Lit Terms that shouldn't be used in Star Wars novels?

He's not right in any sense, pedantic or otherwise.

Gamiel, Lord Dunsany wants a word with you.

 

Vthuil said 'founding father of modern fantasy' and I think Edward Plunkett is more of a grandfather since he influenced the people who established the tropes that modern authors have to relate to in, one way or other.

 

Another one I've been thinking about is the term Dreadnaught. While it's now used just as a word for a large ship, it was originally a specific British ship in 1905, the HMS Dreadnought. If you're gonna be all nit-picky about language then a word based on a specific ship on earth should have no place in Star Wars.

Personally though, stuff like that doesn't bother me unless it's very jarring (I'm looking at you Chuck "space diapers" Wendig).

 

To my understanding dreadnought means "a person who fears nothing"/"something that assures against fear" and a piece of technology called that could just mean that it is so powerful that it has nothing to fear. A perfect name for a powerful war vehicle/machine.

 

There's also things in books that are described as 'Spartan' when there's obviously no Greece, or is there? There is Tion. The Tionese language is basically Greek. My personal theory is that there maybe was a place called Sparta, a planetary state that fell into obscurity and there's no evidence of its existence but the term remained. Same way the common person unfortunately wouldn't know what 'Spartan' even is before 300 came out.

That's my theory for a lot of the words that came from the real life through events and places that normally wouldn't exist. The term 'Holocaust', for example, comes from the Greek language. I would take that in-universe as that it came from the Tionese language. 'Fascism' meanwhile comes from 'fasces' in the Latin alphabet, and I believe we had a language that was practically Latin in Star Wars. I don't recall, but it was either High Galactic or Old Corellian. One of those two.

 

It was High Galactic. (Might I add that the Sith holocron prop appearing in one of the Visual Dictionararies has a genuine Latin sentence written in Aurebesh!)

 

The GFFA uses the Metric System. Celsius is metric.

 

I think the better approach is to list the handful of solely Star Wars terms.

Utini!

Yub yub.

I think that about covers it.

Edit:

Echuta.

 

This example isn't actually from a novel, but it bothered me in an episode of TCW when Obi-Wan tells Anakin, who's piloting their ship, to "Step on it!"

...Step on what?

 

Do we know how speeder controls are set up? They may have accelerator pedals...

 

Steel kitten. Even in a fairly lousy book, that one stood out.

 

Not only, but I'm pretty sure in the very distant past there'd have been wheel-based vehicles in Star Wars. We see them in military application quite frequently through various time periods as well. We use terms that have been around since the 15th century and earlier even if the applications referred in said terms are no longer in use.

 

I'm about 1/2 way thru the Leia book Bloodline. They sure do much drinking in the book! Well anyway while I have no problems of authors using terms like beer, wine, hooch, brandy, etc,.....they shouldn't use earth alcoholic regional names like Port(Portugal), Champagne, Scotch, Tequila, Cognac, Bourbon, etc, etc.

 

Yes, Ferroplast Pitten is much better

 

None of this stuff ever really bothers me in Star Wars, but there was an episode of Game of Thrones that mentioned a "French cut dress" and I was like "Where's France in that world?"

 

He says FRINGED sleeves, not FRENCH sleeves.

 

Galactic Basic Standard was created as an artificial language by Republican scientists and only by pure chance it sounds exactly as modern-day English.
This gives a good explaination on why there are terms used in the GFFA that are cleary related to Earth: For example, while in real life there were old myths and historical events from which the terms "odyssey" (the legend of Odysseus), "Celsius" (a scientist named so) or "crusade" (the medievial crusades) stem from, in the Star Wars universe some guys sat down and invented those terms from out of nothing, and by chance they are spoken and written the same and have the same meanings as regular English words.
Surely this is very unlikely, but I can suspend my disbelief on this.

And the High Galactic Standard language exists in the GFFA too - while Basic is exactly like English, High Galactic is supposed to be Latin.

So I have no problem with words and phrases that are clearly related to Terran history and events. Many words came from such things but they must be used because there are no others terms.
I write fantasy set in imaginary worlds too and the only terms I try to avoid are those with a very clear connection to something Terran. For example, when I describe human ethnicities, I strictly avoid words such as "European" and "East Asian" for obvious reasons, though I still use "antiquity" or "medieval ages" in a current project because in it's world's fictional history there are time periods very akin to those eras on Earth.