I admit, we have not been making the progress that I hoped we would be making this past week toward the Wongery's hard opening. But then, this was a busy week for me for reasons that have nothing to do with the Wongery. I hope later I'll have more time to devote to it.

In any case, it's not as if we didn't do anything this last week. Two new articles are up—two more articles that had been written some time ago and waiting in a backlog. One about the Aabelon—one of the magical cabals that scheme for power on the world of Curcalen—and one about Matuni, the coldest of the five continents of the world of Dadauar. Still, two articles a week is not a pace I am happy with. At that rate, by the time of the hard opening we'll have about a hundred new articles. I want to have much more than a hundred new articles by then. Still, as I said, this has been a busy week, and hopefully we'll have more time in the future.

I say these articles were written some time ago, and that's true, but that's not to say that I just posted them as they were originally written. I did look over them first, mostly for proofreading, but also to catch any other errors or things I wanted to change. And there was one: I (these were articles I wrote myself) had referred to the phenomenon of—roughly speaking—things bigger on the inside than on the outside as "differsion". This had not been the first word I had chosen for this phenomenon, but on rereading it now I wasn't sure I was happy with it. After rechecking the Latin words I had derived it from I was less so. So I ended up spending several hours poring through other possible roots, looking for a word I liked better. I found one, finally, not too different from the previous: simply "fersion". But it took a while to get there.

This is, actually, something that takes up a lot of time in these articles for the Wongery. I like to have terms for things, and there are a great many things in fantasy and regarding possible magical phenomena that there aren't established words for—or for which the established words I feel are inadequate. So I end up coining a lot of new words in the Wongery not just for things tied to specific worlds, but for more general concepts that I felt didn't have suitable words before. I don't, however, generally just make up words out of thin air; I spend considerable time poring through dictionaries of Latin and Greek and Old English and other languages and trying to ensure the words I come up with have reasonable etymologies. "Fersion", for instance, as it will state in the etymology for the corresponding article (will state, because that's another of the many articles that needs to be rewritten—and of course in this case also renamed—and it currently says nothing of the sort) comes from the Latin verb farcio, meaning to stuff or cram, and the nominalizing suffix -tio, which in English generally becomes -tion. This suffix in Latin generally goes to the past passive participle of the verb; farcio has several variants for this form, of which "farsus" is one. The e in the word, however, comes (so the stated etymology will profess) presumably by analogy with other verbs derived from farcio such as confercio and effercio. (From an extradiegetic standpoint, it mostly comes from the fact that I wanted to allow a variant noun using the suffix "-ure", and "farsure" was already a word, albeit an obsolete one. As I said, I considered many possible words—the most common past passive participle of farcio was fartus, and I did for a time entertain using the noun "fartion" (and the adjective "fartive"), but, well, there's an obvious infelicity there.)

But "fersion" is far from the only concept we've coined a word for for the Wongery, nor is it the only one for which I've gone through several different words. (I guess as long as nobody is seeing and using these words, it's okay to keep changing them, but need to make sure they're nailed down before the hard opening.) I haven't kept a complete list, and even if I had it would be tedious to list them all here, but just a few other non-world-specific words coined for the Wongery include accore, achresis, aeiurgy, æalogy, aguia, aliter, allocrane, ambate, ananome, anek, angary, aœdeology, arcession, ardannader, auturgy, avalone, bleson, carrology, celemology, chamulcy, choroplex, cnodax, compit, crepature, cressarch, cromcor, darsis, desis, devinction, dimidiate, dochion, ellogy,epasma, eremization, esture, etory, hapantic, hysplex, iction, ingeniate, iuchurus, lepsis, lucomon, mester, millevia, myriach, naroplasm, opitulator, oroc, parogony, pageric, pantach, paracarminical, parathema, pexis, phallagom, pistication, plectoplex, proflation, rhegus, rophesis, scaft, schematonym, simation, synamma, teporion, thede, theder, thelxis, trochile, umbril, ungule, varate, vitium, xenurgy, ylifaction... well, there are a lot more, but you get the idea.

Is this all pointless? Have we been wasting our time? Well... possibly. It could be, of course, that even if after the hard opening we do get regular visitors to the site, no one but us is ever going to use any of those words, or remember what they're supposed to mean. At the other extreme, maybe those words will come into general enough use that people will eventually not realize that they originated here. Actually... I think I'd kind of be okay with the latter possibility. Though I don't suppose it's necessarily very likely.

Anyway, a lot of these articles, as it stands, are currently red links; the words are mentioned in Wongery articles (or maybe some of them haven't even come up yet?), but they're not actually defined yet. And they're never going to be, if we don't pick up the pace. So... I'll shoot to have more than two new articles up next week. I'm not sure exactly how many, but more than two.