Worldbuilding: when is it too much?

[serria]

I, along with a couple other members of this community, absolutely love world building. In stories that take place in non-Earth settings, I love developing cultures, religions, ecosystems - you name it. Part of the appeal is the freedom to be god without worrying about mucking up details, but mostly I just love the opportunity to be creative.

But as I write "original world" stories, I find myself struggling with a lexicon that's realistic to my world without being annoying. Here's an example: if characters in a fantasy world have a concept of named days/weeks, should they use Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.? How about January, February, and so forth? It would be strange for a culture that had no Roman or Germanic history to use names blatantly rooted in such, just as it might be for these characters to celebrate Christmas. Is it therefore more helpful to invent new named days and months, or does simply confuse the readers unnecessarily, and it is permissible to "translate" a fantasy world into common vernacular?

When does "changing names" go from being world building, to falling under "Call A Rabbit A 'Smeerp'" territory?

In the same ballpark, but more extreme, should the words that characters use, or I use in my narration, be subject to world realism? Is it strange to use the word "maudlin" when the word comes from Mary Magdalene? Okay, that's a radical example, but I think most readers would be thrown out of a story if a character stubbed his toe and shouted "Jesus Christ!", even though the expression is better understood than perhaps a fantasy counterpart - so where is the line between making language and the world understandable to readers, and retaining world realism?

Comments

[sarillia]

I have this fuzzy line where if I feel like there are a lot of people who probably don't know the origins of the word then I'll go ahead and use it. The days of the week would be a borderline one. I'm like you and tend to question a lot and I tend to do what agilebrit said and not use any labels for the days of the week. After all, who says every society will organize the year and months into weeks with regular days? Maybe they have a different system for tracking the calendar.

But then there are things like "Herculean" where the origin is pretty obvious so I would avoid that. Also words for ideologies like "feminism" are things that I avoid. Although now I'm finding it very interesting that the oppressive systems in place feel universal enough to be put into a fantasy story without comment but the movements to shut them down feel too much a part of our world. I'll have to think more about this.

[inkdust]

that the oppressive systems in place feel universal enough to be put into a fantasy story without comment but the movements to shut them down feel too much a part of our world

Wow, yeah, that is VERY interesting to consider.

[serria]

I actually put a lot of thought into my world's calendar when I was doing the world building. I did think about weeks, days, months, years - how would it be different? Then I figured a month is essentially a moon's cycle - that's where the term "month" comes from, anyway. A week could theoretically be a different number of days, presumably fitting into the month in an order, more or less. But adjusting those times too much makes two problems that I see: one, opens a possibility that a year in the fantasy world is different from a year on Earth, which I wouldn't care to touch unless I was writing science fiction, and two, I couldn't see it as necessary unless it reflected an important number or other significance in my culture (such as, Splintered Star mentioned below, the Discworld series using eight days instead of seven). I didn't see that as necessary for my world, and certainly not worth the explanation. So I did use typical weeks and months, but I gave the weekdays new names - named after gods, as our real week is. I even thought about including a Sun Day and a Moon Day (after Sunday and Monday) but stuck with god days. I thought I was pretty clever at first, but then was second guessing how necessarily or obnoxious it was, hence this post. XD

Haha, your example of Herculean - another real example from my writing is, I wanted to describe a particular room as "Spartan", and then had to double-take. Though it's a word that has a meaning, the root is too obvious, and didn't feel appropriate for a world that didn't have Sparta.

I don't think I'd ever use any -ism word in a premodern fantasy world - I guess it's possible, but those just seem like really modern concepts (as an organized ideology, I mean). Despite the fact that I am interested in feminism in the fantasy genre, and absolutely interested in fantasy that tackles modern day issues like sexism, racism, homophobia, etc within its own setting, I'd be a little skeptical of flat out using those terms. If I think about it, I suppose it could be done, I guess I'd just have to see it done well.