Made up words

A reader emailed to ask if the word “materiel” in SILENT ORDER: PULSE HAND was a mistake, and if it should have been spelled “material.”

No, this was correct. “Materiel” is a real word – it refers to weaponry, supplies, and equipment used for war and the military.

Or, to quote the Wikipedia definition:

“Materiel are supplies, equipment, and weapons in military supply-chain management, and typically supplies and equipment in a commercial supply chain context. In a military context, the term materiel refers either to the specific needs (excluding manpower) of a force to complete a specific mission, or the general sense of the needs (excluding manpower) of a functioning army. An important category of materiel is commonly referred to as ordnance, especially concerning mounted guns (artillery) and the shells they consume. Along with fuel, and munitions in general, the steady supply of ordnance is an ongoing logistical challenge in active combat zones.”

To put it another way, not only is materiel a real word, it is in fact a topic to which many serious-minded military officers have devoted much serious-minded thought, since a failure to address your military’s materiel needs means you are going to lose the war before the first shot is fired.

To be fair, as a SF/F writer, I make up a lot of words. Grammarly is always so impressed that I use so many unique words, but it really isn’t fair because I make a lot of them up.

That said, I was a history major, which was not helpful to finding a real job, but turned out to be useful for concepts and terms for fantasy novels. Like, in FROSTBORN, I used the terms Dux and Comes for noblemen instead of “Duke” and “Count” because Latin was the primary language of Andomhaim. However, given how confused some readers were by the terms “Dux” and “Comes”, if I had to do it all over again I probably would default to Duke and Count.

Though “urvaalg” was one of my better made up rewards. No one ever gets confused about what an urvaalg is. 🙂

-JM