I notice thesauruses do not list the word oblivience, yet I am one of those people who give a little extra meaning to "free speech", as in "it doesn't hurt pioneering as long as the intent is clear".
The context of usage is a dictatorship that has infiltrated its opposition ranks, funding and directing it to actually do its bidding while believing to be struggling against it. So the dictatorship is giving orders in "oblivience" (to the opposition), as in "the people who follow orders are oblivious to whom gives them.
Or maybe there is a more adequate choice that fits the context and diction? How to word it so that it is clear that what's oblivious is the implied but not mentioned opposition?
Naturally, I could simply go for "giving orders to the oblivious", however the nuance I am seeking is a lot more subtle. I want less of an emphasis on the "oblivious opposition" and more on the state of obliviousness. Which is why I think "the oblivious" doesn't cut it, because it stops just short of adding opposition.
I also notice that while oblivious implies general unawareness, its derivatives are far more specific, implying the act of forgetting in particular.
I am not a native speaker, which may be a factor, because there is a way to expressing this subtle nuance in my native language. A more verbose way to put it would be either "giving orders amidst obliviousness" but I kind of want it more concise.
So in the absence of of a better fit, and if I had to coin a term, how intuitive is it, not the word on its own, but in the context, outlined in the second paragraph? I should also probably note that one of the reasons to chose oblivience is its similarity to obedience, as in "oblivious obedience", a smoosh word if you will, and also with a ring of ignorance, but a form that doesn't involve ignoring information by choice but through obliviousness.
Best Answer
In search of oblivie̳nce
“Can” you use it? Why yes, certainly you “can” use it, to the extent that you “can” use any word you please, even ones of your minting. But that doesn’t mean everyone will understand your word in the same way you yourself choose to.
In case you haven’t looked far enough afield, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attests these nouns starting with obliv-:
Plus lest one forget, from the “à la recherche des mots
perdusoubliés” département, French has rather more recently than any of these just listed further lent us ou̲bliette, ou̲bliable, ou̲bliance.All but a few of these terms are uncommon to rare. The common radical ᴏʙʟɪᴠ- will convey to most readers something they’ll take from oblivion, but then they’ll just apply what they know of derivational morphology (combining forms) to guess at a particular sense. It therefore follows that if you have your own special sense for something like one of these, you’ll need to set that up clearly for the reader to fend off misreadings.
Even then you may have some difficulty establishing oblivie̲nce so close to some of these others like oblivia̳nce — not to mention oblive̲scence and oblivi̲scence. I fear you’ll find that most readers will not consider a pairing of -a̲nce and -e̲nce spellings to be different words, and quite rightly, which means that it will to them look like you are merely choosing an alternate spelling for the same word.
I was asked what the OED says some of these words mean, so here you go:
There are others, but I quite doubt there are any surprises here. Again, knowing what the ᴏʙʟɪᴠ- morpheme conveys and what the other morphemes combining with it in these means, all are perfectly recognizable in form and sense to the literate reader. If you do plan to go down this road, you might also consider words derived from ᴏʙʟɪᴛ-, like oblite as a verb or adjective (but not to my knowledge anything like oblate).
Even nonce uses built from established morphemes in the language will make sense despite never having been seen before by a given reader; that’s part of how language works and so is completely natural and normal. Nonetheless when you wish to apply some narrower sense than would be suggested by these, it is up to you to acquaint your reader with the auctorial nuance you have intended.
Caveat scriptor
At the risk of bestowing writing advice ancillary to the surface question asked, I must counsel you against trawling through a thesaurus in search of le mot juste. This signal faux pas is one made by budding writers everywhere and everywhen; it risks making your writing not better but worse.
Please do not mistake me. This instinct to create the appearance of new words, whether by combining known forms or by applying new spins on old words, is perfectly natural. The urge to do so is hardly limited to fiction, either, let alone to genre fiction.
But there is a danger here, one best avoided.
Not everyone can be Tolkien1,2,3,4 or Wolfe5,6,7 — nor should they try, for as we see with Miéville8, an exotic vocabulary can as easily come off as annoying and pretentious as delightful and wonderful. Finding your own voice is even harder when using words that are not your own. By focusing on the ordinary machinery of expression, one avoids the risk of coming off as a weak writer feebly trying to impress with obscure or invented words.