: Re: Appropriate use of outdated vocabulary and terms? I'm in the process of planning a story right now, without the intention of sharing it it with others, but I would like it to be comprehensible

@Kevin153

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This really comes down to style and the backstory for your journal. If it's supposed to have sat unread in a drawer for 140 years, nobody would have been able to annotate it; if it's been an object of scholarly study throughout that time, there'll be endless rewrites and examinations of it.

For myself, if I were reading a piece of fiction that was set in a certain time and written by a person of that time, unless it would be totally unreadable without translation (say, written in Old English or similar), I would prefer to see the unusual words exactly as they were written and look them up myself if I'm confused. Adding annotations to clarify feels rather cheap to me, and feels as though the audience is being patronised.

It also severely dates the work, because if somebody's reading it in twenty years and finds that some old words have been annotated but others haven't, it feels less like it was written 140 years ago, more like it was written twenty years ago. For example, if I was reading a book which noted that "Gay" simply meant 'happy' and not 'homosexual', I wouldn't be thinking "Ah, thanks for sharing that", I'd be thinking "Oh, this was annotated ten years ago before 'gay' became a general expression of dislike".

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