Wattles and Gibbets and Clappers, Oh My!
TelltaleGames
Former Telltale Staff
When you work in an office where people are developing a game about crime scene investigation, you hear a lot of interesting language. People around here are always discussing the mechanics of stuffing a body into a crate, the difference between a stabbing wound and a slashing wound, the fact that it's "spatter" and not "splatter" - sentences which take on a peculiar poetic quality if you imagine them out of context. They use a lot of unusual vocabulary, words your spell-checker doesn't know like "Ninhydrin" and "Luminol" and "Leucocrystal Violet." It can be difficult to understand.
And it's not just the CSI stuff, either. I also hear plenty of game company jargon that wouldn't make sense to most people. There is talk of "teching objects" and "baking lightmaps" and "exchange visibility," phrases which make use of familiar words but which offer little clue for the outsider as to their meaning.
A lot of professions are like this. Try hanging around medical doctors sometime and listen to the things they say to each other. A translator is required. These people are speaking a different language.
Or rather, a different dialect. We're used to thinking of dialects as being caused by geographic separation, ie, people in Mississippi don't speak English the same way that people in Wisconsin do. But as our occupations become increasingly specialized and require more and more words to describe concepts that are useless to people in other fields, they give rise to PROFESSIONAL dialects -- the doctors and financial analysts and computer game designers in my town may all speak English, but they do so in dramatically different ways. And it can be quite difficult for people speaking different dialects to understand one another, as any American who's tried to ask for directions in London, or in Mississippi, can tell you. At this point I am growing convinced that any attempt to communicate effectively with another person is ultimately doomed to failure.
Meanwhile, as new words are coined to describe exotic diseases and technologies, some of the old words drift OUT of use by the modern suburban masses, and thus become somewhat dialectal themselves. And this is kind of a shame, because a word like, say, "wattle" has a pleasingly quaint sound which will never be achieved by something like "Leucocrystal."
Why have I been droning on like this about words? Because as we've been working on Bone 2: The Great Cow Race, a story which occurs in a rustic, old-timey setting, a number of great words have come up that you might not hear very often any more, depending on where you live and what you do. My hope is that by providing them with a little media exposure, here in this international forum, I might give these words a bit of a shot in the arm, or perhaps even provide them with new meaning to carry them into the future. With that in mind, welcome to
Me, I like knowing what things mean, but I mostly just enjoy saying the words out loud. Yoke! Toque! Wattle! Gibbet! Clapper! It's a mantra of retro linguistic fashion for the new millennium, and I'd like to hear it chanted in the streets. They just don't make 'em like they used to.
If you care about the "right" answers, that is, what the traditionally accepted meanings are for the words in the challenge, then "a" is correct for all five. But bear in mind that meaning is negotiable as language evolves, and correct is not always best. The historical definitions preclude the construction of a great game-development sentence like "The jokes are yokes and the yokes are jokes, the clapper keeps fiddling the gibbets, and our lead lonker's gone into toque trying to noodle through all the wattle."
Now, for extra credit, a question Dave Bogan asked me which I was unable to answer:
And it's not just the CSI stuff, either. I also hear plenty of game company jargon that wouldn't make sense to most people. There is talk of "teching objects" and "baking lightmaps" and "exchange visibility," phrases which make use of familiar words but which offer little clue for the outsider as to their meaning.
A lot of professions are like this. Try hanging around medical doctors sometime and listen to the things they say to each other. A translator is required. These people are speaking a different language.
Or rather, a different dialect. We're used to thinking of dialects as being caused by geographic separation, ie, people in Mississippi don't speak English the same way that people in Wisconsin do. But as our occupations become increasingly specialized and require more and more words to describe concepts that are useless to people in other fields, they give rise to PROFESSIONAL dialects -- the doctors and financial analysts and computer game designers in my town may all speak English, but they do so in dramatically different ways. And it can be quite difficult for people speaking different dialects to understand one another, as any American who's tried to ask for directions in London, or in Mississippi, can tell you. At this point I am growing convinced that any attempt to communicate effectively with another person is ultimately doomed to failure.
Meanwhile, as new words are coined to describe exotic diseases and technologies, some of the old words drift OUT of use by the modern suburban masses, and thus become somewhat dialectal themselves. And this is kind of a shame, because a word like, say, "wattle" has a pleasingly quaint sound which will never be achieved by something like "Leucocrystal."
Why have I been droning on like this about words? Because as we've been working on Bone 2: The Great Cow Race, a story which occurs in a rustic, old-timey setting, a number of great words have come up that you might not hear very often any more, depending on where you live and what you do. My hope is that by providing them with a little media exposure, here in this international forum, I might give these words a bit of a shot in the arm, or perhaps even provide them with new meaning to carry them into the future. With that in mind, welcome to
The Great Cow Race Vocabulary Challenge and Poll
(pick your favorite meanings for each of the following Cow Race related words)
- yoke
- a) a device for attaching two animals together at the neck
- b) a joke which is not funny
- c) a female nerd
- d) the mental leap a player has to make in order to solve an adventure game puzzle
- wattle
- a) the dangly bit under a chicken's chin
- b) the tuft of hair between a cow's horns
- c) the stuffing inside a seat cushion
- d) indecipherable comments in computer code
- gibbet
- a) what they hang you from when they hang you
- b) an automobile more than twenty years old
- c) the part of a chicken nobody wants
- d) the little handle attached to an object in a 3-D modeling program
- clapper
- a) the dangly bit in the middle of a bell
- b) the part of a toilet that doesn't work right
- c) someone who chides people for spending too much time watching television
- d) a somewhat derogatory term for a producer
- toque
- a) one of those goofy hats that chefs inexplicably wear
- b) a farm implement used to aerate the soil
- c) a laced Medieval shoe made from a single piece of leather
- d) the mental condition of a programmer after working forty-eight hours on potato chips and Red Bull
Me, I like knowing what things mean, but I mostly just enjoy saying the words out loud. Yoke! Toque! Wattle! Gibbet! Clapper! It's a mantra of retro linguistic fashion for the new millennium, and I'd like to hear it chanted in the streets. They just don't make 'em like they used to.
If you care about the "right" answers, that is, what the traditionally accepted meanings are for the words in the challenge, then "a" is correct for all five. But bear in mind that meaning is negotiable as language evolves, and correct is not always best. The historical definitions preclude the construction of a great game-development sentence like "The jokes are yokes and the yokes are jokes, the clapper keeps fiddling the gibbets, and our lead lonker's gone into toque trying to noodle through all the wattle."
Now, for extra credit, a question Dave Bogan asked me which I was unable to answer:
What is a wattle FOR?
This discussion has been closed.