Freedom of association

We go round and round (and round and round) the question of how a poor author of fantasy is to get by, when half his/her vocabulary is tarnished by cultural associations which are not those of the fantasy culture of which s/he writes. One aspect of the problem being, of course, that the effect on the reader does not depend on the cultural baggage which the word carries, or which the author knows that it carries, but on what the reader knows or does not know.

So I am currently reading Salon Fantastique, an anthology with many fine things in it, and among them a tale by Peter S. Beagle called Chandail. The eponymous chandail are - well, to some extent, the gradual revelation of what the chandail are is the whole matter of the tale. They are mysterious and magical sea creatures, that'll do. Unfortunately, chandail is also the ordinary French word for an item of knitwear, and this kept wandering into my mind while I was reading. Afterwards I came and checked in the French dictionary, which confirms that a chandail is a heavy knitted jumper or pullover, and, wonderfully, that is so called because it is the traditional garb of the marchand d'ail or garlic vendor. There is no reason why Peter S. Beagle should have known this: you can't know every word in every language.

The next story, though, was Greer Gilman's Down the Wall, and nineweaving is all about the allusions, picking up a dry leaf here, a wisp of wool there and weaving them with a fragment of shiny ballad into something all her own. I felt perfectly at ease with my mind's insistence that half of these characters were Pythonesque Pepperpots, as written by Mervyn Peake, and illustrated by Dave McKean.

What does all this prove? Just that you can't win them all, all you can do is work at your own comfort level. Readers are willful creatures, and should not be pandered to.