Secondary World Vulgarities
Jan. 25th, 2003 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyOr, 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.
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.
anapest
Date: 2003-01-26 02:00 pm (UTC)It's possible that M. H. Abrams could clear this all up in an instant, but I'm too lazy to turn round and grab it off the shelf.
Re: anapest
Date: 2003-01-26 02:18 pm (UTC)Abrams denies me in my hour of need, leading to the logical conclusion that what I'm thinking of isn't unstressed-stressed-unstressed but in fact short-long-short, and it only exists in Latin, which is the only language I can reliably do scansion in anyway.
Or you're right and it's a chimera I've invented with no external impetus whatsoever. I've defended things with passionate conviction that turned out to be mere mental mirages before.
Re: anapest
Date: 2003-01-26 03:31 pm (UTC)As you no doubt could guess, I did not know that myself, so I made with the looking it up. You were not hallucinating the memory.
Re: anapest
Date: 2003-01-26 03:42 pm (UTC)Renenet, you're the best ever.