[Writing Tips] Different Suffixes for Different Magical Arts · 1:38am Oct 14th, 2015
Ok ok I thought I had posted this earlier but I guess the website ate it up or something and it wasn't actually posted. I tried writing it in my own words, but I guess now that's gone I'm just going to copy and paste it straight from the blog post I learned from.
The Post
While scanning through a lot of magic posts on tumblr, I’ve seen a lot of tags misusing suffixes. In particular “-mancy” gets used as a general term for magic works, I guess because it just sounds mystical in nature. As someone deeply in love with facts and the English language, such misappropriations van be a little off putting. With one simple search, it would be immediately and obviously revealed that -mancy specifically refers to forms of divination; i.e. cartomancy, the use of cards in divination.The obvious exception is of course, ‘necromancy’. The term actual literally means ‘conferring with the dead as a mean to divine answers’, but modern media has bastardized the word into encompassing a strange hodgepodge of dark arts involving corspes. This is wholey inaccurate, and probably is the single reason for that abuse of -mancy. However, the fact that we study eclectic wisdom not typically included in modern academia, is no excuse to abandon higher study practices and formal education. And so, I present a brief list of suffixes and how they can and are applied to magic.
-Mancy: A form of divination.
(CRYSTALLOMANCY: Divination by crystal gazing.)
-Graphy: Writing or feild of study.
(TASSEOGRAPHY: Study of tea leaves)
-Tion: Action of.
(INCANTATION: Act of chanting.)
-Ology: Study of.
(NUMEROLOGY: Study of numbers.)
-Ism: Practice or system of.
(MYSTICISM: Practising mystic arts.)
-Ry: Occupation of.
(PALMISTRY: Work of reading palms.)
-Ic: Having characteristics of.
(GENERIC: Characteristics of being generic.)
-Scopy/Scope: Examination of.
(HOROSCOPE: Examination of a time.)
-Sis: Action, state, condition, or process of.
(TELEKINESIS: Process of long distance psychic interaction.)
-Magy: A form of magic.The suffix -Magy would be a much more logical end to a custom word describing a practice of magic, and far better than the overused -mancy. For instance, magic with technology would become ‘technomagy’. Magic involving thoughtforns would become ‘tulpamagy’. It’s a slight change in spelling and pronunciation, but a huge shift in meaning.
I hope this will clear up some confusion on not only naming of magic practises, but also understanding the meaning of names of existing practices. As always, I’ll update this post as I find more useful ideas, and I’ll probably also make an extensive list of magic related studies and words for reference purposes.
There's also another suffix called -Urgy which is a more older version of -Magy, like the origin origin suffix. If you want to give a name to a very ancient form of magical arts that dates back way before any other magical arts in your stories, using -Urgy would be very appropriate. However this is a writing choice you make and remember to always be consistent with your terminology.
Hopefully Fimfic doesn't fucking put this in the trash again.
I will make note of this blog. It has proved useful to me.
3468528 I shall as well.
3468528
3468540 I'm glad you two can find use for this! It's rather great to know about this for me too.
3468668 Hey, it helps, especially since I write crossover/adventure fics.
I typically use what's in the 3.5 Player's handbook for D&D that I have as reference for schools of magic
-Abjuration
-Conjuration
-Divination
-Enchantment
-Evocation
-Illusion
-Necromancy
-Transmutation
Since the RPG doesn't quite go into detail about more specific schools than that, I usually don't require something more in-depth than the nine schools of magic. But this blog was very informative, so thank you for that.