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> Do you realize that most of those "made-up words" in Anathem were just lightly mangled Latin?

It still felt cheap. Give me another book like Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_ where all the made-up words were English words! (And obviously often Latin-derived.)



It had a purpose in the context of the novel. Why did it strike you as being cheap?


Most of them struck me as being poor riddles; 'here's this strange quasi-English quasi-Latin word which is usually a portmanteau; try to figure out from context what it means and how I derived it!' They wound up irritating me like the meaningless religious allusions and terms in _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ (and many other anime) irritate me.

Maybe there was a purpose in the novel's context beyond being a strange bit of parallel-worlds gimcrackery. I must've missed it.




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