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Alt. reality writers - how do you handle renaming or choosing to keep names for tech and other objects?
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Sorry if the post title doesn't clarify enough. If you write fiction that takes place in a reality or universe different to our own, do you keep the names for things, or use an alternate name? I'm sure there's a mixture of way to do this. On the one hand, it could really convey to the reader that the setting is out of place for them. But it could also, after a certain point, make things hard to understand. A Clockwork Orange is probably the most famous example of this, but goes to an extreme point that I'm not really considering.
Take, for example, and iPad/tablet. Apple borrowed the "pad" nomenclature from Asimov, and "tablet" was simply the choice of one of many words that means "rectangular information holder". It could have easily been "slab" computers.

At one point there was a contest to rename the "motion picture", and "Photoplay" won, but journalism and marketing started using "movies", and that stuck. So much of an invention's name is happenstance. How much should we take advantage of that to paint a world, and how much is too much?

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1 year ago