Brave New Words

May sees the general release of the much awaited new Star Trek movie directed by JJ Abrams and starring Chris Pine as the young Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock. In Brave New Words, the first historical dictionary devoted entirely to science fiction, the editor, Jeff Prucher, explores how the language of this genre, including that of Star Trek and other creations, has permeated mainstream language and culture:

The television show Star Trek, which first aired in 1966, has probably had a greater effect on the English language than any other single science fiction creation, with the possible exception of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Words coined for the series and its spin-offs have stuck in the popular imagination, and are used by people in all walks of life. Some, like mind-meld and warp speed, are mainly used figuratively outside of science fiction. Starfleet has found a foothold in science fiction itself, while cloaking device and nanite straddle both worlds. Star Trek also introduced the world to Klingon, the language created by linguist Marc Okrand for the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and which has since taken on quite a life of its own.

When SF writers want to describe the life of a spacefaring society, they frequently use nautical terms. The analogy between travel in space and travel on the seas is a straightforward one - both entail enclosing people in a self-contained vessel, protected from a hostile environment by only a thin shell, in which they may spend long periods of time between ports, whether on islands or planets. This analogy is most directly made by simply using a nautical term in an outer-space setting, so boat, craft, ship, and vessel, as well as cruiser, destroyer, and dreadnought, can describe both watercraft and spacecraft. Similarly, like a seagoing vessel, a spaceship may be composed of an external hull, punctuated with portholes, which encases and protects the decks, bulkheads, cabins, and bridge, not to mention the captain and crew. If it is a military vessel, it may belong to a navy, in which case the ship's captain probably reports to an admiral. Even the familiar science-fictional alien mother ship is an appropriation of a naval term. Frequently, SF writers take a nautical word and add "space" or "star" to it, as in space dock, space liner, space pirate, spaceship, starfleet, starport, etc. "Sea" can be replaced in compounds such as spacefaring, space-going, and space-sick, as can "ship," in words like spaceyard. Sometimes these appropriations and substitutions can be a matter of expedience, but there is a poetry to it as well; science fiction has often been a literature of exploration and adventure, and drawing on the language of the sea can hearken back to the excitement and romance of the Age of Sail.

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction is now available in paperback. For more details, please click here.

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