Those Wonderful Parasites?

My mind went recently to a number of retro video games that I was once highly addicted to; it's been a long time since I felt like playing much of many computer games, but I still miss those days, they seem to have involved a more continuous, though less deeply satisfying, degree of happiness in my life, whereas working for a living and being indolent during my free time has lead to both more personal productivity and spiritual satisfaction, as well as more boredom and bleak despair. The games I was flashing back to included the fighting game "Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport" (a Mortal Kombat-type game with alien characters), the combat strategy game "Dark Legions" (a more sophisticated relative of the NES classic Archon as well as a direct competitor that lost out to the original Warcraft), and the more strategic (though it still has a combat element, it's mostly about resource management) game "Deadlock: Planetary Conquest".

The reason I bring this up is that I had an interesting thought about one of the seven alien races (well, six plus humans, but one of the reasons I like Deadlock is that it actually treats humans as being just as weird as the aliens, rather than being the default from which they all diverge) is a species evolved from tree-worms known as the Uva Mosk. They're one of my two favorites in the game*, a little of which has to do with the fact that they generate tons of natural resources and thus are fairly easy to play (but not too easy, a descriptor fitting my least favorite races), but mostly it's because of why they get more resources than anyone else. The idea is that, having evolved from parasites who subsisted off immense plants which were their entire world, when they became intelligent they extended their opinion of The Tree to encompass The Planet, and then other planets when they achieved spaceflight. So they have this really interesting philosophy about how all sentient lifeforms are parasites on their planets, and have an obligation to care for their health.

All this is blog material because it points out some of the problems with the English language as it's currently understood by American culture. You see, in our common-sense definition, the word "parasite" is almost invariably taken as a negative; the idea of the Uva Mosk therefore "swims upstream" in our collective consciousness, because they aren't really parasites if they care for the planets they "infect". There is a proper term for lifeforms that subsist harmlessly off their host, commensal, and another term for those who actively help the host survive, symbiote. However, "commensal" is not a term which has ever really entered common use, and most of the social mainstream has never heard it, while "symbiote" is almost as obscure and is often misused in chatter to mean "something which takes over your body", due probably to its careless use by certain early sci-fi writers whose influential reach perhaps exceeded their talent. (I haven't researched the issue so I apologize if this is a misconstrual of what seems to be the word's current understanding and my speculation as to its origin.)

Thusly, "symbiote" may seem like a more sinister word than "parasite", and the latter may be used to describe beneficient leeches like the Uva Mosk, even though by the strictest definition something can't be rightly called a parasite unless its presence is a net negative for the host. I'm even guilty of this linguistic drift myself; wanting to reach that wider audience, I've written my philosophies to use "parasite" imprecisely in a fashion that people might be able to "grok" even if it's technically wrong, rather than disorient them with a less familiar word like "symbiote" or a completely obscure one like "commensal".

There's a lesson in all this, part of which is just that Americans in general and myself in particular are lazy bastards, but also hopefully some of it pertains to the ease with which linguistic drift occurs, and that we should beware of its effects.

* For any fellow goobers who wondered, the Cyth are my other favorite, with the Re'Lu a distant third and humans fourth, the Tarth being the ones that bore me the most and the Ch'Cht being marginally preferable to the Maug. My reasons for these preferences are many but both of the top slots are based primarily on what I regard as "pure cool factor", being a little more intellectual in the Uva Mosk's case while the Cyth benefit from the basic factors that almost invariably make villains cool, them being the most nearly objectively evil of the races even if they do have something resembling a reason for what they do. And even if they aren't evil, they're definitely "dark" and so tap into the same awesomeness factors as Darth Vader, Sauron, The Kurgan, Warcraft III's Undead, and so forth.