Fantasy terminology

Sometimes I worry about terminology in my fantasy being too cheesy or precious. I think we’ve all heard the jokes about capitalization in fantasy, something I tend to avoid. I usually prefer to treat magic as just another part of life in the worlds I create, but it can be hard to convey that when most of the words we have for it are meant to express something, well, magical.

My current project caused some trouble for me because it’s a magic system where each person develops a magical power that’s somehow a natural extension of some aspect of their identity. I wasn’t sure what to call these powers. I had originally landed on “gifts” with the society viewing them as something the gods had endowed them with. I wasn’t quite happy with the general feel of this. Though I did glance at Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland to see what the view of the term was there and it wasn’t too bad:

“GIFTS is another word for TALENTS. It is used by people who feel reverent about MAGIC.”

That actually did fit what I wanted in terms of the religious view in the world I’m making, but something about it was still bothering me. I just had a hard time imagining all different people with different attitudes using it.

Then I decided that this society was going through a sort of Enlightenment period. People are beginning to question the dominant religion and many of them are changing to more neutral terminology like “ability”. So people still use the term “gift” but now it says something about them and their beliefs. Or not. In my main character’s case, she’s not particularly religious but she sticks with the traditional term out of convenience—usually avoiding arguments with more religious relatives—and because it’s just the term most people grow up using, the same way atheists in our world often still say “oh my god”.

I think I’m satisfied with it now.

Petty Worldbuilding Problem

Over the last couple years I’ve been working on some massive worldbuilding projects. I looked over the stories I’ve written and the ones I have planned and divided them between several worlds, deciding which ones take place on the same world. Each one of these worlds has magic that works in different ways. The magic is also used differently in different times and places in each world because each society experimented differently and came to different conclusions about how it works. So I grouped each of my stories based on which overarching magical system it best fit into.

I ended up with fifteen of these worlds.

I’ve been stuck on how to name them all this time. Whenever I come up with a new society for a story, I come up with some rules for the phonetics of the main language they use so that I can create names that sound consistent, like they belong to the same culture. I could use one of these for the worlds too. The problem is that I can never decide which society should get to name the world. I know it’s silly but that’s been holding me up.

Maybe I’ll name each world based on the first story I finished set in it. I’ll make that satisfy whatever ridiculous notion of fairness is buzzing around my brain.