New World English
Hello, Ray. I think I understand what you're contemplating, and it could be a very consequential stylistic decision for The New World.
If you mean removing the word “the” from all New World prose and dialogue, rather than merely changing the title, that would fundamentally alter the voice of the world.
For example:
“The Strawberry Records building stands above Neon Row.”
becomes:
“Strawberry Records building stands above Neon Row.”
And:
“I went to the market and bought the record.”
becomes:
“I went to market and bought record.”
That second version is much more radical. It begins to sound like a language that has evolved after civilization's long disappearance.
There is actually something fascinating about it because The New World already has linguistic rules that distinguish it from our world. Citizens aren't simply people from 2026 transported into 3026. Their culture, institutions, naming conventions, relationship to time, economics, and even their understanding of mortality are different.
Removing “the” could become another piece of that linguistic evolution.
But I would not mechanically delete every occurrence. I'd establish it as a grammatical convention.
For instance:
Old World English:
“The Rev went to the Strawberry Records building to meet Orson Vile.”
New World English:
“Rev went to Strawberry Records building to meet Orson Vile.”
Or:
Old World:
“The citizens gathered on the Dandelion Mile.”
New World:
“Citizens gathered on Dandelion Mile.”
That actually feels quite natural.
Where it becomes particularly interesting is dialogue:
“I saw the girl at the market.”
could become:
“I saw girl at market.”
Now we're no longer merely writing quirky English. We're approaching a New World dialect.
And there is another possibility I like even more: Natural Humans retain conventional English, while New World Citizens use the altered grammar.
That would give you a linguistic distinction between populations without having to explain it every time.
A Deadender might say:
“I went to the Strawberry Records building.”
A Citizen might say:
“I went to Strawberry Records building.”
That tiny difference would quietly tell the reader which world a speaker belongs to.
Given that you've accumulated something approaching a million words, though, I wouldn't start rewriting everything yet. I'd first create a New World Language Style Guide and test the rule against perhaps 20 representative passages from your existing material. We could determine which uses of “the” should disappear, which should remain, and whether other little grammatical changes naturally emerge.
Because if we're going to do this, I think we should discover what New World English actually sounds like, rather than simply performing a million-word search-and-destroy operation on one three-letter word. 😄
Exactly. And that changes the project in a very useful way.
You don't need to retrofit a million words. BRAINSTORM itself becomes the doorway into New World English.
The reader can encounter this conversation, understand the rule, and then gradually begin noticing it throughout the New World material. Once their brain catches the pattern, it stops looking like unusual grammar and starts feeling like the grammar of somewhere else.
I think we should make that an explicit principle of the Style Guide:
XIII. Acclimation
New World English is introduced through exposure, not explanation.
The reader first encounters New World English in BRAINSTORM and learns, consciously or unconsciously, that Citizens speak differently from Natural Humans.
The purpose is not to make the reader stop and decode language.
The purpose is to make the reader's ear adjust.
At first:
“Why did they leave out the?”
Then:
“Oh, that's how Citizens talk.”
Eventually:
“That sounds wrong with the in it.”
That's the transformation we're after.
And because BRAINSTORM consists of the actual conversations through which the New World has been developed, it is almost perfect for this. The reader isn't being handed a fictional linguistics textbook. They're watching the language emerge while they're learning the world itself.
Which gives us an even more interesting rule
The New World does not need to explain everything.
A reader encounters:
“Citizens don't sleep.”
They don't necessarily get a footnote explaining the biology.
They encounter:
“I was at festival with Rev.”
They don't need a grammar lesson.
They encounter:
“Natural Humans still use old money.”
Now they're beginning to assemble the rules themselves.
That fits beautifully with the whole BRAINSTORM concept. It becomes almost an archaeological experience in reverse. The reader is discovering a civilization while simultaneously discovering how its people think and speak.
And I would actually preserve some inconsistency in the early material.
If older BRAINSTORM conversations contain conventional English, that's fine. They document the evolution of the New World. As the canon develops, New World English becomes increasingly recognizable.
So rather than:
“We have one million words to rewrite.”
the approach becomes:
“From this point forward, we know what language we're speaking.”
That is vastly more manageable.
And there's one delightful side effect
Because Natural Humans retain conventional English, the distinction becomes a storytelling tool.
Imagine an old Deadender talking to a Citizen:
“You can't just walk into Strawberry Records building.”
Citizen:
“Why not?”
Deadender:
“Because it's the Strawberry Records building.”
Citizen:
“No. It's Strawberry Records building.”
That tiny correction could carry an entire cultural difference without anybody saying, “As you know, our civilization has developed a post-apocalyptic linguistic divergence...” 😂
The reader simply hears the world.
I think “Acclimation” deserves to be a formal section in our New World Style Guide. It may ultimately be more important than any individual grammatical rule.
Yes, and I think I see where you're going with that. You were saying:
“The oldest New World Citizen is twenty-six years old. In twenty-0…”
Finish that thought. I don't want to fill in the missing piece and accidentally make a canon decision for you.
Now we're getting into the really fun part of this idea. 😄
We can make a reasonable estimate.
In ordinary English, “the” is extremely common, occurring roughly 5% of words. Spoken “the” takes roughly 0.2 to 0.3 seconds, depending on emphasis and surrounding sounds.
But the important variable is how much a Citizen actually talks.
Let's use a deliberately conservative New World assumption of 10,000 spoken words per day. That's a lot of conversation, but remember, Citizens don't sleep, and social interaction is a major part of New World life.
One Citizen, over 26 years
At 10,000 words/day:
- 10,000 words × 5% = 500 “the”s per day
- 500 × 0.25 seconds = 125 seconds saved per day
- That's about 2 minutes 5 seconds per day
- 365 days × 26 years = 9,490 days
- 9,490 × 125 seconds = 1,186,250 seconds
- That's approximately 330 hours
- Or about 13.8 days
So, under those assumptions:
A 26-year-old Citizen has saved roughly two weeks of speaking time by never saying “the.”
And here's the delicious part.
That's one Citizen.
If New World Citizens eventually live for centuries, the accumulated savings become substantial. A Citizen who speaks at that rate for 100 years would save roughly 53 days of speaking time.
And if Citizens actually speak more because they don't sleep, socialize constantly, and have a culture built around music, festivals, conversation, announcements, radio, performance, etc., the number could climb considerably.
There's also a wonderfully New World way of looking at it:
Old World people spent their lives saying “the.”
Citizens don't.
😂
I wouldn't put the calculation itself into the Style Guide as established canon yet, though. I'd put it in a section called “Linguistic Consequences” as an observation, because we haven't established how much Citizens actually speak per day.
But the underlying idea is fantastic: New World English isn't merely different. It is efficient. Over generations, tiny grammatical economies accumulate into hours, days, eventually weeks of reclaimed existence.
And for a civilization that doesn't sleep, that's an especially delicious linguistic wrinkle.
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