The power of names

Yesterday and today I set myself to working on titles and forms of address to be used in the novel. I ran a large number of possible roots and compounds through the phonological mill, applied my general principle that romance roots are considered more upperish-class and germanic ones more lowerish-class, and picked the results with the right "feel". The next step was putting together a matrix of all relevant combinatorial interactions of class, formality, age, and intimacy and sketching out the general social rules for address and reference. The exciting part was that as I started firming up the results, I could feel the tone of the story shift from "generic Englishy feel" to "definitely Somewhere Else". "Mistress *placeholder*" is a rather different person from "Maisetra Sovitre". One of the fun things I hope to do in my overly-analytical way is to track the shifting relationships between the main characters not only in how they address and refer to each other, but -- in the case of the two POV characters -- how people get referred to during their "stage time". Yes, it's a bit excessively picky, but it's sort of like getting the food right, or the clothes right. I have most of the main characters named at this point, so I think I'm ready to start the revision process on Part I. I'm guessing that what with one thing and another this process will take me through the end of the year.

An interesting LJ observation

So every once in a while I browse some of my LJ-friends friends-lists to see who else might be posting interesting things that I'm not reading regularly. What I find is that even for people with whom I share only about 20% of our friends-lists, the overlap in content of our friends-postings is typically around 60-80%. Part of this is that -- because I f-lock so few of my posts -- I don't feel the need to friend people just so they can read me. So if I get friended and on poking around I discover that the person either doesn't post much of anything or only posts memes, I generally don't friend back. So if I'm comparing f-lists with someone and they don't have a similar strategy, our f-list overlap percentage is going to be smaller than otherwise. It's also possible that a fairly high proportion of posters (overall) f-lock their posts and, of course, when I browse someone else's f-list I only see postings from people we have in common or who don't f-lock. Checking my own f-list postings, if I eliminate feeds and communities, about a third of the posts I see are f-locked. So someone else viewing my f-list would only see 2/3 of the personal postings that I see. If my friends and my friends' friends f-lock at similar rates, then if I share 20% membership with someone, and I see 100% of the 20% overlap posting but only 67% of the 80% non-overlap posting, then I'd expect the shared visible postings to be 20/(20+54)= 27% overlap of what I see on that persons f-list. Now to approximate the effects of my not friending non-posters (and thus artificially decreasing the potential f-list overlap) I note that people I haven't reciprocally friended represent about a quarter of the number of mutual friends I have. But as a wild-assed estimate, if this increased the potential f-list overlap to 25% (from 20%), then the expected shared visible postings would be 25/(25+50)=33%, and still not close to the approximately 60% or so overlap that seems to be the minimum I see.

From this, I jump to the completely unwarranted conclusion that my friends are simply, on average, much more interesting and prolifically-posting people than other people's friends. :)