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16 June 2009 2:16 PM
The Richest Literary Tradition
Could it be sci-fi?
Sam Jordison thinks so, assuming that the metric used is how many new words a genre contributes to the English language. His post is at its best when it delves into particular linguistic contributions.
This only bolsters the case that but for sci-fi we wouldn't have this cultural treasure.Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that "robot" is a relatively recent SF coinage. But if you're like me, you might be interested to discover it comes from the Czech word "robota", meaning forced labour. It was first used in a 1920 Czech play called RUR, Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Capek and first came into English in Paul Selver's 1923 translation. It then appeared in the Times in the same year in the wonderful sentence: "If Almighty God had populated the world with Robots, legislation of this sort might have been reasonable."
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And useful words, too. Fantasy may have contributed as many but half of them are weird elvish names that won't do anyone any good at all...