Swearing this time around.

[mrissa]

This book, as you may have guessed, is in head-eating mode. I've had plenty of other things to think about but haven't really wanted to talk about them much here. So you get book babbling. Lucky you.

One of the things that's different here is that so far as I can tell, this world is entirely atheistic. There's a lot of math and magic and metaphysics, but no one has so far decided that any personal deities are attached to that stuff. (The math -- don't worry -- is implicit, not explicit. This fantasy novel does not come with equations.) (Metaphysics ditto.) So the obvious stuff to figure out is who does which social functions of religion and how and why, and most of that came to mind fairly quickly, and hurrah.

What is much less intuitive is the swearing, and yet it keeps coming up. Even the fake-swears: "darn it" might work backwards if you were applying it as a mild fake-swear akin to "patch it." But only if you'd set it up so that doing the mending was a source of much annoyance culturally, and why? Most of the other fake-swears refer to either religious or bodily concepts. Even my favorite Minnesota fake-swear, "Oh, for the love of Pete," is likely to come off wrong in a fantasy novel: "Oh, for the love of Ky'ythryinian'iel," is likely to give someone the impression that there is a deity or some other important figure of that hideous fantasy novel name, rather than that's a random person's name. And if it's, "Oh, for the love of [common name given to a spear-carrier in Chapter 4]," you may have readers wracking their brains for who that was again and why their love should matter.

"Oh, hell." Is none. "Damn it." See above re: cultural notion of hell. "My God, what were you thinking?" I was thinking that these people didn't seem to have one. At all. Nor do their neighbors. And you know what? I don't want their neighbors to. I don't want to set up a theist vs. atheist distinction in cultures in this world. This is sort of like when I look at a short story and have to put a boss character in and decide that the boss is female because my main character is female and I don't want to get into simplistic analyses of gender roles in that particular interaction. There are enough bits of cultural stuff to mess with here without making it look like the Evil Christians are trying to oppress the Good Atheists or vice versa. (See also Wicked Jews, Deeply Nasty Muslims, Awful Pagans, etc.: wish to dodge accidental statements about all real-world religions in this book, as that is not what I'm interested in here.) So there's no profanity borrowing, as atheists in our culture sometimes do, saying, "God damn it!" when they don't believe in God or gods or damnation or hell or anything related.

Then there are the vulgarities. This culture definitely still has shit, bullshit, ass, jackass, etc. It has genitals, to which I tend not to refer much as insults anyway, in part because those are supposed to be good bits, not insults. It has copulatory references from "screw it" on out through various permutations and levels of vulgarity to the average English-speaker's ear. But not all swearing is equal, and an English speaker would not snap, "Shit, Martha!" at their cousin in the same circumstances as they'd snap, "Jesus Christ, Martha!" So I can't just substitute vulgarity where profanity would go; it doesn't read right.

This is not an insurmountable problem, and I'm not saying it is. But made-up swear words are hard to get right. Red Dwarf's all purpose "smeg" works for several reasons: because it's the sort of noise an English-speaker could make in disgust, and also because Dave Lister's character is one who really would apply one word to every situation in his life, from a minor annoyance to grave peril, and having it be "smeg" is not that far off. Words like "frag" and "frak" and other transparent euphemisms for broadcast purposes sound like transparent euphemisms for broadcast purposes; they sound to me like adolescents who want to say "fuck" and not get grounded for it. Which is very different from having a culture in which no terms for sexual intercourse would ever be considered vulgar or offensive. So coming up with a word that people in this culture say when people in our culture would say, "Oh, God!", is not going to come out right; it's going to read like that word is just another gosh or golly, another spot where "God" originally went but didn't go this time for the sake of someone's sensibilities. The problem is that I don't want euphemism, I want a different outlook on the world completely. Euphemisms are easy. Shift in perspective are hard.

pameladean did a beautiful job with the swearing in The Dubious Hills, starting on the first page. I can't lift it, because doubt is a fact of life in this world and not an obscenity, but it worked for me; it didn't sound stilted but flowed and world-built and did all sorts of things you would want your swearing to do.

Working on it. But it turns up at odd moments. Probably when I'm two-thirds of the way through it'll start to feel natural, and then I'll be nearly done.

Comments

[gaaneden.livejournal.com]

I have run into such problems in my stories. Mostly, I focus around whatever is considered bad in that storyverse and build off it up. IE: "Sarryn's spite!" (Sarryn being previously introduced as an evil goddess but, even if she hadn't been, you get the idea.)

Neil Gaiman did some good ones in "Neverwhere." IE: "Temple and Arch! My poor head." No idea what temple and arch mean but it flows well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've done that in stories with deities, too. But another complicating factor -- and this comes in with stories with divine characters as well -- is when things that are considered evil or oath-holding are also literally present. The characters in Dwarf's Blood Mead and The Mark of the Sea Serpent would call upon Ull's ring to witness truly serious, truthful statements, the way someone devoutly Christian but not too Biblically literate ("let your yes be yes and your no be no") might offer to swear on a Bible. But Ull turns up with his ring in part of the plot, and I have to be careful to be clear on when the character is saying, "Ull's ring witness," as a figure of speech and when it means, look, here, I have it in my hand.

Same with the evils in the universe of this book: they are more abstract but just as literally present.

Again, doesn't make it impossible. Just requires care.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Words like "frag" and "frak" and other transparent euphemisms for broadcast purposes sound like transparent euphemisms for broadcast purposes

I don't know if this is true, but allegedly Tallulah Bankhead said to Norman Mailer, who had used the word 'fug' extensively in The Naked and the Dead, 'So you're the young man who can't spell fuck.'

Si no e vero, e ben trovato.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I would have read "fug" as attempting to phoneticize dialect rather than as a whole separate euphemism.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

The other good thing about "smeg" is that we have no smegging clue what it means. It's just an all-purpose fricative.

As I watch BSG I'm getting pretty sick of "frak"=="fuck" in all its contexts.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

am i the only person who immediately thought "ah, a shortening of 'smegma', got it?"

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Phonetics has a lot to do with whether I like made-up swear words or not. Farscape's "frell" sounded way too pretty for me to buy into it. "Smeg" at least sounds kind of vulgar.

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... math is sort of religious. But perhaps not enough to permit profanities.

"You zero-divided bastard!"
"Plato's Wall, Martha!"

Nope. Not seeing it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And anyway there's no Plato in this universe.

[jerrygordon.livejournal.com]

I did the first draft of a space opera with garden variety cursing, choosing to revisit the phrases in the second draft. A late plot point let me cheat the issue a bit, but it's a difficult balancing act. If you want to be true to the realities of language, you're going to produce something almost indecipherable to a reader. It's the skillful illusion of a perspective shift that's damn hard to pull off.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I was pondering this myself while in London, for no explicable reason.

The only time I've invented profanity for a story and been pleased with it was the use of "Void" in Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch. It served the functions of both "damn" and "hell," because the Void is what your spirit passes through on its way to reincarnation, so damning someone to the Void means wanting them to get stuck there, and when a character says "Void it" they are employing that notion as a verb. It's the only time I've been able to come up with profanity and satisfy my own standards, let alone anybody else's. (Everything else halfway decent I've done has been more directly a riff on English profanity, like in The Waking of Angantyr when they refer to hells, plural.)

English swearing operates on two principles: blasphemy and bodily parts/bodily function. It's hard to break away from those, when imagining a culture that doesn't (for example) have bodily taboos, and even if you do it's hard to get the reader to experience other things as offensive. It's even more difficult when you want the word to be something obscene enough that it's rarely said: you have to use the word to familiarize the reader with it, but the more you use it, the less special it will seem. The best examples of this I've seen have tended to be racial insults; "Mudblood" in the Harry Potter books works for me on the level of sound, composition, and meaning. I can get offended when someone uses that word.

So yeah. The best invented swearing grows out of the worldbuilding. But it's very hard to integrate it on a level where your reader will buy into it, rather than automatically translating it as a substitute for standard English profanity.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Mudblood" is a good example.

Hmm. There's a good deal of casual ethnic bias in this book, but most of the "racial" stuff is elsewhere and complicated. (There was one king of a border region who got so sick of trying to mediate interracial squabbles that he cast a spell making babies' skin color random within local human ranges rather than dependent on their parents' skin color. It didn't work to obliterate ethnicity, but it sure messed with people's heads and particularly with outsiders' perception of people from that region.) But it almost certainly affects how people in the larger region see race and ethnicity and people from that smaller region. Hmmmm.

[tewok.livejournal.com]

Here's a counter-example for you: Tanya Huff's Quarter books. I love Huff's writing, but the cursing and oaths in those books just felt Wrong. The words were associated with the magic/spirituality of that world, but they never, ever worked well.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite swears from the Illuminatus! books: "Shit, piss, and industrial waste!" It's a favorite because it implies a slight shift in focus from the standard one -- that what makes excreta worthy of a swear is not their bodily nature but being part of the collective group of deleterious waste products. Somewhat analogous to the British ejaculation, "Rot!"

In general, even if a culture does not have a deity per se, it will have things that it venerates or esteems. Whatever is the opposite of that which is esteemed will presumably be the source of profanity.

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

Whether there are gods or not, there are legends, and there are heroes. Your setting doesn't need to have the divine in order to have the sacred. And swear words are strong precisely because they displace the sacred.

"By Grabthor's Hammer" works, as ridiculous as it is, and we don't need to know who Grabthor is, particularly. He's a hero, and has a legendary hammer, and it's shocking and a little taboo to profane it by such a casual oath.

And I've probably misspelled Grabthor.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had heard it as Grapthar. But yes, historical swears do count.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It is always a tricky one - you're writing in English, but excising all the English expletives and trying to invent something else that will sound just as native and embedded. Excluding religion & vulgarity on top, which are the two significant sources for expletives - whoo. That's hard.

As a matter of simple unhelpful curiosity, are these post-religious cultures, or have they just never had that religious impulse, the urge to seek answers in the numinous?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Vulgarity isn't excluded. It just doesn't apply in all situations. My characters can say, "Shit!" and do. It just doesn't cover all the times when they would be under pressure and likely to swear.

The numinous is not personified, is the thing. There is a numinous, they do seek answers, but they don't experience it as a being with its own sense of identity and so on.

[pameladean]

I sometimes think that people say "fuck" and its derivatives so much in TAM LIN just BECAUSE THEY FUCKING CAN.

I'm glad Hills worked for you. The Secret Country books proper have a different set of constraints and it is starting, actually, to get to me, not because the dialogue is hard to write but because the underlying metaphysics is intruding.

Good luck with yours.

P.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I sometimes think that people say "fuck" and its derivatives so much in TAM LIN just BECAUSE THEY FUCKING CAN.

Which is part of what makes it just like our college experience.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I actually love this part of the process. "Space!" makes a good curse word on a generation ship, and gives you lots of nice constructions-- "Space this!", etc.

I'm using "Light" and "Shadows" in the Eddas, as sort of archaic blasphemous curse words, to cover the functions "Oh my god!" and "Dammit" and so forth have in our world. Of course, they also have fuck and shit, so I'm off the hook there.

I kind of liked the Farscape curses. "Frell," which is like "fuck," but not exactly, because I don't think it has anything to do with sex. It's just applied to stuff that's broken, in the way, inconvenient, should be discarded. Which is a logical thing for a spacefaring limited-resource culture to find obscene. "Frell this!" "Get the frell out of my way!" Likewise "dren," which appears to be both "shit," (excreta) and "junk". Dren is always a noun; frell takes all parts of speech.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ktundu. Jen The World's Best Lab Partner taught me that one; it's the stuff that clutters your life, conceptually or physically. Several times one or the other of us would moan, "Aughhh, we need to clear the ktundu out of this lab!"

(Jen TWBLP's parents were missionaries in Africa and took her with, but I am blanking on what language ktundu is from specifically.)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I believe we actually have no examples of cultures that aren't either religious or post-religious, that is have a religious past that they're aware of. Lack of real-world examples at least means people can't prove your guesses wrong; but won't help at *all* with their finding your guesses believable.

In a christian context, damning somebody to hell is the most extreme possible bad wishes; totally beyond human scale, in fact. *And* it's a conveniently stressable monosyllable. It's not clear to me that a rationalist culture would have anything nearly as over the top available.

You could always borrow "srizonified" (which literally means roughly "descended from countless generations of dwellers in stinking, unflowering mud"). But it doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well really. (I can never remember if it's "szrizonified" or the version I used above.)

I'm not sure this is Doc Smith's fault, since another writer finished the book, but he got fairly good use out of "eagle meat" in a culture where the extreme execution method was to break all your bones and then stake you out for the eagles.

And the use of sexual terms probably does say something about our cultures, and you might not want to say that about the ones in your book.

"Rot" is good, and you could probably develop "worms" or something to be effective, working on themes of putrescence and death.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And the use of sexual terms probably does say something about our cultures, and you might not want to say that about the ones in your book.

Had thought of that, yes.

But worms, worms are good.

[arkuat]

Linda Nagata's characters sometimes use "love and nature" this way. ("Love and nature, Martha! That's my toe you just trod on!")

Some of them also swear by the Unknown God a lot, but obviously that wouldn't work in this situation, whereas something like "love and nature" might. At least these are not vulgarities, and they are pretty awesome (and can be terrifying, which is where the casual use of "damn" etc. may have originated.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

One of my other books has "Saints and monsters!" used that way. I'm not sure what the monsters are; if I ever get a chance to revise that and try to make it a Real Published Book, I should probably try to find out.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, thanks!

The official icon name for this icon is "intense," but the necklace in it is this book's necklace. And I'm pretty intense about this book at the moment. So.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I realized some time ago that I've done the same thing, writing an atheist culture just because it's what I'm used to. I hadn't given the curses as much thought except that I'm trying not to make them as misogynistic as 'bitch' et cetera and that certain characters will swear by certain other characters' gods, explicitly-- "Janice's God!" "Sam's frozen hell, what were you thinking?" The rest, once I fix it, will mostly swear by acts of war. Instead of hell, one might be strung on the walls.
Drat it, this novelish is like a Rorschach blot for my brain. Every scene reveals a bias!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all used to atheist culture, not even atheist-but-with-borrowings. So. Dunno.

I think all novels are like Rorschach blots, but sometimes we're the only ones who are clear on which bias is being revealed. And sometimes we're the only ones not clear on same, I suspect!

[redbird]

Diseases? Things like "Plague take it" and "a pox on them!"?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, there are a couple of big diseases. Good one.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

1. Are there any occupations or activities considered especially vulgar? If pastry chefs were held in low esteem, for an illustrative example, "Frost this!" and "What a frosted mess you left the laundry in!" and "Parfaits, Martha!" could be examples of cursing.

2. This might fall somewhat under historical references, but somewhat related to ethnic bias, are there sociopolitical references that could be used as swears? I don't know of any Cold-War-era Americans using curses like "Sickle and hammer!" or "Khrushchev's shoe!" but I would have understood that they were Bad Things.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's funny: I just don't think of "frost" and "frosting" in the same way, so I would assume that was a cold-phobic culture, not one that disdained pastry chefs.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Use dashes. Possibly with letters. I did this in Tooth and Claw and it really worked for me. People still email me asking what "V-----" is supposed to be.

"Plague" and "plaguey/plagued" also make good swears along the lines of "damned".

I had an interesting experience in Greece, where I had learned the language from a tape but learned the swearing in context. I had no idea what any of it literally meant, and wouldn't have been prepared to say the equivalent words in English. The Greek words still come out sometimes. The one that comes out most often is the one that means "Pathetic incompetents". You could think along those lines -- we have words like "slobs" and "kludged" and a society where "slob" was a worse thing to call someone than a sexual insult would be interesting. "Lazy-fingered baboon". "Piece of kludge". "Broken circuits, Martha!"

I'll stop thinking about this before I come up with their entire cultural context.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The dashes feel Victorian to me, which is very appropriate for Tooth and Claw.

I went through all the Travis McGee books not that long ago, borrowed from dd_b, and the early ones were not allowed to print expletives past a certain point, so the text would read, "She called me a ten-letter word." Then I had to go through all the insults I knew and count the letters and figure out whether there were any alternatives to what she might have called him. I came up with several I was fairly sure the author did not intend, and spent far more time thinking about nasty language than the censors wanted.

Another variant...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

...specifically suggested by the Greek experience above is to use swear words that come from the characters ethnic background that don't necessarily translate well, or even at all. With the right combination of picking fricatives and making things sounds sort-of Yiddish, this could go a long way.