one of the really cool language things I want to get into, is the naming conventions that they use in this culture. Three Seagrass is kind of sort of a main character. But everyone has a name kind of like that. Arkady goes and explains, like, that they use a number and then they use a word. My favorite name, and I can’t remember exactly, but it was Seventeen All Terrain Vehicle… Thirty-six?
[Howard] Thirty-Six! Thirty-six.
[Dan] Thirty-six. There it is.
[DongWon] All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] This is one of my favorite parts of this book. It is a line that made me laugh so hard when I first read it.
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] And it’s also a very emotionally significant line for me, because one of the things this book is about is about the concept of assimilation. Right? Names are very fraught when you are a child of immigrants or when you are an immigrant to another culture. Names become a very difficult, fraught topic. Right?
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] I’m unusual among my peers because I use a Korean name. I don’t use an Americanized name. Most of the other Koreans I know, or other Asian Americans in general, have names that are very typical, usually very Judeo-Christian names, picked out of a baby book or picked from the Bible. I don’t have that. Well, I do have one. I’m not telling you what it is, because I hate it more than anything. But I do have un-American name. My brother has an American name. We both used our Korean style names. That choice has been one that has been an ongoing challenge for me over the course of my life, because my name, unfortunately, also happens to sound like a famous character from literature. So I get one joke every single time I introduce myself to a new person. That is repeated over and over again. I also have a thing where I cannot quite pronounce my name correctly. You’ll hear me say it in a mostly Americanized way on the show, which is DongWon, which is how I, for years and years, introduced myself to white Americans. I have recently been shifting a little bit to something closer to the Korean pronunciation, which is more like [done one]. That has been a shift I’ve been trying to make. It’s kind of hard to do. Because I’m used to saying it in a certain way. But all of this is to say that names are so important, because they identify you in the culture. They can be exclusionary, and they can be an invitation in. So, this idea that this person came to this culture and named themselves Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, which is hilarious to us as the audience, but it is also hilarious to the people in the culture. The line that comes after that is:
A revelation that produced in Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.
[Chuckles]
“No one would actually name a child that,” Three Seagrass complained after a moment. He has no taste.
[DongWon] This idea of taste is so important, because this is clearly someone who wasn’t born to this culture. They identify that immediately. This person has desperately reached for something that sounds right to them, and they’re like, “Well, that’s a number, and that’s a noun.” But it’s an absurd noun.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] And it’s the wrong kind of number.
[Howard] For English speakers, there is an unwritten… Mostly… Rule about adjective order. We can tell when adjectives are in the wrong order. You will often see people string together adjectives in instruction manuals or whatever, and you realize, “Oh. Oh, you didn’t get the memo about the way adjectives are supposed to work.” The fake AP stylebook said, “Adjectives should be listed in increasing awesomeness. The blue Italian rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle.” I’ve always laughed at that, because it follows both rules. I was reminded of that by Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. Three Seagrass is given pause because, oh, that’s technically right, but you ran afoul…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Of a very different rule.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And another worldbuilding bit is communicated in this. Right? Because the names are one of the striking things. Soon as you meet Three Seagrass, soon as you meet Twelve Azalea, Six Direction, all these people, we get the sense of like, “Wow. What a weird way to name people.” Right? Like, from our perspective, as the reader, it feels alien and cool. This joke is an opportunity for the author to say, “Okay. Here’s what’s going on. Here’s how this works.”
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] “You pick a number, you pick a noun, these kinds of nouns are good, these kinds of numbers are good.” Like, you get a sense… It’s an opportunity for her to just stop and tell us. Going back to show, don’t tell, this is her way of saying, “I’m going to take a break here. I’m going to explain what is going on with these. So that you experience the delight of running into them the first time. We’re far enough into the book that I can slow down and tell you what’s going on here.”
[Mary Robinette] Just to talk about the specific mechanics of one of the things that Arkady is doing with this. She’s… When she slows down and explains it, she is also making it about something else. She’s making it about a bonding moment between these two characters, and she’s also using… There’s a flash… Brief flashback that Mahit has where she remembers vividly part of her early language training on Lsel when her entire class had been encouraged to make up Teixcalaanli names to call themselves while they were learning to speak. She picked Nine Orchid because it was the heroine of her favorite book. It… She… So she’s having this moment where she’s explaining it to us, and it’s a tell moment. Because she’s like, “This is how these lang… These words… These names work.” But she’s also masking it by having it be… Doing some loadbearing on character. Doing loadbearing on history. She’s having this moment do multiple different things. So when you have something like this that you need to explain to your reader, look at the different things it can be doing, so that it’s not just, week, let me stop the story.
[DongWon] Yep. Exactly.
[Howard] I… To me, this got a pass because I laughed at the name.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Any time you can make me laugh, that page had a reward. Thank you for making me read it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I will also say the other thing that happens for me is that because she slows down here, when… Much deeper in the book, when Six Helicopter…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Comes in, we know that his name is also absurd. So, we are in the joke…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] With everybody else who’s having that moment.
[DongWon] Well, again, all of this speaks to the core thematics of the book. These… It’s a funny moment, it’s a character moment, it’s all these things, but it’s also a moment that is about Empire and how it works. The thing that she talks about in terms of the flashback is a thing that if you go to an Asian country there in a language school, they’re all picking American names. Right? In South Asia, in Korea, in Japan, China, they’re going to pick an American name so that they have that thing, in the same way that Mahit picks Nine Orchid.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] To be her Teixcalaanli name. She’s reflecting all these real-world themes, routing it in things that are familiar to us, so that we understand what Empire means and how that works in our world. On that note, we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to keep unpacking some of these very specific examples of language.
[Mary Robinette] The Gilded Age on Max is the latest offering from Julian Fellowes, best known for Downton Abbey. This is set in 1882 in New York City among the ultra-wealthy. It’s got social battles between new money and the established social crowd. It looks at class and race, and also just straight up romance. I’ll be honest, the plots are not surprising, but they are somehow still captivating and moving. Sometimes I get a little mad when I’m crying, because I could see it coming, but I was still excited to get there. It’s a good example of why formulas can work. Also, the costumes… If you are at all into fashion and history, the costumes are exhaustively researched and are often replica of extant downs or paintings. Check out The Gilded Age for a lot of very pretty, pretty clothes.
[Dan] All right. So, one thing that I wanted to talk about here is another neat trick that Arkady is using. The culture is kind of sort of… Well, at least linguistically, has a lot of Aztec influence in it.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Dan] Teixcalaan is an overtly Aztec-ish word. One of the reasons that I suspect she may have made that decision is precisely because the words are hard to pronounce. Right? Teixcalaan, which would be [Taishkalan] in actual Aztec, I think it was an overt purposeful choice to pronounce it more westernized than that, just to kind of continue the theme of cross culture stuff. That’s the name of the Empire, and the name of the city, and the name of the planet. Something that comes from Teixcalaan is Teixcalaanli. The word for a person who is from Teixcalaan or the people from there is Teixcalaanlitzlim. You get these words and you kind of stumble over them. I think that that’s on purpose. As a way of really hitting home, this is different. This is outside of your realm of experience. This is outside of your comfort zone. You are trying to assimilate these very difficult linguistic concepts. It also signals to the reader that language matters. Like, I am going to make you figure out how to say Teixcalaanlitzlim, and you’re going to do it and that is going to let you know to pay close attention to the language, because it is worth this effort.
[DongWon] She’s doing a thing where she manages to make the reader feel the subjectivity of what it is to be an immigrant. Right? She forces the reader into the position of being a foreigner to a culture. Which, I think we talked about audience surrogates earlier. But this is such, like, a grounded way, and such a material way to make that felt. The way she does that is by introducing a con lang in some ways. Right? A constructed language in some ways. We don’t get all of it, but we get some parts of it. And introducing culture. The poetry, the epic poems, the different refrains. Even when we get a couplet that is an epithet for a person. Right? When Nine Ads appears… Nineteen Ads? Or Nine Ads?
[Mary Robinette] Nineteen Ads.
[DongWon] Nineteen. There’s that beautiful epithet that she has about the edge shine of a knife.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? What a remarkable striking moment, and, wow, did that establish a character…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Immediately. Like, to be referred to poetically as the edge shine of a knife.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] How terrifying that person has to be.
[Howard] One of the things that she never did, Arkady never did, was use the word meme. The Teixcalaan… Teixcalaanli culture is, especially with the poetry, is inherently memetic.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Howard] All the time, people will make references, will say things, and Mahit realizes, “Oh, that last thing is a line from this poem about the buildings, and so what you’re saying is not just thing but also referencing a building.” That idea comes back over and over. We see it in our own culture as people will make pop-culture references. Oh, I understand that joke.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] And everybody is now on board. I loved that she did it and was frankly amazed that she did it without ever using the word meme.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great comparison. As someone who’s chronically online, I’m capable of having a conversation with my friends that is impenetrable to an outsider, based on the number of memes and references that we’re making.
[DongWon] I want to show how this is used in the text in a way that I found particularly fascinating. This is another one of my very favorite moments. It’s from page 86, for those of you who have the print edition. This is when the bomb in the café goes off, which Howard mentioned a couple episodes ago. So…
She knew the Teixcalaanli word for explosions, a centerpiece of military poetry, usually adorned with adjectives like “shattering” or “fire-flowered,” but now she learned, by extrapolation from the shouting, the one for “bomb.” It was a short word. You could scream it very loudly. She figured it out because it was the word people were screaming when they weren’t screaming help.
I am obsessed with this paragraph.
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] It is so powerful, it is so upsetting. It communicates the true horror of what has just happened to her and the people around her, and it tells us so much about Mahit as well. Her first thing is to go to this cerebral abstraction…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] She retreats into academic thought and poetry before she returns to the word that they’re screaming when they’re not screaming help. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Also that there is a genre of military poetry.
[DongWon] Yes! Exactly. So in the way that Howard is talking about, this sort of memetic way of having culture, the word for explosion is part of that. Right? There are beautiful poems about fire-flowered explosions, but nobody talks about bombs.
[Dan] Well, it… That’s another that goes back to our conversation about scale and the concept of how close are you to the subject that you’re talking about. Because from far away, you can talk about a fire-flowered explosion and it sounds really cool. But when you’re down there on the street, surrounded by rubble and smoke, it is a bomb. You need a word you can scream loudly.
[Howard] You are lying on the ground thinking, “Ah, I learned a new word.”
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Also, who would teach you the word bomb to go on a diplomatic mission?
[Mary Robinette] No.
[DongWon] You don’t need to know that.
[Mary Robinette] It reminds me briefly of when I was learning Icelandic, I initially was doing… Learn… Yes, I speak Icelandic a little bit. But there were two texts that I had a choice from. One of which taught me phrases like, “Where is the train station?” There are no train stations in Iceland.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] There is no circumstance under which you would need to be able to say, “Where is the train station?” in Icelandic because you would have to be someplace else, where… Like, there aren’t Icelandic speakers outside of Iceland except in Minnesota.
[DongWon] This is that damn Duo Lingua owl trying to convince me that I just need to know how to say, “the cat is under the pizza tables.”
[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the other books, one of the… In the first or second chapter, one of the words that you learned was decapitation.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was like, “This person has read Icelandic epics.”
[DongWon] Yes.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is one of the things about these, is, like… The things that… The other thing that is in this is, like, what is valorized?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] What is valorized? A bomb is not valorized. Explosions, yes, but explosions from starships that are… And warheads that are coming down. But not a handmade bomb in a café.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] That’s not a valorous experience.
[Dan] Well, correct me if I’m misremembering, because it has been a few years since I have read this, other than skimming it for these episodes. The… Don’t they come back later and propagandize this explosion a little bit, this bomb? And just the language that they use to talk about it changes. It isn’t a bomb anymore. It’s a fire-flowered explosion. They’re using it for political purposes by changing the words they use to describe it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. They’re taking it from being common to being elevated.
[Yeah. Right!]
[DongWon] So, again, this is one of the these moments where so many layers of the story and character and world are in this. Right? So, just to recap in some ways, she’s again explaining culture, how the culture works by starting on this poetic way, explaining the stakes of the book, because, hey. Mahit could get blown up. Her life is at risk. Right? She’s communicating a different kind of risk than we’ve seen before. Up until now it’s been political, it’s been words. Bombs are in play now. Right? She’s lying trapped under rubble while the person she came to meet is… Her blood is dripping on her face. It’s a visceral terrifying moment. But, more than anything else, she’s using this moment to communicate such fear and helplessness and pain. The way this shifts into this such an emotional place by the end of it, with, that, like, the word people are screaming. Right? Like, it’s so grounding, and it’s so scary, and it’s so upsetting to communicate what violence actually is. That establishes the themes of the book, of we can talk about it at this abstract level, but the reality is this, and don’t forget that.
[Howard] One of the first things that I try to do when I’m in a new place with a new language is learn how humor works. So that I might reach that high bar of being able to tell a joke. The moment that I was hoping for in this book… Quietly, but hoping nonetheless, with all of Mahit’s appreciation of poetry and Three Seagrass’s standing as an actual poet, I thought, “Wow. If that was me, the real horror would be what if I have to write a poem?”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The stand up and cheer moment for me in this book was Mahit and Three Seagrass have to write a poem upon which their life literally depends.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] I love that so much, and the language aspect of the book supported it in a way…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] That… I stood up and cheered.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Worldbuilding is storytelling.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. She does a really great job of… One of the things for you, reader, when you’re thinking about this is how many different ways can you use a piece of worldbuilding? So she’s using language to do multiple different things. Which is part of why when we talk about muscular writing, that’s what we’re talking about, is having it do more than one thing.
[Howard] This is such a big flex.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Such a big flex.
[DongWon] I think we’ll leave it on that.
[DongWon] I have a little bit of homework for you. I would like for you to write a scene that describes a fictional piece of literature. Whether it’s a poem, a song, a story, comic book, that means something to the people in the story that you are telling.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
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[Mary Robinette] Let’s talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It’s going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
