Omnite

As often happens with movie adaptations, the novel Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson tells a pretty different story than the film. In the book, people die at 21, not 30; the Sandmen carry a revolver with six special bullets; the whole world is under the same system, not just one domed city; and the ending is completely different (I won't spoil it).

At one point in the novel, Logan 3 (!) is in a prison cell with bars made of ice, and he needs to escape.

Logan faced the imperfection in the cell bar, stiffening his fingers into a slight curve, bunching the pad of muscle in the heel of his hand. He assumed the Omnite stance.

Now.

He summoned tension into his body, feeling it gather along the backs of his legs; he felt his spine arch as the muscles pumped full of blood. He concentrated on the hand. He was only a hand. He took several deep breaths, let his attention widen to include a spot in space three inches beyond the bar. He would hit that spot.

He blacked out the cell bar that was between the spot and his hand. It didn't exist; there was no cell bar. He tensed. Energy sang into the arm that slashed the rigid hand at the spot in the air.

A splintering crack. The bar exploded. Logan squeezed through the opening. (pp. 65-66)

"Omnite"?

I have to admit that, upon first reading it, I mentally pronounced this word "omm-night" and figured the ending was the -ite of monophysite or Israelite. It's pretty clear, though, from all that business about Logan stiffening his hand and concentrating on a point in empty space and there is no spoon that Nolan and Johnson meant it to be read "omni-tay"—a Greek Latin-Japanese compound word, derived from karate (空手, "empty hand") and meaning something like "everything-hand". If it were a purely Japanese, or rather Sino-Japanese, compound, it would have been something like zente or zenshu (spelled 全手 either way).

I'm on record frowning at Greek-Latin compounds, but I'm willing to let this one go. The novel is full of exuberant experimentation with language, including Burgess-style invented future teen-speak, lots of emphasis using italics, Allegorial Names in Capital Letters, and impressionistic sentence fragments (e.g. "A splitering crack" above). The style is very seventies-dystopian-SF, and a little cross-language compounding fits in nicely.

One more note on language in Logan's Run. On page 7, we find, "Logan watched the two lemon-tunicked officers dismount and advance on the bearded man." When I read this, I thought that it must be the only time the word tunicked was ever used in the history of English. The morphological process whereby a noun can have the -ed suffix attached to make an adjective is certainly productive (white winged, fleet footed), but how often can it have been used with the uncommon word tunic, especially since it triggers the unnatural-looking k-insertion spelling rule that also produces panicked? It's not vanishingly rare, though—tunicked receives about 285 Google hits, although the first is a reference to famous photographer of naked mobs Spencer Tunick (possibly not safe for work). Interestingly, most of the examples, like the one in Logan's Run, are preceded by a color word: green-tunicked, brown-tunicked, red-tunicked, etc. However, while the past-participle form is attested, the progressive form tunicking, as in "it was tunic weather, but he was untunicked, so we immediately set about tunicking him", receives 0 Ghits.

[Now playing: "Can't Be Sure" by The Sundays]

[Update: I just realized that omni- is Latin, not Greek. Oops! Fixed inline above.]