The Law of Terminological Inexactitude:
Any term created to describe a particular social happenstance occurring under particular conditions and among particular groups will rapidly evolve to include any possible happenstance under any possible condition that fits the technical definition of that term and displace the original intended meaning of the term.
The Incel Corollary:
A term which is particular will become expansive, similarly, a term which is expansive will become particular.
Last year, aided by an abundance of quotes from other fantasy writers, I attempted to make an argument for fantasy as a genre fundamentally rooted in history. The basic thrust of my argument was that intelligent fantasy riffs on history, takes its materials and combines it in new ways, albeit often whilst borrowing mythology's toys.
It turns out, though, that Adam Roberts has beaten me to it with a far, far more incisive, intelligent, and compelling argument: that
[C]ontemporary Fantasy is, amongst other things, a mode of historical fiction:—that genre Fantasy is one of the ways the historical novel has evolved as a form, out of the fiction of Walter Scott and his nineteenth-century imitators
It's nice to have one's errant notions confirmed by a greater intellect.
Phil Christman has this rather good idea, which he exposits here, of "discursive basilisks."
Basically, there are some discourses that are so bad that the only healthy way to engage with them is not only not to engage with them but if possible not to directly look at them. Certainly to attend to them with any specificity is to boost their power. You can talk about them in a vague way, you can gesture at them, but you need to stay carefully on the side of the use-mention distinction, where you’re vaguely gesturing at them. There is something radioactive about the words themselves.
This is how he explains it initially. But for my money, there's an expansion a little later on, spinning from that last sentence, that's even better. The discursive basilisk is something that
will play and replay in your head forever and make your head a worse place to live.
So, given that the third in this irregular series has been hidden, I think I'm going to need to investigate options for separating this blog from Blogger — eg Wordpress. Which opens up the ability to finally acquire for myself a proper website, something which is long since overdue.
If you’ve watched House of the Dragon and read the chapters of Fire & Blood it’s based on, you’ve been let into a knowledge of the past usually found only in people that read history widely.
So, last time, I sketched an idea of self-confidence as functionally similar to other forms of confidence in being something that requires "putting in the hours." I didn't, however, sketch out what that means, and it's also the case that it's a little bit more complicated than that. What follows is my attempt to figure out what "putting in the hours" means.
