Its all made worse by the fact that, in an effort to rid the book of stilted exposition, the meanings of the words are explained once or twice in passing mentions, and seem to be replacements for real words fairly arbitrarily (you try to remember one word only to find its never mentioned again, another it turns out is vital to the plot).
Though I guess that is to be expected of anything which has has such a vast influence on a genre, no book is perfect.