In our culture, the word “alienated” refers to a normal condition but look it up in a hundred-year-old dictionary and it is a mental illness. The Catholic church used the word “atheist” to mean disbelief in God, but that word originated with the Greeks who meant “godless, without a god.” We could write stories about time travelers from a hundred years ago who know we are mentally ill, or about people whom no gods want.
“Time” originally meant, “to divide.” Now we think of it as a dimension we can travel through. Preliterate peoples had no such concept. European companies introducing factories into Africa had to teach the natives how to divide their day into shifts. One company put a large alarm clock on a pole in the village and whenever it went off, workers in the village would go to the factory and tell those already there to go home. I doubt workers in the afternoon shift ever imagined that they could physically travel to that morning’s shift and work before they came to the factory.
People are more down to earth than I as a writer sometimes think. The word “human” originally comes from the Greek and Persian and Latin words for “earth, land,” suffixed o-grade form, “earthling.” Now that makes the sci-fi in me wonder. Could I write a story about travelers coming to Earth billions of years ago and messing with the DNA of cyanobacteria – so that we humans evolve? Oh, wait. I did. That’s The Phoenix Diary.
Writers’ heads are full of words and how we relate them in a story is what makes the story ours. We can choose the right meanings for the story and write fiction that is truth. Do I believe travelers came to Earth a couple of billion years ago? Maybe. The evidence is the 1.7 billion year old Oklo nuclear reactors pictured in the NASA photo above.
The photo is NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day,” from September 12, 2010.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100912.html
NASA people say those nuclear reactors “must have formed naturally.” But what else could they say and keep their jobs?
Most people mostly say what is expected but expect writers to be creative, to say the unexpected. That’s fair. The oldest meaning of the word, “expect,” is “to observe.” Writers observe and express what they observe. We also play with our words in the process, to better describe the world we are observing. That may be what makes us writers: We like to play with words.
“Play” is a word that takes up a whole column in my large American Heritage dictionary. So many ways to play with that word! The original word root, in Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and possibly Latin, meant “to engage oneself.”
That is what we do with words, isn’t it?
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