So, I've been adding more to The Exile Princes lately, which has meant trying to work out turning some more medieval demons into enemy creatures for it - which has led me to be pondering the problem of naming them quite a lot. When a monster appears which is new to you, do you prefer it if its name is a) plain words (e.g. "devourer", "abyssal beast"), b) contains plain elements (e.g. "cemetaur") or c) novel (e.g. "sarien", "vorthal")?
Initial thoughts: a) works best for individualised monsters. Fighting the Master of Lies works well, fighting 2d4 Masters of Lies works less well. It also seems to give a more demonology/biblical feel, though I honestly don't know why (As in, I don't know if that's a result of biblical texts actually giving creatures plainer names, or if it just dates back to things like Warhammer where the bloodletters, plaguebearers, screamers etc have the plain-ness as a distinct nomenclature feature).
The middle option I think works well mainly if you can relate the creature well to something else. Like, the cemetaur is a disappointment in The Witcher because we're used to -taur being half-and-half beasts (cen-, mino-), even if that is etymologically nonsensical. So it's possibly the best option but hard to actually use in practice.
Doing something really novel gives more freedom of action, but OTOH it can make it harder to explain to people why they should care about the new creature and how they should feel about it, because they have less mental hooks to hang it on. That's great for a weird/SF aesthetic, but can be more of a struggle in a fantasy one, especially if you have limited time or options to build up people's feelings and mythos around a creature.
(Also it strikes me that this could be a good subject for an article, if anyone would be interested in reading that?)