Alma Hill

2 Quotations from Alma Hill

fanspeak n. 1959 A. Hill Letter in Science Fiction Stories Sept. 117/2 Words become progressively improper from seven phonemes on down:…. Three-letter words are either vulgar or quarrelsome, or both; two-letter words are obscene and one-letter words insane…. We could do a lot worse than introduce a system like that into Fanspeak.
Saturnian n. 2 1959 A. Hill Letter in Science Fiction Stories Sept. 117/1 Everybody is familiar with the tendency of most language systems in the bulky planets, where the politeness of a word is in direct proportion to its length, so that a really diplomatic statement may have to appear in several volumes. In Middle Saturnian, the business dialect, it is customary to use words averaging about twenty phonemes, more or less, with no discourtesy implied as long as the number does not fall below eight.