Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1116045It makes no sense to use "minotaur" if Greek never existed in that world. I assumed that we were using a translation convention where the fantasy language is represented as English for our convenience but isn't English in-universe. Therefore, I assumed the fantasy language word being used would be translated into what their language writes as "king's bull."

Minos is the Cretan word for "king," not a specific king of Crete except in Greek myth.

I treat the fantasy language as coincidentally identical to English for convenience, but not in every etymology and in any case I would not find it reasonable that every translation into the fantasy language must preserve the etymology from not one but two languages. We didn't translate the original name into English or we would be saying kingsbull rather than minotaur. I would also accept that the word minotaur could be introduced in a fantasy world by someone from our world familiar with the myth, who would quickly identify the bull headed man as a minotaur, and the word might be widely adopted. (What king would the creature be associated with in a world that did not have that myth?)

QuoteI would have called the Grendel a "river troll," in accordance with Scandinavian usage anyhow not weird D&Disms based on a single story by Poul Anderson.

We gave the Zippopotamus a silly name because we thought it was a silly monster; even "river bull" might have been better given its tendency to charge at unbelievable speed. In The Legacy of Heorot it was a grendel because of allusion to Beowulf. Trolls regenerating seems to be exclusively from the Poul Anderson book, but many D&D monsters are from zero or one sources. It is unfortunate that fairly generic names have been given narrow meanings in popular culture by D&D (most other games don't have enough influence to have achieved this).

QuoteThese are basically mimics that pretend to be a stalactite, stalagmite, and floor, respectively. They aren't even the only monsters that mimic those things, the dark mantle mimics the stalactite and stalagmite, the lurker pretends to be a ceiling, etc. There have been so many articles about how silly this formula is.

It's the naming rather than the mimicry that bothers me. If the rust monster were simply a "ruster" or the displacer beast a "displacer" or the blink dog a "blinker" I would probably find the names too pedestrian. But I'm probably a poor judge of these names because of long experience of them in D&D.

QuoteI don't know... "eye tyrant," "vile oculus," "sphere of many eyes" and "evil eyes of Augrah-Ma" still seem more evocative and distinguishing than the dictionary word for someone who beholds. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and all that.

I didn't say there weren't more evocative names possible, only that beholder has become evocative (for me). Outside of the saying or alluding to it, the word beholder seems rarely used; having long experience of it in D&D, the association for me is now more with the monster. The "spectator" is by contrast not evocative (for me) because the word is more generally used and the monster recent and infrequently encountered (in my experience).