shiny

One of the things you really notice about Whedon's work is the love of language. It is something to be played with, twirled around and twisted into new shapes and syntax. Buffyspeak is not real Valleyspeak and Firefly is in its own gorram universe of language. It's archaic, it's futuristic and it's just plain odd. Yet it is always understandable. I can't think of another scriptwriter with such a love of words and wordplay as Whedon. There's the fact that I unconsciously call things that are good "shiny" (I had to explain it to a colleague recently) or that "scary visual place" evokes a particular voice in my head. Sometimes, in an idle moment, I wonder if a handful of Firefly fans using "shiny" to denote "good" will eventually spread the word, meme-like, until the fictional meaning comes to be the norm. Then there is "corpsified" which is just a great word.

The big problem is writing Firefly fiction which evokes its futurespeak without just borrowing phrases wholesale. That's a problem with any fanfic: badfic sites always mentioning the borrowing of memorable phrases. I've been a member of the worthless word of the day mailing list for a long while now and it struck me tonight that here is a source for archaic and/or obscure words to use in Firefly fanfic. F'example:

picaroon
[Spanish picaron] /pik uh ROON/
1) a rogue or adventurer; a bohemian
2) a pirate, corsair
3) a small pirate ship
carnaptious
[fr. Sc. knap, to bite] /ka(r) NAP shus/
Scots & Irish dial. : bad-tempered, irritable, grumpy
cahooting
[fr. cahoots : collaboration, collusion]
conspiring, plotting

See? Hours of fun.