Secondary World Vulgarities

[truepenny]

Or, Problems Tolkien Never Had to Deal With

This is venting, but it might also be interesting. I hope. It's about making up language--not Sindarin-style, but in terms of, how can characters curse when they live in a world that doesn't permit of, e.g., Jesus H. Bald-headed Christ. Oh, yeah, and there's going to be strong language. And a lot of it, including some remarkably vulgar and offensive terms.

I think, therefore, I'm going to stick this behind a cut-tag, so if you read it, it's by choice.
Red Dwarf has the best solution I've seen for simple getting-around-vulgarity: "smeg" does relate to bodily functions (I love the moment on one of their blooper reels where Craig Charles and Robert Llywelyn are doing Q&A at a con, some kid asks them what smeg is, and they both promptly fall off their chairs and start crawling for the exit); it has the right sort of sound: one syllable and the hard /g/ mimics the /k/ sound in "fuck." (Yes, I took a linguistics course; I just can't for the life of me remember what all the different noises are called. So I'm going descriptive rather than technical.) But that's a solution to a specific problem--much like, I gather, Farscape's "frell." In books, where you can get away with all the four-letter words you like, the problem in an sfnal context, is more the blasphemies. (Although not exclusively. You cannot have a secondary world character say, "fucking-A," even if it would be appropriate to both character and situation.)

And the slang.

I started working on The Project in 1994. Appalling, isn't it? I've rewritten the first novel three times (I think), with the current go-round being number four (and also turning the damn thing into two books), and it wasn't until I was on rewrite #3 that it occurred to me that, since one of my protagonists is gay, I really needed a slang term for persons attracted to members of their own sex. I found one, but it was like falling down the rabbit hole: everywhere I looked, there were other terms that needed to be tweaked or invented.

And then there's the cursing. You have to find the right rhythm and you have to find the right sounds. Most fantasy writers tend to go in for long, over-elaborate curses; sf writers tend to like shorter words, but ones that don't particularly sound like the hard Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that Anglophones (and those being written about in English) are going to snarl in moments of stress. (Somebody, in something I read, adduced Niven's "tanj" as an example of something that just isn't mean enough to be real.) English swear words tend either to be guttural (fuck, berk, cunt, God) or sibilant (piss, Jesus). Even our own made up curses follow the pattern: drat, jeez, dagnabbit, heck, darn.

(Elizabethan curses--at least the ones that have survived in texts--tend to the same pattern: sibilants ('Sdeath) or hard gutturals (Od's bodkins).)

Two syllable words have to be ... oh fuck my brain's gone. It's all over. I can't think of the word for the opposite of an iamb. I can remember spondee and dactyl, but not the other one. Fuck fuck fuck. (I said there'd be strong language.) Anyway, stressed-unstressed, generally in combination with a one syllable: JEE-sus CHRIST, FUCK-ing HELL (or BLOO-dy HELL, if you're Spike), HO-ly SHIT. (Or two stressed-unstressed--what the FUCK are those things called?--in a row: MOTH-er-FUCK-er.) There's a rhythm. Or you can go the other way, with an anapest: godDAMMit. (That is an anapest, isn't it? Or have I fubar'd my scansion beyond any hope of redemption?) But still, rhythm. Swearing has rhythm, and that's why it's so damn difficult to invent. You have to come up with something that sounds like a curse (i.e., not mealy-mouthed and not something that any sane adult would snigger themselves to death the first time they said it), but it also has to roll off the tongue like a course.

Which is why I'm tearing my hair out in a corner, trying to figure out how to be shamelessly vulgar in a secondary world.


And now, having demonstrated the appalling extent of my vocabulary, I'm going to bed.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You've just made me realise why I'm so bad at swearing in English. No, really, I've never got the hang of it. I can about say "fuck" without the quote marks being audible, but it doesn't come naturally.

In Welsh, which is the only language I heard anyone swear in when I was growing up, including when they were speaking English, they often are two syllables, strong followed by weak, and they often end on a rolled r. (I cannot roll rs in English. My English is arhotic. I can actually feel the switch in my head that controls it, if I concentrate hard, which I have to when I want to roll them in French.) Diawl (pr. DEE-awrrrrrrr! Means the devil.)

Or, they are three, with the stress on the third. Thus when I say "bloody hell" I have to swallow half the "bloody" to get the stress on the "hell" where it belongs. Annwyl Du (pr an-oil THEE! It means scumbag. Literally it means black love. I have no idea.)

(What? Sure I swear in Welsh, but have you ever dropped a kettle on your foot and then been asked to translate what you've just said?)

Thus my made up curse Turth's tusks is deeply satisfying as a Welsh swear, I can say it quite naturally myself, but it doesn't really work in English.

I learned to swear like a trooper in Greek, without knowing what it meant, because the stress pattern fitted what I was used to. The stresses in Demotic Greek are generally much like Welsh.

How nice to know it isn't embarrassment.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks for the non-English corollary. All the languages I know, I learned in school, so by and large I don't know how to say anything really filthy--certainly my vocabulary isn't extensive enough for a comparative analysis.

I suspect, in the Welsh/Greek vs. English thing, that there's also the matter of intonation. You posted about this earlier re: French, but I think it contributes here, too. Welsh and Greek are both very tonal, and English just isn't (thus the polite amusement of the Greek ladies who worked at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens when I botched parakalo yet AGAIN). I imagine that there's tonality in Welsh and Greek cursing which adds a whole different dimension. I have no ear for it, so you'll have to tell me whether I'm talking through my hat or not.

(Note to self: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to fuck around with pseudo-Celtic fantasy. You will only embarrass yourself unmercifully.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yes. It is tonal as well. But English is kind of tonal, English actually conveys a ton of information with stress, when spoken, like the guy the other day, in the cold, saying to Zorinth "Hot chocolate?" in a way which tonally expressed the strong expectation of a positive answer, which there's a construction for in Welsh, (which has no single word for yes or no, and makes wording referrendum questions agonising) and in Latin, but which written English can't do and spoken English can manage entirely on stress.

And yes, don't try pseudo-Celtic, everyone does it painfully wrong, but fortunately for them the Welsh and Irish readership for fantasy appears to be rather small. Even Cherryh doesn't quite get it right.

My corrections to the Welsh in The Last Hot Time came with a note saying "I expect I will be the only person to notice, but..."