Reflections From The Pond

I like words.

Swedish or English, I’ve always been curious about words and their origins and I love finding new ones and synonyms for old ones.

I used to giggle inside when I knew more words than my high school English teacher (can you believe she did not know that sorcerer was a synonym for magic user!) and I always flooded deluged my essays with lots of odd old words.

I guess to a native Englishman my way to speak and write is a peculiar mix of the different varieties of the language (British, American, Aussie, etc) and also I guess an odd mix of modern expressions, old idioms and my own constructions. 

Anyways, one thing that fascinates me with World of Warcraft is the words of the game.

There is a popular urban myth claiming that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, but I wonder if Blizzard is not close on their tails there.

I mean, how many words for ice bolt can you think of? Or how many words for fiery bolt?

Well, you have the basic Fireball of course, but also Fire Blast (blast = to explode or destroy something), Scorch (wither or parch from exposure to heat), Pyroblast (pyro denoting fire, heat or high temperature), Immolate (to kill or destroy by fire), Searing Pain (searing = very hot), Incinerate (burn to ashes) and Conflagrate (burst into flames), for example. All very fanciful and imaginative and conjuring up images of fire and brimstone and devastating heat.

Same with the more wintry kind of spells, with variations of Blizzard, Frost, Ice and Icy, Icebound, Winter, Freeze, and Cold among the many different spells of the Frost schools (mages, death knights and shamans), and they all bring forth allusions to biting, debilitating, numbing coldness.

But there is one spell I just don’t get – Wrath. The word wrath means intense anger, often on an epic scale, and wrath is one of the cardinal sins (the rest of the sins also having grand names such as gluttony and sloth). I don’t see any connection at all to the Nature based druid dps spell, and given the imagination shown by Blizzard in naming spells of all kinds I do think they could have come up with something better for this streak of greenish-turqoise fire.

There is also all the different items dropped by mobs all over the world, given names ranging from the plain and simple like Light Feather to more eloquent ones like Sericeous Down (covered with fine silky hair).

For example, there is a quest in Zul’drak that requires you to gather Diatomaceous Earths and Banshee Essences. Now, diatomaceous means something that easily crumbles to dust, and diatomaceous earth is a naturally occuring chalk-like sedimentary rock, very porous and light. When I was doing this quest I started to try to get this word into our guild chat conversations, and my fellow guidlies were not slow to pick it up and it didn’t take long until diatomaceous seemed like a word as common as a very common thing.

And the words just keep coming.

Last night, for example, as we were doing Trial of the Champion, the Cord of Tenebrous Mist and The Dagger of Tarasque dropped from the Beasts of Northrend encounter there.

I asked what tenebrous meant because I had no clue, and got a reply from a friendly guildie that it meant shady (thanks!). Shady, dark and gloomy, and it dawned on me why one of Sartharion’s hench drakes is called this – Tenebron, who like the other two hench drakes does a lot of shadow damage.

(Sartharion’s other drakes are called Shadron and Vesperon, and I guess Shadron is a play on Shadow + the drake name ending -(r)on. Vesper is an archaic word for evening, which again hints strongly of shadows.)

Tarasque was another matter, and I got suggestions that maybe it was not a “who” but rather a “what”, like instead of a dagger of cheese it was a dagger of the material tarasque.

Subsequent research showed that Tarasque was not a material but a fearsome beast found in both mythology and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as in the French military where it denotes a towed 20 mm anti-aircraft gun.

It is also a statue in the town of Tarascon in France.

I wonder what new things I will learn in WoW tomorrow.

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