Community Event / Creation Profanities in the future
- Thread starter drew
- Start date
Many of the words we use today will end up sounding silly in the future.
After all, how many of you now ejaculate when you're excited? Or moan when you've made a big boner? Fifty years ago these were not the same words.
But it's silly to go too far with this. We have to consider the current audience, not an invented language of the future that will be far from the truth regardless.
Firefly had a nice touch with using Chinese cursing, mind. And that's something we're likely to do badly in the fiction - I somehow imagine many of our characters will be white UK/American in both looks and character.
After all, how many of you now ejaculate when you're excited? Or moan when you've made a big boner? Fifty years ago these were not the same words.
But it's silly to go too far with this. We have to consider the current audience, not an invented language of the future that will be far from the truth regardless.
Firefly had a nice touch with using Chinese cursing, mind. And that's something we're likely to do badly in the fiction - I somehow imagine many of our characters will be white UK/American in both looks and character.
Nice reminder there, Darren, that there are other languages (and cultures) out there than us "westerners" and even we have multiple languages amongst us. I imagine that one to three major languages will dominate by the year 3300, but given that even nowadays the languages are mixing and matching (English has several loan words from Finnish, for example), there could easily be words (changed beyond recognition, probably) from many different present day languages in the main languages of 3300.
And, of course, there could be secluded settlements where people speak their very own language (some remnant of old Earth languages, for example).
One Finnish swear word is pretty "popular" even outside our borders (heard it used in Germany and by one American, at least): Perkele
And, of course, there could be secluded settlements where people speak their very own language (some remnant of old Earth languages, for example).
One Finnish swear word is pretty "popular" even outside our borders (heard it used in Germany and by one American, at least): Perkele
I agree, its easy to get wrong
the BSG example of Frak works well but in Galatica 80 they were swearing with words like felgercarb and gaulmogging and it sounded bizarre to my young ears.
I don't entirely agree that all of the characters will be Wasp like as people write what they know and if someone has an ethnically diverse peer group this cant help but show in what they write
in my own story for example i'm basing a hacker on a srilankan guy who works in his family's shop next door, Cisco qualifications coming out of his ears and he's stacking shelves in an off licence with no thought of putting them to use.
Well there seems to be a bit of a consensus that this can all get a bit silly if allowed to run rampant, and I would agree with that, however...
..although the usage of these words on TV and in the comix was ostensibly to get around problems of censorship whilst retaining the bang of an expletive, and I was always aware of that... unlike many of you I just thought it was a fun and cool thing, and always thoroughly enjoyed it. Mainly because where I did hear/read it done, there was some restraint exercised. With BSG, the latter one, I loved the casual way the writers would always contrive to make cries of "Gods!" a plural -- to better fit the dialogue into this odd polytheistic universe which was so much like ours, yet not so. And of course 'frak'. But they left it there -- there was no "felgercarb" or other multiple hammy attempts to be clever. Similarly in the pages of 200AD, Dredd would mutter "Drokk!" and I would grin, just being entertained and transported into a world that resembled ours, but was slightly different. There was no carpet bombing of these words.. just used now and then to good (and amusing) effect. The original motivation may have been to get cursing past the censors, but for me these little strategic insertions of someone else's profanity took on a life and significance of their own, and the stories were all the richer for it... as long as it was done right.
Language does evolve over time, even profanities, as Drew illustrated with "Damn". You can still find librettos of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with the word used but abbreviated with a long dash as in "D____ you, he cried!", or sometimes even referred to obliquely as "the big D". Today just a century later the word is little more than a bit of punctuation. So in 3300AD -- if we are shooting for projected realism in profanity -- just how will our contemporary expletives have evolved? How can we know?!
My take on this is, realism doesn't matter so much. Entertainment value does. That's why our ships are FTL and our transgalactic communiques will be instantaneous. Too much projected linguistic realism and you do start to go down the A Clockwork Orange path with a mass of unintelligible cant. Let's evolve a very small limited number of cool, colourful curses that sound great, and just go with them. It'll be good fun.
..although the usage of these words on TV and in the comix was ostensibly to get around problems of censorship whilst retaining the bang of an expletive, and I was always aware of that... unlike many of you I just thought it was a fun and cool thing, and always thoroughly enjoyed it. Mainly because where I did hear/read it done, there was some restraint exercised. With BSG, the latter one, I loved the casual way the writers would always contrive to make cries of "Gods!" a plural -- to better fit the dialogue into this odd polytheistic universe which was so much like ours, yet not so. And of course 'frak'. But they left it there -- there was no "felgercarb" or other multiple hammy attempts to be clever. Similarly in the pages of 200AD, Dredd would mutter "Drokk!" and I would grin, just being entertained and transported into a world that resembled ours, but was slightly different. There was no carpet bombing of these words.. just used now and then to good (and amusing) effect. The original motivation may have been to get cursing past the censors, but for me these little strategic insertions of someone else's profanity took on a life and significance of their own, and the stories were all the richer for it... as long as it was done right.
Language does evolve over time, even profanities, as Drew illustrated with "Damn". You can still find librettos of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with the word used but abbreviated with a long dash as in "D____ you, he cried!", or sometimes even referred to obliquely as "the big D". Today just a century later the word is little more than a bit of punctuation. So in 3300AD -- if we are shooting for projected realism in profanity -- just how will our contemporary expletives have evolved? How can we know?!
My take on this is, realism doesn't matter so much. Entertainment value does. That's why our ships are FTL and our transgalactic communiques will be instantaneous. Too much projected linguistic realism and you do start to go down the A Clockwork Orange path with a mass of unintelligible cant. Let's evolve a very small limited number of cool, colourful curses that sound great, and just go with them. It'll be good fun.
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Too much projected linguistic realism and you do start to go down the A Clockwork Orange path with a mass of unintelligible cant. Let's evolve a very small limited number of cool, colourful curses that sound great, and just go with them. It'll be good fun.
I'm not disagreeing with what you have said, but your mention of A Clockwork Orange got me googling (it's been a while since I saw it) and I hadn't realised the roots of the words they used - If anyone else is interested there is a short description of what Burgess did and a dictionary....
Hope you Kopat it Lewdies!
Frakk, drekk and others could work like those suggested above.
Had an idea that links in with this thread,. someone mentioned about swearing in another language as a method of getting round the profanity issue
What if the word you used from another language wasn't even a swear word in it?
German is full of examples with words like swine sounding a little more offensive than pig and even the German for mother could work well in the right context.
What if the word you used from another language wasn't even a swear word in it?
German is full of examples with words like swine sounding a little more offensive than pig and even the German for mother could work well in the right context.
As my main character is of Italian heritage I may use a few bits of colourful sounding Italian. Other characters might do similar based on their ancestry.
Hi
just come back from the 33rd century and the most common swear word that i came accross was "Dumbleflowskin".
example you can just stick your finger up my Dumbleflowskin.
sounds totally stupid in todays language but I swear thats the most common swear word in the future. I think its probably best to just stick to swear words in our current century because if you are going to come up with daft sounding swear words that people in the future use they aint gonna think much of the story.
oh also Elite Dangerous got released in April 2014 to critical acclaime and soon after world peace was declared and also a new religion was formed on the back of it.
just come back from the 33rd century and the most common swear word that i came accross was "Dumbleflowskin".
example you can just stick your finger up my Dumbleflowskin.
sounds totally stupid in todays language but I swear thats the most common swear word in the future. I think its probably best to just stick to swear words in our current century because if you are going to come up with daft sounding swear words that people in the future use they aint gonna think much of the story.
oh also Elite Dangerous got released in April 2014 to critical acclaime and soon after world peace was declared and also a new religion was formed on the back of it.
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I think profanities in fiction should be exactly that - swear words that we recognise, and many use, today. However, they should be used very sparingly (which often isn't the case in RL), in my opinion - in a 25k word tale, I used the 'f' word about a dozen times, with a couple of choice Spanish profanities thrown in.
Of course, I'm not constrained by any rules/protocols as I ain't writing for this game - yet!
Of course, I'm not constrained by any rules/protocols as I ain't writing for this game - yet!
The Church of the Holy Braden? i had heard wispers it was forming
I don't know what the smeg you're talking about.
It maybe a matter of style, but I don't personally like profanity in books (or in real life) very much - certainly not as a matter of course, but occasionally it is appropriate.
I don't want to use the modern day versions (no need for me to quote them here), but I wondered if there was interesting in putting together an 'Elite Universe Cussing Guide' so that characters would be able to share some colourful metaphors.
BSG had the excellent 'Frak', and I'd hope we'd come up with something along those lines without being derivative.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Drew.
I have to say that I really disliked the swearing in Status Quo, prak in particular. Goid also sounded off to me, particularly when someone was something like a "lucky goid"; we don't bandy the names of our hated and deadly enemies around as a term of affection, e.g. "ooh you jammy little N@zi".
For swearing to be effective, it should be used sparingly, in choice moments. However, sometimes you don't care about efficacy
! For example, it has been shown that swearing helps you tolerate pain. Also, the ivory towers and most advanced facilities in academic research frequently run blue with expletives poured forth by doctors and professors (usually at machines, particularly if they're not working).Swearing usually revolves around subjects that are either taboo or of great significance: e.g. bodily functions, mothers, religion. These things are unlikely to change in the next thousand years or so, and are also shorthand for intense emotions; hence I am in favour of keeping contemporary swearing, so everyone understands what's going on.
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