Just the thing to study if you’re reading Patrick O’Brian novels and want to feel more like Aubrey than Maturin…
However, if using tech-talk (of whatever period, for whatever subject) remember that once you’ve learned all the proper terminology and start applying it to Show Your Work, not every character (or reader) is going to be up to speed and might find wading through your newfound knowledge a bit much.
IMO any piece of dialogue that could prompt the response “I recognised some of the words but none of the sense” or “Again please, in English” (or whatever) needs careful consideration.
The best place for it is from a geek-nerd-boffin character you’ve already established as doing it all the time, to the extent that other characters wait for it to happen, are surprised if it doesn’t and - if they suddenly hear a complex problem described in plain language - realise that Things Are Really Serious.
There’s also a right and a wrong time to make a point of noticing it…
The following snippet is from “The Paladin” © 1972 by George Shipway, a writer of excellent gritty historicals - anyone who likes “A Song of Ice and Fire” should try Shipway’s Norman-era novels - but who, IMO, sometimes gets things slightly out of step. This is near the end of a four-page naval episode during which things start well then go progressively more wrong until…
…the hunter was creeping nearer, prow slicing through the waves and flinging spray. Fierce, bearded faces, iron caps and glinting spears. Voices hammered faintly, a thin thread of sound that wavered on the wind.
Hardwin thumped his oar. “How do you want me to steer?”
Almost imperceptibly the longship overhauled us. I swallowed a lump in my throat, licked salt-caked lips. The waiting was hard to endure. Things happened so slowly at sea.
The scarlet hull was a bowshot distant.
“They’ve yawed on our larboard quarter,” Hardwin announced calmly.
The man talked gibberish, I thought testily…
YMMV, but in my view that last exchange spoiled a growing mood of inexorable, unavoidable threat which gets paid off dramatically five paragraphs later.
I also have opinions about those two speech tags. One is out of place: the man speaking - sorry, announcing - calmly is the one who just thumped his oar, not merely touched or tapped or patted it. The other isn’t necessary, since dismissing someone’s speech as “gibberish” isn’t friendly and doesn’t need defined as unfriendly or impatient or irritable. But that’s another post…
The protagonist (Walter Tirel) was on board Hardwin’s ship for three pages prior to this incident, so there was plenty of less-tense opportunity to introduce nautical technobabble and his response. IMO it would have been far better here for Hardwin to say something more related to the impending action, like “any minute now”, and for Tirel - he’s a skilled archer, and “a bowshot distant” shows what form of hazard he’s thinking about - to take some precautions against incoming arrows.
However I’m not George Shipway, and more particularly I wasn’t his editor, who must have seen this line and thought nothing of it.
But when using impenetrable specialist jargon in fiction, it’s worth sparing a thought about whether it, or other people taking notice of it, is happening in the right place or the wrong one.
(NB - I don’t make critical comments like this on writers I don’t like; them, I ignore, since otherwise it’s too easy to start kicking and not stop. With writers I like, I re-read their work often enough that I’m able to see where something went slightly skew-wiff and make a note of it for both my own writing and for posts like this. Shipway was a teacher before he was a novelist; I like to think he’d have understood what I’m doing…)
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