[Quiet Man Cometh]

Originally Posted by johnny

I think this is how people hand-wave most stories written about -- or set within -- fictional, wholly made up universes and realities. But that last bit -- that's where I get held up, because the language chosen can help build the universe. "Pianoforte" has different connotations than "keyboard" and inspire different immediate mental images. Someone reading "keyboard" is more likely to picture either an electric musical keyboard, or a computer keyboard (or similar, perhaps futuristic console) but "pianoforte" is more likely to bring to mind not only a piano, but an old-fashioned piano...

To clarify, "keyboard" would be a more general term in the way that 'pipe' is more generic for flute or panpipes, etc. but that doesn't make it equal to something more specific like 'pianoforte.' It is a generic word, so you would have to put more effort into describing the object as you want it to appear. Sometimes you need a sentence to equal a word, and I can spend a lot of time in my writing deciding which route to take.

Ultimately, everything been to boil down to how well we can pull something off, rather when whether we should try in the first place.