: Re: Using terms for clarity in first person When writing in 1st person POV, if your story's universe or your main character uses made up values of measurement or doesn't have a term for something

@Eichhorn147

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Show it.

"I'll take 40 nargs of milk," Jon said, carefully counting out the
gime needed to purchase it.

Stan's eyes went wide, and Jon waited for him to ask why he would need
so much, but instead Stan pushed his hat back to look at the little
cart he was hauling and said, "How you going to carry all
that?"

"I'll manage somehow," Jon said. It turned out to be a bit more of a
balancing act than he'd counted on, and one of the jugs fell out as he
hit a hole in the road, but none spilled and he placed it back on.

You can get more descriptive than that. We don't need to know exactly how much a measure is, but you can give people a rough idea.

Tell it.

In the market they sold colorful silk fabric by the el. Will used to
joke that an el in Drubinshire was longer than an el in Frisinki,
because in Frisinki they used the king's personal part as the measure, and here
they used the mayors'. She found herself missing Will's vulgar
inaccuracies, even though she never could buy silk without thinking an
el was overlarge if that's where the measure came from.

Still doesn't give us an inch for el measurement, but for the purposes of your story, you know that it's a measure of length, and it's longer than um...and this also tells us something about the characters.

You say that the character:

doesn't have a term for something like eyeliner or traffic lights

In this case, I take that to mean that they might be experiencing eyeliner or traffic lights for the first time (although eyeliner...that's really, really old or at least the idea of lining or darkening around your eyes is--sailors did it back in the day). So they either don't have a concept for it (traffic lights) or they do (eyeliner probably). If they do, it will remind them of something--a person with eyeliner or eyeshadow might remind them of sailors or pirates and that can be ever so much fun!!

Play with that--that they have things like it (history really does repeat itself and you would be surprised what your person might have seen in a different context) but that the context or meaning is totally different! Maybe only high priestesses darken round their eyes, or people with plague to mark them--or, or, or.

As to a never-before seen thing, like say a traffic light-- @FraEnrico 's example is perfect, and I can't improve on it. It's situational though, depending on how observant the character is--they might not notice until after they get run over, and if they are walking might be more likely to notice the little walking man icon and the hand, along with the pedestrian flow.

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