Word that should be done away with according to Io9.

I feel like some of these terms originated in fanfic -- Mary Sue, at least. Not sure about the others.

When I was getting my doctorate in Comp Lit, we'd use terms like dystopian, exposition, and omniscient POV, but never info dump or head hopping. I discovered those online. (And I love the term head hopping because it gives me a way to pinpoint something that drives me crazy. No way I'm giving that up!)

I m curious when the term "head hopping" originated. Pulls a couple craft books that deal with pov off shelves.

Orson Scott Card (Characters and Viewpoint, 1988) distinguishes between omniscient and limited in his chapter on third person, and he says you should not change pov mid scene, but he doesn't use the term head hopping.

Characters, Emotion and Viewpoint (2005) by Nancy Kress doesn't use the term "head hopping either," though the author enjoins readers not to change pov promiscuously and to leave pov changes for scene breaks.

Both books also talk about narrative distance within limited third povs.

So it may be a term that's been coined fairly recently. But that doesn't mean the concept (and the admonition not to shift between characters mid-scene in a limited pov) haven't been around for a while.

This blog entry by Wendig on POV cracks me up.

Aggy B. said:

Beta-reader, like these other words, fulfills a specific definition because it differs from an alpha-reader (someone who reads unedited/unpolished work) or a crit partner (who would read on a back and forth trade across multiple projects, not just a single book).

It's also not an unknown concept; video games and other consumer products have been using beta-testers for years.

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It describes something people have been doing for millennia; doubtful whether a new term was needed. But it's a usefully compact term. And certainly inoffensive compared to other recent attempts at neologisms, especially the flood of unneeded, clumsy portmanteaus. (The other day, I saw someone announcing he'd just made up the word "snortle" to mean "snort and chortle", apparently not knowing Lewis Carroll had already done the work for him by (probably) combining "chuckle" and "snort" into "chortle" in the first place in 1872. Carroll knew how to forge a new word.)

The basic objection in the article seems to be that a lot of perfectly good terms are being used inappropriately/more broadly than their original meaning.

Mary Sue
Correct usage: A character who bends the universe and the plot around her, and is perfect, and who tells you which other characters are good and which are bad by whether or not they like the Sue.
Incorrect usage: An awesome, super-competent character who's the star of her own story.

Head-hopping
Correct usage: Frequent, badly-transitioned shifts in POV that leave the reader confused as to who is saying or thinking what.
Incorrect usage: Any multiple-POV writing style.

Dystopia
Correct usage: A society that has become a twisted, malevolent reflection of the real world.
Incorrect usage: Any sort of crapsack world where life sucks. Especially when conflated with "post-apocalyptic."

Jamesaritchie said:

Ellen Kushner does not seem to understand what "relatable" means in terms of character. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the character being your pal, or the character being you. It's really is the wrong word, though. "Empathetic" is the right word. If there is no empathy towards a character, a reader will not care if that character lives or dies.

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No, you've misunderstood her objection. A lot of readers complain about characters who are not "relatable" meaning either they are not like the reader, or not likeable. Kushner is saying that you should care about the character (i.e, empathy) and what happens to him or her, but you don't need to identify with or like the character.

Manuel Royal said:

(The other day, I saw someone announcing he'd just made up the word "snortle" to mean "snort and chortle", apparently not knowing Lewis Carroll had already done the work for him by (probably) combining "chuckle" and "snort" into "chortle" in the first place in 1872. Carroll knew how to forge a new word.)

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We've been snergling in my family for years. Hasn't caught on elsewhere yet, but we all know what it means.

Amadan said:

No, you've misunderstood her objection. A lot of readers complain about characters who are not "relatable" meaning either they are not like the reader, or not likeable. Kushner is saying that you should care about the character (i.e, empathy) and what happens to him or her, but you don't need to identify with or like the character.

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I've always seen the term "relatable" used to mean a character who is capable of engendering the interest and empathy of the reader, regardless of whether they are likable or not. I think the author is creating a straw man here.

That's my main problem with much of this article. The author is interpreting the words the way they want, or possibly taking a half-baked misinterpretation of the term they've encountered somewhere on the web, then using that as a rationale for scuttling a useful concept. It actually makes me think about what would happen if, say, scientists made a list of every scientific or technical term that is commonly misunderstood by people with less training (or that has a different meaning in everyday life) and using that as a rationale for banning the word entirely, or maybe even just deleting the entire concept from our textbooks.