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queenluaSo in the Viz translation of the Wolf's Rain manga, they did an odd thing with chapter titles—instead of labeling things "chapter 1," chapter 2," etc, each section was titled "grope 1," grope 2," etc.
There was a translator's note that explained this odd naming convention. Evidently, the original Japanese also used a non-standard word to label the chapters; it used a word that meant something to the effect of "to reach a point at the end of a long struggle." The translator chose to render this as "grope," I imagine, as a closest approximation to the original Japanese while remaining concise. One problem, though: your first thought upon seeing the word "grope" all by its lonesome was probably "ew is there some molester person in this manga." Alas, connotations.
It's unfortunate that "grope" has such ugly connotations, because I adore the lovely and shadowy connotations of "grope" when put in a context like "groping through the darkness for the key"—it implies blindness, struggle, indeterminateness, a question and a quiet fear. It implies grasping with hands, implies physicality, moreso than say, "struggle," which is just generalized striving. I liked how it fit with the travel/quest plotline of Wolf's Rain—with the translator's context in mind, seeing it after every chapter gave me this small sense of relief, a small outbreath. It went a long way toward implying that some big, exhausting struggle had just happened, and a big exhausting journey was still ahead.
I was thinking about this today because there's a Unix function—"grep"—which also means something like "to search," and sounds a bit like "grope." In technical use, grep is a terminal command that lets you search for a particular word or words within a bunch of files. If I type, say, "grep -r ponies ./ponypalace" into a terminal, it searches the ponypalace folder for all instances of the word "ponies." It's super-useful when you're programming, to figure out where a particular function or class was first defined, all of the files that use a particular object, changing variable names, and so on.
But, if you hang out around programmers who only ever talk with other programmers and should really go outside sometimes (aka, me), they'll sometimes use grep in slangy ways, or in non-technical contexts. "I was grepping around my homedir," is a perfectly acceptable technical use of the term, but then they'll be like "ugh I need to grep my bookshelf for that Knuth book," which is obviously non-technical. It's not really done self-consciously or ironically, either, unlike "lol I'd fork your repo"-style jokes. It's just a part of the vocabulary—you spend so much time grepping at the terminal that you start grepping in real life, too.
Me? I like "grep" as a word a lot. I like that it sounds a bit like "grope," and it makes me think of some of those lovely connotations I mentioned before. I like that it has the same vowel as the word "trek," that it's nearly a slant-rhyme for "trek," as it implies something a bit grander in scope. Trekking. It's fitting—grepping through a really huge file tree does feel pretty grand.
Grep isn't quite grope, obviously. When I think about the two side-by-side, I think grep sounds a bit more focused, a bit more purposeful. But not in the sense of say, find or strive. Striving has an end goal, a plan, and exertion as its primary characteristic. In Unix, you're generally grepping to find all instances of something, or to figure out where to look more closely—it's a purposeful but scattershot search, broad in scope and often experimental.
But grep is a weird word, by conventional standards, and though hearing someone use "grep" as a verb scarcely makes me blink anymore, I imagine for most other people, it sounds cyberpunky and unnatural. Like a word you'd see on one of those standardized tests with the fake words and fake definitions you have to memorize. Lep and bloy and plam and grep.
Two takeaways from this: first, I think this kind of, in a roundabout way, speaks to the difficulty that science fiction writers face when they try to spin up a jargon or set of science-y words for their universe. Like, they have to do that to an extent, right—if people are still talking about space shuttles and the internet and headphones in the year 3030, I'm not gonna totally believe you. But to my ear, 99% of the time the made-up terms ends up sounding like unnatural gobbledegook.
But dude, for a long time I thought my mathsci colleagues were speaking unnatural gobbledegook, too, and that was a real, actually extant jargon. I remember making fun of an especially math-y, cs-y friend for using "orthogonal to" and "increasing monotonically" and "ping" and so on in casual speech, when we first started hanging out freshman year of college; after about a year of hanging around him and doing All The Maths and All The Computer Science, I sounded a whole hell of a lot like him.
In theory, fantasy writers have this problem too, but rather than face it head-on, they tend to reserve the weird made-up words for magic incantations that are meant to be nonsensical anyway, and just resort to pseudo-Early-Modern-English for the rest. Sometimes they substitute "by the goddess" or "hellfires" in place of actual swearywords, but those never feel quite natural, either, which just goes back to proving how hard this inventing-a-jargon thing is.
But the other takeaway, which is really the point of this whole ramble, is: I want to fast-forward fifty years so I can use "grep" in standard prose without sounding like a fucking blockhead, because I'm totally writing a story right now where grep would be a rather interesting and lovely word in this one sentence if it were actually in common colloquial use and had the connotations I imagine it to have, and clearly fifty years from now everyone will be using Unix and contributing to Viva La Revolution Open Source so it will totally be a colloquial term by then, am I right or what.
There was a translator's note that explained this odd naming convention. Evidently, the original Japanese also used a non-standard word to label the chapters; it used a word that meant something to the effect of "to reach a point at the end of a long struggle." The translator chose to render this as "grope," I imagine, as a closest approximation to the original Japanese while remaining concise. One problem, though: your first thought upon seeing the word "grope" all by its lonesome was probably "ew is there some molester person in this manga." Alas, connotations.
It's unfortunate that "grope" has such ugly connotations, because I adore the lovely and shadowy connotations of "grope" when put in a context like "groping through the darkness for the key"—it implies blindness, struggle, indeterminateness, a question and a quiet fear. It implies grasping with hands, implies physicality, moreso than say, "struggle," which is just generalized striving. I liked how it fit with the travel/quest plotline of Wolf's Rain—with the translator's context in mind, seeing it after every chapter gave me this small sense of relief, a small outbreath. It went a long way toward implying that some big, exhausting struggle had just happened, and a big exhausting journey was still ahead.
I was thinking about this today because there's a Unix function—"grep"—which also means something like "to search," and sounds a bit like "grope." In technical use, grep is a terminal command that lets you search for a particular word or words within a bunch of files. If I type, say, "grep -r ponies ./ponypalace" into a terminal, it searches the ponypalace folder for all instances of the word "ponies." It's super-useful when you're programming, to figure out where a particular function or class was first defined, all of the files that use a particular object, changing variable names, and so on.
But, if you hang out around programmers who only ever talk with other programmers and should really go outside sometimes (aka, me), they'll sometimes use grep in slangy ways, or in non-technical contexts. "I was grepping around my homedir," is a perfectly acceptable technical use of the term, but then they'll be like "ugh I need to grep my bookshelf for that Knuth book," which is obviously non-technical. It's not really done self-consciously or ironically, either, unlike "lol I'd fork your repo"-style jokes. It's just a part of the vocabulary—you spend so much time grepping at the terminal that you start grepping in real life, too.
Me? I like "grep" as a word a lot. I like that it sounds a bit like "grope," and it makes me think of some of those lovely connotations I mentioned before. I like that it has the same vowel as the word "trek," that it's nearly a slant-rhyme for "trek," as it implies something a bit grander in scope. Trekking. It's fitting—grepping through a really huge file tree does feel pretty grand.
Grep isn't quite grope, obviously. When I think about the two side-by-side, I think grep sounds a bit more focused, a bit more purposeful. But not in the sense of say, find or strive. Striving has an end goal, a plan, and exertion as its primary characteristic. In Unix, you're generally grepping to find all instances of something, or to figure out where to look more closely—it's a purposeful but scattershot search, broad in scope and often experimental.
But grep is a weird word, by conventional standards, and though hearing someone use "grep" as a verb scarcely makes me blink anymore, I imagine for most other people, it sounds cyberpunky and unnatural. Like a word you'd see on one of those standardized tests with the fake words and fake definitions you have to memorize. Lep and bloy and plam and grep.
Two takeaways from this: first, I think this kind of, in a roundabout way, speaks to the difficulty that science fiction writers face when they try to spin up a jargon or set of science-y words for their universe. Like, they have to do that to an extent, right—if people are still talking about space shuttles and the internet and headphones in the year 3030, I'm not gonna totally believe you. But to my ear, 99% of the time the made-up terms ends up sounding like unnatural gobbledegook.
But dude, for a long time I thought my mathsci colleagues were speaking unnatural gobbledegook, too, and that was a real, actually extant jargon. I remember making fun of an especially math-y, cs-y friend for using "orthogonal to" and "increasing monotonically" and "ping" and so on in casual speech, when we first started hanging out freshman year of college; after about a year of hanging around him and doing All The Maths and All The Computer Science, I sounded a whole hell of a lot like him.
In theory, fantasy writers have this problem too, but rather than face it head-on, they tend to reserve the weird made-up words for magic incantations that are meant to be nonsensical anyway, and just resort to pseudo-Early-Modern-English for the rest. Sometimes they substitute "by the goddess" or "hellfires" in place of actual swearywords, but those never feel quite natural, either, which just goes back to proving how hard this inventing-a-jargon thing is.
But the other takeaway, which is really the point of this whole ramble, is: I want to fast-forward fifty years so I can use "grep" in standard prose without sounding like a fucking blockhead, because I'm totally writing a story right now where grep would be a rather interesting and lovely word in this one sentence if it were actually in common colloquial use and had the connotations I imagine it to have, and clearly fifty years from now everyone will be using Unix and contributing to Viva La Revolution Open Source so it will totally be a colloquial term by then, am I right or what.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-26 05:52 pm (UTC)I think I've seen the word Lua's talking about, though I can't seem to find Wolf's Rain raws. The word specifically refers to not the movement, but the point at which the journey is finally over. "Arrival" is far more mundane but probably closer than any of the above. Of the evocative ones I like "Catharsis" best though it's not quite accurate.
I'm with you both in that "grope" is a terrible choice. The "groping around in the darkness" meaning is way, way less mentally prominent than the molestation.