You’re reading your latest SFF obsession and you hit a string of back-to-back profanities: “Fuck! Shit! Damn!” The rogue stubbed her toe during a challenging stretch of a treacherous climb.
I see segments like this and I chuckle. There’s an odd, intangible pleasure in seeing a swear word taking up space on a page. “Hey, I say that when I stub my toe, too!” (Of course, I’m not climbing cliffs or buildings. I last stubbed my toe chasing my cat, who refuses to swallow his pill.)
SFF authors have proven time and again that profanity can be an art form. I look to Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard sequence as the gold standard, here—the series elevates swearing to the realm of artistic achievement. But for every book blending the familiar profanities we know and love with magical lands and spacefaring civilizations, there’s a work that substitutes new terms that take the place of common expletives to great effect.
In my recent reads, encountering profanities that are specific to one particular world or group of characters have genuinely added to the immersive experience in ways that go beyond wordplay or the author simply having some fun…for example:
“Storms!” Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive characters whip this exclamation out regularly. It’s a sigh of relief, a shout of agony, an utterance of frustration. “Storms” acknowledges a power Rosharans can barely understand, but which irrevocably shapes their world.
“Stars!” Becky Chambers uses this one in tandem with our own beloved profane lexicon. It’s not the only swear, but it’s one of the few new ones you’ll encounter in the Wayfarers series. “Stars” tells us we’re witnessing human stories from a future far removed from our present, both in time and space.
“Scrum/Scrumming!” Robert Jackson Bennett’s beautiful substitute for “fuck” and its versatile forms stands in for the fan-favorite F word perfectly in Foundryside and its sequels. “Scrum” is a signpost telling us “You are here, and here is nothing like where you’re from.”
What purpose do these replacements serve? I think the easy and occasionally correct interpretation of such substitutes is an author’s desire to shy away from actual swears.
And I get it. Some people just don’t like profanity. They can take it, but they don’t want to read it every few paragraphs. Hell, I have one friend who says “frick” and “dang” when they need to blow off some steam. Whether it’s out of some misdirected piousness or a holdover from childhood, I don’t know. I’ve also seen folks comment on LinkedIn posts asking the original poster why they felt a particular swear was necessary; clearly it can strike a nerve.
Despite what may seem like the norm, especially online, there are still plenty of people that shun swears in all their forms. As such, an author’s desire to cater to the masses is a viable reason to steer clear of such language. I think there’s an element of this in Sanderson’s “Storms!”—what a tonal shift it would be to hear Kaladin yelling “Fuck, I need to save the weak and underprivileged!” every few chapters.
I wanted to nod to this explanation for a moment because it’s probably a very real factor, and any reason for replacing a common swear with a new one should be treated as valid.
…Valid, sure, but scrumming boring. Luckily, I don’t think most authors are beating around the bush simply to please swear-averse readers. Instead, I see invented profanity in fiction as a crucial storming tool in an author’s storytelling arsenal.
Consider The Stormlight Archive first—or any Cosmere story; “Colors” from Warbreaker is a personal favorite. “Storms” can stand in for almost any exclamatory swear, which is to say, all of them. “Storms” and “storming” works in the place of fuck, shit, damn, and anything else you’re bound to utter when your forearm nicks the red-hot rack as you maneuver your frozen pizza from the oven.
But let’s not forget that literal storms ravage Roshar on a regular basis. So regular, in fact, that they create the planet’s climate. These storms dominate daily life and define the calendar by which Rosharans live. As the series progresses, our protagonists come to understand more about the storms, their historical meaning, and their impact on the future of the civilizations on Roshar.
“Storms” has a pseudo-religious feel to it, more along the lines of saying “hell” or “damn.” Nobody in The Stormlight Archive balks at its use. Instead, its ubiquity unites characters from all walks of life. Queens, generals, lighteyes, darkeyes…they all drop “storms” into conversation from time to time, as they literally live in the shadow of a force beyond their comprehension.
As simple as it seems, “Storms” is an expression that firmly roots the reader in a new world and forces us to reckon with the reality of highstorms as though we lived on Roshar, too. Sanderson uses a substitute swear word to ground the reader in his foreign world, and it works. “Storms” worms its way into the Rosharan vernacular as easily as “fuck” or “damn” find their way into our everyday speech. It is both a fact of day-today Rosharan life and a reminder that we, the readers, are not in Kansas anymore.
In our next example, we turn to humanity’s future as imagined in Becky Chambers’ impeccable Wayfarers series. Humans exist as one of many species in a galactic civilization. In fact, humans are low on the societal ladder. Forced to abandon their home for a fleet of starships, humans subsist on donated stars and handouts. Some choose to remain in the Fleet while others venture to alien worlds and settlements to make new homes.
“Stars,” then, is a symbol of humanity’s humility. The swears of yore all pop up in equal measure, so instead of replacing our profane vocabulary, “Stars” adds to it. It’s not particularly profane by any stretch. Instead, Chambers’ characters tend to use it as a sigh of relief, an expression of irritation, or a simple placeholder when no other words can coagulate a thought into coherent phrases.
Save for radical sects from a dying Earth, humans have evolved beyond religious zealotry in Chambers’ sci-fi universe. “Stars” becomes a nod to our origins. Stars die. Their matter spreads across the universe. Under the right conditions, that space dust collects into planets. If the planet is lucky and well-placed, perhaps it yields biological life.
Chambers doesn’t outline this process in as many words, but she doesn’t need to. She has the only word she needs: “Stars.” It captures the vastness of existence, which expands far beyond earthly humanity’s wildest dreams. “Stars” encapsulates the entire universe and all the tiny specks of matter living and breathing within it.
For readers, “Stars” serves as a reminder that we’re witnessing a different humanity from the one we know. This humanity has grappled with its problems, watching its Earth decay. Wayfarers—in particular, Record of a Spaceborn Few—chronicles a small, scared remainder of humanity living in the long shadow of its mistakes and struggling to stay relevant on a cosmic scale. Stars. What else is there to say?
Shifting gears once more, let’s turn to another fantasy: Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside (and the larger Founder’s Trilogy, though I have yet to read the sequels). In Tevanne, there is no use of “fuck” or “fucking.” There is only “scrum” and “scrumming.” I have to hand it to Bennett, because it’s hard to find a replacement with the same percussive oomph as the word “fuck,” but he did it. While we’re on the subject, I also want to shout out “candle,” which stands in for “penis” to hilarious effect throughout.
Whereas Stormlight Archive takes place on a completely different planet and Wayfarers takes readers to space, Foundryside feels the most grounded of the three titles. Tevanne shares some similarities with Italy and Spain, and the Romantic-sounding names certainly further this overall feel.
Because Tevanne feels inspired by real-world history and locations, “scrum” has some extra weight to pull. Again, we see a fictional swear reminding us at every turn that we are not at home anymore. We are somewhere different, where the rules have changed. Magic and technology are one. Scriving dominates civilization, with the rich using it to bask in luxury while the poor pine for a taste of what the magic can offer.
I don’t find it particularly difficult as a reader to imagine a new world, especially when a sharp and practiced author makes it easy. But small things can help the worldbuilding gears turn in my brain, and something as simple as “scrum” replacing “fuck” can go a long way toward making that world feel real and lived-in.
Foundryside also offers large quantities of something both of the other books I mention toy with to some extent: humor. Levity radiates throughout Foundryside, despite the stakes being massive and the challenges facing Sancia and her crew being dangerous. I chuckled when I saw “scrum” gracing the page because it’s such a ridiculous collection of sounds. It fits as a profanity stand-in, and although it replaces a real-life swear of unparalleled utility, it still hits just as hard.
Swear words can serve any number of purposes in an SFF novel, all of them unique and interesting in their own way. I love them as tools of characterization and punchy dialogue. But there’s something special about an author who can twist a word’s meaning or create a new world altogether in a way that fleshes out the setting and general feel of a book.
Sure, “fuck,” “ass,” “damn,” and their profane brethren have a well-earned place in our day-to-day language, whether you choose to use them or not. But newfangled exclamations that border on the profane can help drive home a well-honed fantasy or sci-fi world and bring new flair to an already great book.
So, got any scrumming swear stand-ins that tickle your fancy? Drop ‘em in the comments. For my part, I’ll leave you with my personal favorite, from The Lies of Locke Lamora… “Nice bird, asshole.”
Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live or on Twitter @ColeRush1. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science-fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are: The Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.
I am a fan of Robert Jordan’s “blood and ashes.” It allows “bloody” as an intensifier which is always fun.
Another good approach is religious based swearing. It’s always fun to swear by a deity’s body parts and which body parts get associated with which deity is an excellent opportunity for world building.
Love a good scrumming swear word!
After the first Artemis Fowl book came out, D’Arvit became a common swear word in our house, not only for me and my brother, but my father also used it from time to time.
TANJ
Frak
Gorram
:D
In my novel Only Superhuman, I invented a new set of curse words for Asteroid Belt dwellers (Striders), because it seems to me that the words I grew up considering obscene have become everyday and harmless now, so I think future societies will need to invent new ones to take their place. (Much like how “golly” was once considered a serious blasphemy because it’s short for “God’s body,” which was taboo to mention in Elizabethan times, yet it’s now seen as childish and quaint.) Also, the Striders have fewer sexual taboos than present-day Western culture, so they use the f-word simply as a synonym for copulation. In its place, the main cuss word is “vack,” short for “vacuum,” a source of existential fear to space dwellers. There’s also “punk” for a hull puncture and “leak” and “suck” for depressurization, which have the benefit of sounding dirty in other ways too. It makes for some rather vicious-sounding curses. “Vack you out a very small punkhole, you vack-sucking hose-clog!” “Flare” is also an expletive, since solar flares are a deadly threat, but it’s milder, because it just doesn’t have the same phonetic kick.
In Star Trek: Enterprise, the Kreetassan species was established to consider eating in public a taboo akin to having sex in public. So in my Trek novel The Buried Age, I had a Kreetassan captain use “bolus” (chewed food) as a profanity.
Stars & Stones
Hells Bells
The Dresden Files. Of course, there are conventional swear words too which lead to this delightful exchange:
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Hellhounds.”
“Harry,” Michael said sternly. “You know I hate it when you swear”.
“You’re right. Sorry. Holy shit,” I breathed, “Heckhounds.”
Really interesting topic. I remember first thinking about this after reading Alison Goodman’s Singing the Dogstar Blues, which is partially set in a sci-fi future Australia and features ‘screte’ (a reduced ‘secretion’) as a go-to swear word. I agree that the practical reasons (avoiding current non-fictionally taboo words) are there, but are probably no more than a big plus. Casual language does so much to reflect the society/time it comes from, and profanity is always casual language. It stands to reason that where the swear words come from depends to a large extent on what’s considered the most rude/shocking/bad in the society in question – and authors who realise this (implicitly or otherwise) can get a ton of mileage out of it for the worldbuilding, exactly as you say. I could go over to the next province to the east (Québec) and find that a lot of the worst swears are church-y words that sound prosaic in English, probably thanks to the effects of the Quiet Revolution (toward secularism and a newly prominent Québec identity) in the last few decades.
@6/wlewisii: I think maybe in the Dresden Files case, the issue is that Hell is a real place there, so using the word carries serious weight.
When this topic comes up, my mind always goes back to the cultural difference revealed by a conversation I overheard on a bus once. A guy was rattling off a long monologue to his friend, and practically every fourth word was an epithet that I’d been raised to consider the most heinous, forbidden profanity of all time, but he used it so casually that he elided it to “m’fug” or “m’fuh,” and he used it basically as a pronoun and verbal pause, without any malice or strong feeling behind it. But when he did want to convey strong emotion, he said, “What the hell?!” Which, to me, was at the opposite end of the profanity spectrum, the mildest of the words I was raised not to say aloud. So for him, their relative weight was the complete opposite of how I’d been raised to see them. It really drove home how these things would differ from one culture or generation to the next.
It also interests me how Asian cultures often don’t use profanity the way we do in the West. Words that are used as expletives turn out to be startlingly mild in their literal meaning. For instance, the Japanese interjection shimatta! is often subtitled as “Damn!” or a stronger word phonetically similar to it, but it literally just means “It has occurred,” in the sense of regret/frustration that a bad thing has occured. And “Kisama!” or “Onore!” can be translated as “You bastard!” or “You scum!”, but they’re really just variously impolite levels of “You.”
I still use Frell from Farscape now and then!
I love “Storm Father” in the Stormlight Archive. It reads, “Jesus” to me and is used in many similar contexts.
It’s not a swear, but I also love Sanderson’s use of “brightness,” for light-eyed women. Even thought it’s similar to “Lady,” I think it’s a cute pet name too!
I have never sworn, at all, for various reasons so, when I do swear, people back away because I am angry and about to do a volcano impression. Also, something I almost never do. I have the same feeling about my dialogue. I only use it when my character is ballistic about something. All those repetitive vulgarities, obscenities, and religious words are nothing but boring, otherwise. I do enjoy an inventive swear word, though.
Christopher Bennett@8: From what I’ve read, the “sama” in “kisama” is the same “-sama” that when used as an honorific denotes respect and deference. So then “kisama” is in fact super-polite…to the point that nowadays it automatically indicates sarcastic insult. (I suspect you know this, but others here might find it interesting.)
@12 Sort of like the use of “Bless your heart” in the American South? ;)
I think I might be the exception here, in that I rarely if ever like profanity that is made up for fantasy and SF works. While there are cases where it works – Firefly for all that I wasn’t its biggest fan did a great job of this – most often if is jarring and takes me out of the narrative. One of my favorite authors recently did this in his newest work and it annoyed me every time I read it.
There is something missish about it much of the time, rather than adding to the richness of the worlds created.
And fuck – and all if it friends and relatives – is a truly wonderful, multipurpose word!
I swore voluminously in Pernese as a teen (Faranth! Shards! Blast the shell and sear the skin!) because my devout parents would not countenance actual swearing. For a while, I couldn’t even say ‘gosh’.
I have played far too much Dragon Age, and my go-to now is an eyeroll and a long exhaled “Maaaaaaaaker’s breath.”
I am a fan of Firefly, and enjoy sprinkling my speech with the few Chinese words I know, even if they aren’t dirty. Dong xi is a great one, it literally means ‘everything from east to west’ but is just used to mean ‘all your random belongings’, e.g., “Children, get your dong xi and get in the car!”
also we enjoyed ‘Caravast!’ from Zeb in Rebels. What a great word. Had the hard consonants beginning and end, a nice syllabic roll, can be whispered or shouted with good effect either way. Or muttered in disgust.
A couple that have always stood out to me are from Django Wexler’s Shadow Campaign series. Both are religious/blasphemous expressions.
“Saints and [fucking] Martyrs!” and “Brass balls of the beast!” Often, they’re used as an expression of exasperation or anger, sort of like we’d say “sonuvabitch!”
Someone already frakking beat me to frak, by Klono’s golden claws!
@14/Lynda: “Firefly for all that I wasn’t its biggest fan did a great job of this”
As I recall, Firefly didn’t make up a lot of profanity (besides “gorram”), but instead used Chinese phrases as the profanity in the middle of the otherwise English dialogue. Which isn’t how it would work at all — instead of alternating between pure English and pure Chinese, you’d get a pidgin (to start with, and eventually a creole) blending English and Chinese elements into a single dialect. I tried to do a bit of a dialect like this for a couple of characters in Only Superhuman, e.g. “Dong ma?” blended with its equivalent “Do you understand?” to become “Do you dong me?”, and “Mei guanxi” (“It doesn’t matter”) merged with “No problem” to become “No guanshee.” I was deliberately trying to counter how Firefly got it wrong.
What, no love for Red Dwarf’s “smeg”?
Fun fact: their decision to use an invented swearword was a tribute to Porridge’s use of “naff”. While Porridge isn’t SFF, it’s perhaps the most influential example of this, because “naffing” and especially “naff off” actually entered general usage in the UK as a result of the show.
@9 Frell is my go to as well.
Shazbat!
@20 Porridge may well have popularised “naff”, but the highly respected Etymonline suggests it has existed in various forms for much longer, giving a date for “naff off” specifically as 1959, some 15 years before the TV show. https://www.etymonline.com/word/naff
I dislike most invented profanity because it rarely seems connected with the setting it is used in, and as Lynda says, it often seems wimpy. I appreciate those who use Christopherlbennet’s approach of making them out of what is dangerous in the setting. Or otherwise somehow meaningful in the setting and cultures of the story.
Which allows me to segue to some I thought were well done in a Silmarillion fanfiction: Starless Night of the Gloomweaver; Grinding Ice (used by those who crossed it to get to Middle-Earth); Great Mother of Spiders; Star and Water. Source, A Boy, A Girl, and a Dog, the Leithian Script, by Philosopher-at-Large. available on Ao3.
Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky illustrates the trauma in the Emergents’ society’s background with their curses: “pus,” “plague” (and compounds like “pus-funny,” “pus-sucker,” “plague take it” and “pus-be-damned”
Asimov’s characters used “Galaxy” as a swear word in the Foundation series.
@19/Christopher Bennett: You should at least give Firefly credit for using “Rutting” as a more network friendly synonym for the F-word. Worked for me anyway.
“naff” apparently is Polari, British gay slang with other ethnic derivation that had a lengthy run in the B.B.C.’s politely bawdy 1960s radio show “Round the Horne” so no actual swear words were heard, though some were misheard. “naff” means “unsatisfactory”.
“Scrum” is a formalised ruck in rugby football, and is a type of business planning meeting. Both are quite intimate.
Star Trek novel “Debtors’ Planet” ran with a concept that Ferengi cursing is about money. I just realised that probably makes the title of the book obscene. “The Galactic Whirlpool” described a semi-official class in creative cursing at Starfleet Academy, one of whose graduates, if I recall correctly, “a besieged Star-Colonel” replied “Mertz!” to a surrender demand, and relief arrived while the enemy were still trying to translate that.
@25/AndyLove: I’ve always figured that Charlie Brown’s go-to expletive, “Rats,” must have originated in the time of the bubonic plague and been intended much more seriously. Although now that I think about it, it’s just as likely to have a nautical origin.
In a similar vein, Doctor Who‘s Australian companion Tegan used “Rabbits!” as an oath, in reference to their perception as vermin on a continent where they had no natural predators and bred out of control. I think there might have been an instance somewhere in Star Trek literature of Klingons using yiH (tribbles) in the same sense.
@23, @28: interesting. I knew about RTH and naff’s Polari meaning but always thought it was Porridge thst had turned it into a generic expletive.
I wonder if, despite RTH having already popularised the original meaning, the expletive sense remained community-specific until its use in Porridge?
Cf. “Gordon Bennett”, a Cockneyism that I’m told was largely unknown outside London until Only Fools and Horses, though it long predates the show.
@18 Doc Smith’s Lensmen had the best ersatz salty language. Back in the early 20th Century, when you couldn’t even publish swear words, inventive invectives were the only way an author could express colorful language without running afoul of censors.
@31/AlanBrown: Yes, there was some really creative euphemizing back in those days. “Jumping catfish!” “Leaping lumbago!” “Great Caesar’s ghost!” “Oh, my stars and garters!” I’m no fan of censorship, but the drawback of graphic profanity being more common now is that there’s just no imagination in spouting the same few 4-letter words over and over again.
My favourite use of this is from Karen Traviss’ Star Wars novels, where she gives the Mandalorians a range of culturally-specific curses and insults. Aside from the ever-popular references to bodily functions (“osik” means excrement), Mando’a (being a nomadic warrior culture) don’t usually swear about religion or sex; most of their worst profanities involve cowardice, stupidity, and betrayal.
Particular examples include “shab” (screwup/failure), “di’kut” (stupid), “hut’uun” (coward), and “aruetii” (traitor/outsider). It also has a lot of colourful phrases: “kaysh mirsh solus” (“his/her brain cell is lonely”), “mir’osik” (dung for brains), “mirsh’kyramud” (“brain-killer,” for someone really stupid/boring), and my personal favourite: “ori’buyce, kih’kovid” (“all helmet, no head,” for someone with an inflated sense of their own importance).
Transformers also gets special reference, as it’s gone through a number of different kid-friendly robot-themed profanities: Beast Wars in the 90s used “slag” and its derivatives (slagging, slagged, slagger), before someone informed Hasbro that that was an actual offensive term in the UK. Then in Transformers Prime, they switched to using “scrap,” before that got shot down, and they ended up using “scrud” from 2015 forward. They also have a few religious epithets involving Primus (i.e. God), Unicron (the devil), the Allspark (Heaven), and the Pit (Hell).
@33/Cybersnark: Interesting. The 1988 film and 1989 TV series Alien Nation used “slag” as a racial slur for the extraterrestrial immigrants featured therein, derived from the fact that they were ex-slaves. I wonder if they got complaints from the UK too.
That show had its own alien language for the Tenctonese, including some swear words, although they tended to swear by their religious figures Andarko and Celine (respectively male and female, with each gender preferentially swearing by the corresponding figure). One of the funniest moments in the series was when the human detective was shown a shockingly mutilated body in the morgue and reflexively exclaimed “Andarko!” like his alien partner would.
IIRC, smeg comes from Yiddish..
@35/wiredog: The producers of Red Dwarf have always insisted that they made up “smeg” as just a meaningless word, but the term was in use as slang at least a decade before RD, and was derived from smegma, a Greek term for a sebaceous secretion of the genitals.
Watership Down has ““Silflay hraka, u embleer rah!” which Adams doesn’t translate in the text – but he does provide definitions of the individual words, so if you’re paying attention its meaning is clear.
I don’t love a lot of invented swears, I mostly tolerate them because I understand it’s meant to reflect the fictional world, but I think it’s also as much if not more the case of shying away from real-world profanities. I love Sanderson’s works, but “Stormfather” used analogous to “Jesus” is the most believable swear for me, “Storms” slightly less so “Storming” a lot less so, and I cringe at “Colors”. The biggest thing about invented swears to me is they have to both reflect the world and sound good, which I’m picky about. “Storms”, for me, has too many consonants at the end, it doesn’t sound as sharp as “fuck” “shit” etc, and in the real world we don’t say “it’s storming outside.” “Colors” I would believe if it was used when someone sees something breathtaking, but I don’t think it was used that way at any point. @blairb’s examples from Shadow Campaign sounds better to my ear even though I haven’t read the series. I guess when it comes down to it a good invented swear for me sounds like poetry, with all the emotion and imagery crammed into a word or three.
The only invented swears I truly and absolutely love are the ones in Dresden Files. Others have mentioned “Stars and Stones” and “hell’s bells” but to me they’re the paragon of invented swears, they’re familiar words, they fit the character’s background, they sound good to an English ear with the alliteration and the rhyme, they’re single syllables like actual English curse words, and on a meta level one has an association with LotR and the other with AC/DC, I really cannot ask for any invented invective to do more*.
(*Unless the invented swear is actually in an invented/constructed language.)
@38/tkThompson: “I think it’s also as much if not more the case of shying away from real-world profanities.”
Well, yes, it’s often a way to get around censorship, on television or in older literature. But as I said, working within such limits can often inspire creativity. Just throwing in an f-word or s-word every half-sentence becomes irritating noise. Having to concoct creative euphemisms can be much more entertaining.
I sort of split the difference in Only Superhuman. Part of the reason I came up with “vack” and the like was to ameliorate the profanity a bit; however, I made a point of having the characters use “fuck” literally as a sexual verb to make it clear that it wasn’t just about censorship, but about words changing meaning and perceived offensiveness from era to era.
Honestly, I’m uncomfortable with the use of “fuck” as an expletive. To use a phrase meaning “copulate with you” as a curse, as a wish for something undesirable to befall the listener, seems to be implicitly saying “I hope you get raped.” Granted, the way people use the word is so divorced from its literal origins that it’s basically just a meaningless syllable in most instances. Still, if that was the original intent of the phrase, it’s disturbing, and it’s not something I’d care to say to another person even if I hadn’t been brought up to be averse to cursing in public. I think that’s the real reason I substituted “vack” in OS, which I wanted to be a very sex-positive book (though I think I fell short of that goal in some ways).
“in the real world we don’t say “it’s storming outside.””
Sure we do. There’s also storming the ramparts, storming out of a room, the Storming of the Bastille, Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, etc.
“Others have mentioned “Stars and Stones” and “hell’s bells” but to me they’re the paragon of invented swears”
“Hell’s bells” is much, much older than The Dresden Files. It’s been in use since the 19th century.
Hells Bells is also the lead track of AC/DC’s album Back in Black
Never really felt Niven’s Known Space swears, “tanj” and “Finagle.” In particular, the derivation of tanj (There Ain’t No Justice) felt… tame.
Nowadays, I mostly swear with “Blood and Shale,” from Ursula Vernon’s Digger.
Where is “Stars and Stones” from? It sounds familiar but I just can’t place it.
Oh, and I always assumed Firefly‘s “gorram” was just a corruption of goddamn.
A fictional example of this is Nicholas Seafort from the David Feintuch “Hope” books. He’d never even say “God damn him” unless it was a completely sincere wish.
I swear and cuss quite a lot, I think, though I have tried my best to keep it more “polite” – which is why I have, for example, substituted “fuck” with “fudge”, inspired by an episode from “Supernatural” (though some milder mother-tongue swear words occasionally still slip in). Maybe that is also the reason why I belong among the people who enjoys seeing a nice and proper swearing on page or screen, if it is consistent with the world and worldbuilding. Adding plus one here for Robert Jordan’s “Blood and (bloody) ashes!” and even “Light!”, Brandon Sanderson’s wide gallery of planet-specific swear-words (“Storms!” “Colors!” “Sands!” And of course Spensa’s “Scud!” and “Scudding!”) (I occasionally use them myself), and some other examples I cannot remember from the top of my head right now. I agree that besides softening, it helps to convey the sense and feel of the culture, whereas it rubs me the wrong way if I see or read of a culture far removed from our religions and then the author has just had the character say “hell”.
While totally Earthly and not new inventions, one of the more fun examples of softening swearing comes from Moning’s “Fever” series, where the protagonist MacKayla Lane and her sister Alina created their own code words to cuss politely – I actually took their cue and used “frog” for “fuck” and “petunia” for “ass” for several years.
And totally agree with swearing being an artform in the Gentleman Bastards’ series in itself!
There’s also the broad range of expletives that Erikson came up with in Malazan,
https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Exclamations
I particularly like “Hood’s balls on a skillet”.
The usual ones are contradictions -Hood’s Breath (he’s dead), Beru Fend (she won’t), Togg’s Teats (he’s male) and so on.
@36. ChristopherLBennett: “a Greek term for a sebaceous secretion”.
So that’s why they called humans sebaceans in Farscape!
– – –
You know the sound “poot!”? That leads us to “Oh, for Pootin’ out loud!”. :-)
In child-rearing, I can see all the frustrated kindergarten teachers screaming “Oh, rear me!”.
Since swear words always loose their strength, I wonder what the end result will be.
Oh, bling-bling!
“Drokk !” (Just about every “Judge Dredd” story).
”Belgium !” (“The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” – always wondered what the Belgians thought of that one).
I’ve always preferred traditional profanity – and plenty of it. But then I’m Australian, and we tend to swear a lot.
The best use of profanity is from Pogo (the character and the strip):
Gosh a mickle,
dickle pickle,
gee willie wobbles, dog my cats,
and ROWRBAZZLE!!
@48 As a Pogo reader from a young age, my eyes were opened to the limitless possibilities of language. Walt Kelly was a genius.
Watership Down has already come up, but there’s also “basting” and “baste it!” in Richard Adams’ novel Maia.
In Scott Westerfield’s “Leviathan” trilogy, set in a steampunk/dieselpunk alt-hist Earth c. 1914, “clart” is used for “shit.” It is an actual old British dialect word for “clump of mud.”
And in David Gerrold’s “Star Wolf” novels, the alien Morthans have a grievous insult, “Yicka Mayza-Lishta,” that is translated as “lawyer-dung.”
@52/Russell H: “And in David Gerrold’s “Star Wolf” novels, the alien Morthans have a grievous insult, “Yicka Mayza-Lishta,” that is translated as “lawyer-dung.””
Which is one of the many insults in Gerrold’s fiction directed at Leonard Maizlish, Gene Roddenberry’s lawyer who reputedly made life hell for Gerrold during Gerrold’s brief stint as an uncredited co-creator and staff member of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Star Wolf series was based on an unsold TV series pitch Gerrold developed after being driven off of TNG, and was basically his response to it, the way he would’ve done TNG given the chance. And I think it contains several references that are barbs directed at Maizlish, as does almost everything Gerrold has written post-TNG. He really, really hated the guy.
@41 Frank, “Tall ships and tall kings / three times three / What brought they from the foundered land over the flowing sea? / Seven stars and seven stones and one white tree” — The Lord of the Rings I’ll be honest, I don’t actually know that they’re references, that’s just the associations those curses brought to my mind.
@39 ChristopherLBennett, Those are different uses of “storming” which I did not count because they’re not referring to the weather, the verb forms of “storm” is a metaphor for a person’s actions as being like a storm. The word “storm” does not have uses equivalent to “rain”, we say “it’s raining outside”, and a person can “storm outside”, but when there’s a thunderstorm outside we don’t say “it’s storming outside”. There’s a divide in the noun and verb functions of the word “storm” that there isn’t in “rain”.
Personally I don’t swear in front of strangers or people I just met, and even with people I’m familiar and comfortable with I’m not using swears in conversation, but I’ll let out a curse when I stub my toe or something. In books I think there’s a viceral-ness to real-world swears that invented profanities can’t quite replicate unless the conditions of it being poetry-like is met. At the same time a real-world swear does have to serve a purpose in a book, I don’t like when a book uses “fuck” every other sentence, The Emperor’s Blades for instance annoyed me so much doing that I couldn’t make it through the first seven chapters.
@54/tkThompson: “Those are different uses of “storming” which I did not count because they’re not referring to the weather”
But the ones I linked to in the Google Ngram search are in reference to the weather. People do, in fact, say it’s “storming outside.” Mark Twain used it that way in The Innocents Abroad, for instance. Look through the examples at the Ngram Viewer link and you’ll find that most uses of the phrase “storming outside” do indeed refer to stormy weather. And the dictionary on my shelf gives “storms, storming, stormed” as allowable forms of the intransitive verb “storm” in the meteorological sense. So I have no idea why you think the verb is somehow forbidden to have a gerund.
@54 Swearing every other word reminds me of Uno from The Wheel of Time so does swear in every sentence. The use of fictional swears makes it much less grating to read than if he was using contemporary curse words.
@ChristopherLBennett, All I saw the first time was the graph, I had to go back to figure out how to use it, lol. That use of “storming” definitely wasn’t part of the lexicon I grew up with or what I’m used to hearing now, so it still sounds weird to me.
@noblehunter, I definitely agree with you on that point.
When Poul Anderson wanted words with a alien flavor for some story, he looked to foreign languages for inspiration. It’s not as hard as it sounds. He just looked at a local map of the nation in question and studied the place names.
If you want to do something similar for curse words, read:
The Vulgar Tongue: Comprising Two Glossaries Of Slang, Cant, And Flash Words And Phrases, Principally Used In London At The Present Day, by Anglicus Ducange.
Or 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose.
The “present day” for DUcange is mid-nineteenth century. A lot of those cant words ranged back to Shakespeare’s day. You find things like Zounds! which is a bastardization of God’s Wounds! Or tuppeny upright; a street whore who will do the deed in an alley, leaning against a wall, for the named price. Or draw the claret, give someone a bloody nose.
@58/Fernhunter: “When Poul Anderson wanted words with a alien flavor for some story, he looked to foreign languages for inspiration. It’s not as hard as it sounds. He just looked at a local map of the nation in question and studied the place names.”
I’m a fan of Anderson’s writing, but come on, that’s ethnocentric as hell — assuming that anything that sounds foreign to English-speaking readers can work as non-human language.
Although I do see the reverse in Japanese tokusatsu shows, where aliens’ names and terminology are frequently English words or variants thereon.
ChristopherLBennett
I’m a fan of Anderson’s writing, but come on, that’s ethnocentric as hell — assuming that anything that sounds foreign to English-speaking readers can work as non-human language.
Poul told the story in a speech. I forget which convention it was. The discussion was something about world building.
Poul wasn’t saying that a foreign language map was a non-human language.
He was using the unfamiliar sounds to feel his way to a “language” for a SF story. Poul was clearly pleased with himself. He had invented a simple, useful tool. It was a generous gift to aspiring writers.
The audience was also pleased. They laughed with him.
At the time, Political Correctness was only beginning. It hadn’t gotten as far as condemning ethnocentrism.
I held Political Correctness in contempt then.
I hold Political Correctness in contempt now.
@60/Fernhunter: “Political correctness” is a toxic concept and a propaganda shibboleth used by the right to demonize the idea of fairness and social justice. It originated in Stalinist Russia to refer to pretending to toe the party line to avoid punishment. It was co-opted by the right to discredit the idea of fairness and respect for diversity by claiming it was just a false pretense to go along with the political fashion, or that objecting to bigotry and hate speech was somehow a violation of freedom of expression.
It is not “political correctness” to recognize that something is ethnocentric and fails to consider alternative points of view. It’s simply being a decent enough human being to recognize and care about points of view other than one’s own.
@@@@@ 61, ChristopherLBennett
@@@@@60/Fernhunter: “Political correctness” is a toxic concept and a propaganda shibboleth used by the right to demonize the idea of fairness and social justice. It originated in Stalinist Russia to refer to pretending to toe the party line to avoid punishment. It was co-opted by the right to discredit the idea of fairness and respect for diversity by claiming it was just a false pretense to go along with the political fashion, or that objecting to bigotry and hate speech was somehow a violation of freedom of expression.
Fair enough. That is one of its major roots.
It is not “political correctness” to recognize that something is ethnocentric and fails to consider alternative points of view. It’s simply being a decent enough human being to recognize and care about points of view other than one’s own.
We are discussing Poul Anderson, right?
Did you ever talk to the man? Did you read his stories and essays?
I never met a more decent, considerate, compassionate man.
Even when he disagreed, he gave the other guy a fair hearing.
We seem to be getting off-topic here, and this seems like a good time to remind everyone of our moderation guidelines. It should be noted that dismissing or disdaining others’ opinions or points of view as “political correctness” is not in keeping with the civil and constructive approach to conversation we try to encourage on the site. Let’s move on, and keep things polite.
The part about using foreign languages for inspiration risks the words falling extremely flat for anyone who speaks the language. It reminds of the meme of re-subbing Hitler’s speech from Downfall. It can be hilarious to non-Germans but is utter nonsense to anyone who speaks German.
To this day, the use of f– and s– (and before you think I’m a wussy for not spelling them out, remember I had the brass to not spell them even though I knew you might think that ;) grate on my ears (though I do respect people’s right to make their own linguistic choices). I think this is because in the case of the first word, sex is, quite literally, a divine gift, and it chafes a little to hear it used as an insult or for common purposes. The second word has, for me, the opposite problem. It’s not quite akin to literally throwing feces at someone, but in my mind, it feels similar. I realize that many people may not have my same associations, so again, I don’t judge someone’s choice to use those words, but I appreciate when writers don’t subject me to what feels like a constant stream of excrement and degraded sex acts. So yeah, maybe many authors who make up fantasy swears are doing so to avoid using real swears, but before you roll your eyes, no matter how affectionately, maybe take a moment to put yourself in their shoes and imagine the feeling those words might conjure for them.
And philosophical, philological musings aside, fantasy swears are just plain fun. You really do need some oral designation of frustration to use when you stub your toe or months of careful planning to take over the world go down the drain, and I love when SFF authors take the time to imagine what expressions of frustration would have arisen in their cultures. Even better yet when you can string them together in one long exclamation of “Storming colorful nights!” and your fellow Sanderson fans nod knowingly while everyone else looks at you like you’ve gone crazy.
Sure, you can get around a censor, but to the OP’s point of using swearing as worldbuilding, it can also point directly at what’s most sacred and most profane to the people using it. “Stars and Stones” is interesting because we learn that it also has a magical meaning, so when Harry says it, it references the thing he’s most reverent about. In a less puritanical culture, “fucking” loses some of its taboo. As much as I enjoyed Firefly, it was linguistically lazy (although convenient) to just borrow curses from another culture.
And I’m trying desperately to remember what story used “Rust!” as the pinnacle curse, because actual rust would have been bad news, as well, in context… I’m drawing a blank on what it was from – but I remember the rust!
I think my favourite is Douglas Adams’s use of ‘zarking’ – which he never explicitly connects to his world’s Great Prophet Zarquon!
I’ve long been fond of the use of “fsck” in computer technology circles, which comes from the Unix “filesystem check” program. And of course, we have the now positively ancient use of “frak” from Battlestar Galactica of the 1970s. In a way, it’s almost surprising that they were able to do that on broadcast television 45 years ago.
In my WIP novel, the gods are gone, vaguely remembered as stories about ancient saints. I’ve had a lot of fun crafting profanity around the saints’ names, that some of my characters use very lightly (“Dathius’ eyes, what a disaster!” or “For Nan’s sake, I’m not getting caught up in another of your goose-brained schemes”), but it’s the kind of moderately old-timey religiously motivated swearing that comes with a high fantasy Great Depression.
As our heroes start to bring the gods back, they have to reckon with the idea that St. Dathius and St. Nanette (etc) are very real, and very powerful, and using their names gets their attention. And don’t you dare invoke Old Saint Darren unless you really mean it.
Footnote on St. Dathius: they’re known to have been reincarnated as pretty much every possible sex of every sapient species in the setting. So any anatomy is fair game.
@66/Rachel Ayers: “As much as I enjoyed Firefly, it was linguistically lazy (although convenient) to just borrow curses from another culture.”
Even worse, it wasn’t supposed to be another culture. The idea was that the culture of “the ‘Verse” was an equal, syncretic blend of Western and Chinese elements, because the two dominant planets in the system had been respectively settled by American and Chinese colonists and had had equal cultural and political influence over the ensuing generations. But then they cast the lead roles without a single Asian actor among them.
@rachel Ayers: I know Jemisin’s Broken Earth series used “rust,” but I imagine it would apply to lots of mech-rich worlds.
@68/fuyume: “And of course, we have the now positively ancient use of “frak” from Battlestar Galactica of the 1970s. In a way, it’s almost surprising that they were able to do that on broadcast television 45 years ago.”
I don’t think the original series used it anywhere near as heavily, or as blatantly as a synonym for the other f-word, as the 2003 reboot series did. The more commonly used cuss word in the original was “felgercarb,” which the reboot series never used except as an in-joke brand name for toothpaste. “Galmonging” was also used on a few occasions.
Also, the original series spelled it “frack.” The “frak” spelling comes from the reboot. https://en.battlestarwiki.org/Frack
Holy forkin’ shirt, I can’t believe no one has mentioned The Good Place yet.
I like most of John Ringo’s stuff, including the Looking Glass series, but never understood why maulk and grapp were so much better than what they replaced in the vernacular.
By Klono’s titanium horns, there’s even a discussion of the FUNCTION of swearing in Doc Smith’s Lensman series!
Rust and Ruin, I’ve fething picked up a storming lot of fictional gorram cursewords. Why? Because I frakking collect them, you frelling scrapshunts.
I’ve also had them slip out in place of or alongside more mundane cussing. And it’s not just cursewords, either. I’ve answered questions with “Aff” or “Neg” without thinking about it, and ended up getting about half the service desk I worked on at my last job using Clanner slang from BattleTech with me.
Sources for the profanity:
Rust and Ruin is from the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, and is every bit as closely tied to the worldbuilding as the Stormlight Archive’s cussing.
Feth is from the Gaunt’s Ghosts series by Dan Abnett, where it’s apparently the name of an ancient fertility-associated tree spirit from the homeworld of the Tanith First and Only regiment, and means exactly what you think it does from context.
The Stormlight Archive provided “storming”, as was mentioned in the article.
Gorram comes from Firefly, of course.
Frak, I didn’t get directly from Battlestar Galactica, but instead got it by way of Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) novels, where it’s prevalence in cussing is one of the many shout-outs to non-Warhammer stuff in them.
Farscape may have an excessive amount of fictional swears (as shown by the fact that the dialogue in the Farscape parody they did in the 200th episode of Stargate SG-1, due to having acquired Farscape’s two leads by that point, is about 90% cussing and not a single word is repeated), but Frell was always its favorite.
And scrapshunt comes from Titanicus by Dan Abnett (Adeptus Mechanicus cussing is weird and interesting and I will be incandescently error-shunt-abort at anyone who says otherwise).
Besides the Sanderson ones, the two that come to mind immediately are the Robert Jordan as already mentioned.
and then Dan Abnetts warhammer series Gaunt’s Ghosts- with their use of the word “feth” and “fething”
Did anyone mention the legendary Conan’s frequent, “Crom!”? I mean, that’s WAY back in the day. There were probably more, but I haven’t read Conan in decades. “Frak” in BG series got way overused and became a parody of itself.
Mother’s milk in a cup!
One thing I actually liked about some of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” invented swearing is that most of them were specifically mild, almost euphemistic. So for instance, at one point a character notes of another character that when they’re just playing around they swear by Finagle, but when they swear by damn, they mean it. Another incident has a character point out to another character that it doesn’t do much for his masculine image to be using the swearwords “censored” or “bleep” because those originated as substitutes for real swearwords and so are kind of wimpy. The response, “Censor my masculine image!”
Most of Niven’s characters were not “tough guy” types, so it’s rather appropriate that their invented-swearing was, within the setting, quite mild.
Late to the discussion but I will say that curses and curse words are two different things. Curses are easy (and can be part of worldbuilding).
Curse words are hard. They need to be single words, ideally ending in hard consonants, that can be used in a single word sentence, often with an exclamation point.
This brings to mind two Terry Pratchett quotes.
” Well, —-me,” he said. “A —-ing wizard. I hate —-ing wizards!” “You shouldn’t —-them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.”
“Carrot can pronounce “d*mn”, said to be “a difficult linguistic feat””
Totally agree! I blogged about this in the romance world awhile back: Alpha Heroes- I Swear. Hope the link is allowed.
Robert Frezza made some terms swearwords (Frost or Frosty) in his Small Colonial War series. He even eventually described how they came about, since the planet they were on did not have much background in the events they grew out of.
I love Anne McCaffrey’s “Fardles” and “Frak!” has occurred in more than Battlestar Galactica
@2 scrumming good comment. And re:”candle”. a very real-world picture describing the act of scrumming – “dipping one’s wick…”
Beyonf the usual “frack” or “frell” (I think the spellings are correct), I kind of like “BLARG!” as a catch-all explosive. Can mean so many things, including giving meaning to this blarging comment.
How about the movie Johnnie Dangerously? “You fargin icehole.”
My $.02… I infinitely prefer a substitution — preferable a well thought out substitution which will work in a variety of situations. “Storms!” and “storming” are of course the perfect examples — great substitution for profanity of all sorts, and directly and significantly related to the world built by Sanderson in the Cosmere.
In fantasy fiction, I find that the use of 21st century American/English profanity jars me out of the world built in the story. I feel exactly the same way about other slang — “Dad” comes to mind. In a book read recently, a character said “Get a grip, so-and so!” — which I found so jarring. When a medieval fantasy character calls his father ‘Dad,” I find myself zipped from his word into my own.
I would love it if authors would take time to think about expletives in their worldbuilding — striving for something understandable as an expletive, signifcant to the story, and unrelated to 21st century English slang.
When my father-in-law would hit his thumb with a hammer, he’d cry, “Dirty word!” That works for me.
@84/Ruth White: ““Frak!” has occurred in more than Battlestar Galactica”
Mostly in post-BSG productions featuring nerdy characters who are using it in reference to BSG. Similarly, I think the character of Fargo in Eureka was known to use “frell” from Farscape.
I like most, if not all the Sanderson ones. Way back up at #1 we had mention of deities and their body parts which made me think immediately of the Imperial Radch trilogy and found this example:
“Varden’s suppurating cuticles,” said Seivarden.
Although the one I was thinking of was Aatyr’s (spelling?) and then a slang word for breasts. (I know the article had profanity, but I don’t want to get my comment moderated away)
@87 – I mean, the story is probably translated from whatever language it would have taken place into modern English so you can read it, so you could just view that as the translator adding a modern idiom for you.
@90/Eric Mesa: “…we had mention of deities and their body parts…”
One I’ve always remembered was in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “Mudd’s Passion,” where at one point he had Harry Mudd exclaim, “By the sacred thumbs of Hnisto!”
“…so you could just view that as the translator adding a modern idiom for you.”
Except good translation is about capturing the style and tone of what’s being translated as closely as possible. If something is historical, you want it to feel historical.
I have to shout out to the recently-released videogame Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for having a lexicon of cussing that makes sense for the characters (and also allows them to keep their rating). Appropriately for people who literally live and die by things called Flame Clocks, the characters use “spark” and “snuff” to express…lots of things. This makes sense, because they don’t *have* a concept of hell, for example. When a character says, “Snuff it!” a lot, the Fuck This Emotion is expressed in a T-for-Teen way.
I’m actually most interested in neo-profanity for more “mild” swearing, actually, because “fuck” and “shit” don’t carry the cultural baggage of “damn” and “hell”. English isn’t well-supplied with casual cuss words that aren’t Christian-derived. If the fantasy culture doesn’t Do damnation or hell, then…damn, hell, heck, dang, goddammit, and of course jeez…all off the table.
Though not science fiction, my favorites are Johnny Dangerously and The Good Place. I still shout out “farging bastages” from time to time. Any young ones out there should check out Johnny Dangerously, damn fine comedy. I’m not sure where “shut the front door” comes from, but that’s one I like. I’m ever grateful for Battlestar Galactica for helping me cut down on my swearing by subbing Fracking out.
Bujold used absent gods throughout the Sharing Knife series. How many times did Princess Laia call Han a nerf herder? I’m reading Tamer: Enhancer and Enhancer II by Dave Barack (Grrl Power). Every character is an abductee from a different planet. All have different expletives.
Then there’s “snel-frockey” from Podkayne of Mars. It’s questionable, though, whether that’s a real cuss word even in-story; Podkayne may have simply made it up.
#81: In The Truth, Pratchett has Mr. Tulip use “—ing” as an all-purpose swear word. This is actually one of the book’s many Watergate allusions, since it constitutes an expletive deleted!
I mentioned Bujold, but forgot to mention the Sorceress in The Hallowed Hunt who constantly muttered “dratsab,” the fifth god’s name, backwards.
“Saint’s Teeth!” used by characters in T. Kingfisher’s Paladin universe is my current go to for swearing, you can really drag out the “eeetthhh” at the end for emphasis.
I suggest that David Drake succeeds in suggesting the same but different with his use of substituted profanity in the world of Hammer’s Slammers. John 14:6 suggests Via for Christ and also in line with a to the stars aspirational drift in religion in the books – perhaps an expression of the sort of manifest destiny that arguably led the U.S. into some errors over the years.
Curst for damned is an easy one for one substitution. Seems to me the substitutions make the profanity more acceptable – less shocking – in the stories just as traditional profanity would have been less shocking used in the original place and time but more shocking – even pace changing – contemplated at leisure in a paperback for readers of all ages. Toned down in impact but not omitted when profanity was common in the source material.
@40 “Hells Bells is also the lead track of AC/DC’s album Back in Black“
There’s a much older Benny Goodman song called Hell’s Bells. There’s also a play from 1925 and a book about WWI as well.
As for making up swear words and cussing in fictional worlds – I love it when an author does this. It increases the sense of being elsewhere/when and immersion into another world’s culture. Bonus points for the words coming out of things the characters are actually dealing with or using in their world because you know it’s coming from something that is real for them. I’m all for worldbuilding with swearing and cussing that doesn’t hearken back to the world I currently live in.
For us old folks, Podkayne of Mars’ snel-frocky! Spit!
Harry Dresden’s curses gain rather more weight if one knows the titles of the books in the final end-of-the-world trilogy are planned to be Hell’s Bells, Stars and Stones, and Empty Night. I think “Empty Night” has textual evidence to imply it refers to the end of the world as well.
@37 When I first read Watership Down, I was actually shocked when one of the characters swore “Embleer Frith”. Adams does such a good job of building up the language and the rabbits’ world that that combination comes across as pretty much blasphemous. The shock value is heightened, of course, by the fact that it’s meek, visionary Fiver who says it. (Granted, I was a fairly sheltered young adult from a family where the worst swear was a quiet “Damn!”)
“Fuck, I need to save the weak and underprivileged!”
THESE WORDS ARE ACCEPTED.
There are so many good expletives/swears in fantasy books. I personally find it boring if an author uses the same ones we use in English. I love to see the creativity flow.
Personal favorites include Jacqueline Carey’s “Elua’s balls!” and “Naamah’s Tits!” in her Kushiel series, Sarah J Maas’s exclamations relating to the Cauldron or the Mother (“By the Cauldron!”) in her Court of Thorns and Roses series, or sometimes in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar, they’ll say “Haven!” which is the name of their capital city.
I lived with a man who swore [he’s dead now] found it unpleasant but eventually boring. We all remember Treasure Island’s ” Shiver my timbers” , dangerous for ships. Nancy Blackett’s “Barbecued billygoats” , Jennings’ ” Fossilized fish hooks” have more life than f—, b—— & s—.
In C.S. Lewis’ ” The Great Divorce” someone in the afterlife says he never asks for bleedin charity. The answer is, ” Then do! Ask for the Bleeding Charity”,
As for Dad in a medieval context: in Welsh, the oldest language in Europe, Tad [father] mutates to Dad. Used a lot in church.
Sorry, folks, it’s Klonos’ *Brazen* Claws. Just sayin’.
Also, “Drown you!” from Dreampark by Niven et al in a future that includes the Great Los Angeles Earthquake and the subsequent tsunamic.
And almost any Klingon word can sound bad if pronounced with enough emphasis. I tell people in some situations that I needed to use Advanced Adult Klingon to manage my feelings.
I definitely have to applaud the use of Shazbat. This was used to great effect in the presence of a two year old after a Close Encounter of the Ugly Kind with an earwig.
Not direct profanity, but I’m pretty sure I recall that the men in Joe Abercrombie’s world of The First Law have “fruits” instead of nuts.
I don’t know if this counts as pseudo profanity. It does seem to bear on the topic.
“I know that the English set a special value on humour,” said Lind. “They have a very fine sense of humour and sometimes they think theirs is the best in the world, like their marmalade. Which reminds me that during the First World War some of the English troops used to go over the top shouting, “Marmalade!” in humorously chivalrous voices, as if a heroic battle-cry. The Germans could never get used to it. They puzzled tirelessly to solve the mystery. Because a German cannot conceive that a man in battle would want to be funny, you see. But I think the English were dissembling the horror of their situation so that they would not notice how close they were to Death.”
[Robertson Davies, World of Wonders, 1975]
@93 “farging bastages” reminds me of “fraggin’ bastiches” from DC’s Lobo
There’s one arena where fake expletives are forced on the work for reasons of audience: children’s lit. And in that realm, I want to give a shout-out to the two great exclamations from Spongebob Squarepants: “Barnacles!” (which is self-explanatory) and “Tartar sauce!” (which Stephen Hillenburg once explained was the equivalent of “hellfire”, because the denizens of Bikini Bottom would only encounter tartar sauce after having been killed and prepared as food).
Also special points to Mr. O’Malley’s exclamation in the 1940s targeted-at-kids-but-it’s-the-adults-who-get-the-jokes comic strip Barnaby, “Cushlamachree!”, which looks like a nonsense outburst but is a version of an actual Irish Gaelic phrase, “vein of my heart”.
I have a certain affection for the preferred expletive of the ’90s cartoon superhero Freakazoid!: “Aww, nutbunnies!”
I’m a bit weird when it comes to profanity. A lot of people curse more when they get more emotional or distressed, and there’s supposedly research showing that it’s psychologically healthier to embrace the emotional release of cursing. And yet, though I often curse casually to myself (though I have lifelong conditioning against cursing aloud among other people), when I’m under stress, e.g. tired from carrying a heavy load or (to cite a recent example) worried about having a flat tire, I find myself unconciously saying things like “Oh, dear” and “Oh, my goodness.” I don’t know why that is, but those are where my mind and mouth go when I’m genuinely upset or overwhelmed — to the most innocuous, un-profane interjections imaginable.
Maybe it’s because my private cursing is sort of an affectation. As a child, I had such a strong mental block against speaking expletives that I wouldn’t even let myself subvocalize them or say them in private. Eventually I forced myself to overcome that and allowed myself to cuss in my own head, and eventually it became habitual. But I suppose there’s something artificial about it, so it’s not where my mind goes in times of genuine stress. Or maybe it’s that that lingering taboo adds a touch of anxiety to cursing, so when I’m already anxious, I retreat from it to someplace more comfortably harmless.
Or, heck, maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy at heart and always have been.
“Fuckstockings!”
― Christopher Moore
Probably my favorite fictional swears originate from the video game series “Thief”, which originated the term “Taffer”, which of course *could* mean anything… The guards use it a lot while you’re sneaking around stealing things. then, of course, there’s not just calling someone “Taffer”, there’s also “Taffing around”, “What the Taff”, “Taff Off”, and several variations I’m not remembering ATM.
H. Beam Piper’s science fiction had a lot of this, mostly avoiding Hell, damns and so on in favour of synonyms, though for some reason “Great Satan!” was also popular. This reached its height during a tense battle in SPACE VIKING:
“Then the Yo-Yo was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying, “Gehenna with this fooling around! I’ll fix the expurgated unprintability!”” (and launches salvo of very powerful nuclear missiles).
A pity Lovecraft didn’t indulge in this sort of thing; one might imagine the Cthulhu Mythos providing rich fodder for alternative swearwords.
@115 given Lovecraft maybe it’s better he didn’t.
I personally use “Gods of all Stars!” as a substitute for “what the actual f—?” In a current work in progress I use “slanging” as a substitute for the “f-word”, as in “I need a good slanging — you in the mood?” The real problem I’m having in that worlds, though, is the fact that while God is real, there is no Adversary and no Hell.
I am a fan of invented cuss words, but they have to “fit” for me to feel they’re anything but a polite nod to avoid offense.
As far as I know, “smeg” comes from “smegma.” You can look it up. It’s a dictionary word.
James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy had the cussword “Helleshin.” It was originally supposed to be a Vegan word, but nobody still alive knew what it meant. IIRC, “Gods of all Stars!” is also from Cities in Flight.
Worth noting inter/cultural dynamics of cuss wording. If you listen to foreign tv (I’ve a penchant for Scandi) you pick up that English has ‘lent’ some words to other cultures. Some sociolinguists note that subaltern cultures tend to borrow curses from their oppressors. There’s also a class dimension -almost as if exploited classes dare their exploiters to use such language and in doing so express and consolidate a class-solidarity. The hard one to replicate in invented swearing is the substitutions that ‘politer’ society makes for the ‘heavy duty’ curses -probably because we the readers don’t have the trained cultural sensitivities to ‘get’ when it’s a ‘real’ swearword or when its a politeness substitute since the emotional force may be ostensibly the same in the text. (Substitutes in English have been in the UK, ‘blooming’ for ‘bloody’ [when that was a heavy duty swear], ‘for crying out loud’ [try saying the first syllable without the irst f’r’ as most UK English speakers do and run the syllable on to the first consonant following] and of course in the thread ‘heck’ has been mentioned). I like it when writers show awareness of such things.
@120/Andii: “For crying out loud” is generally considered to be a minced version of “For Christ’s sake.” There are a lot of minced oaths for Jesus’s name, like “Jiminy Christmas,” “Jumping catfish,” “Jumping Jehosaphat,” “Jeepers,” “Cripes,” “Crikey,” etc.
@@@@@ 120. Andii
Worth noting inter/cultural dynamics of cuss wording. If you listen to foreign tv (I’ve a penchant for Scandi) you pick up that English has ‘lent’ some words to other cultures. Some sociolinguists note that subaltern cultures tend to borrow curses from their oppressors. There’s also a class dimension -almost as if exploited classes dare their exploiters to use such language and in doing so express and consolidate a class-solidarity. The hard one to replicate in invented swearing is the substitutions that ‘politer’ society makes for the ‘heavy duty’ curses -probably because we the readers don’t have the trained cultural sensitivities to ‘get’ when it’s a ‘real’ swearword or when its a politeness substitute since the emotional force may be ostensibly the same in the text. (Substitutes in English have been in the UK, ‘blooming’ for ‘bloody’ [when that was a heavy duty swear], ‘for crying out loud’ [try saying the first syllable without the irst f’r’ as most UK English speakers do and run the syllable on to the first consonant following] and of course in the thread ‘heck’ has been mentioned). I like it when writers show awareness of such things.
Some British slang is intentionally hard to understand. Much formal politeness involves not doing or saying the obvious thing. When you eat soup, the natural movement is to pull your spoon towards you as you charge it. The polite thing to do is to scoop the soup by moving your spoon away from yourself. Why? It’s polite.
When your mother describes someone as Not Quite Our Kind of People, she may say they are MIF. Say what? The proper way to pour a cup of tea is to pour the tea first. Add the milk. Stir. There may be better ways. There are not more polite ways. Unfortunates who are MIF don’t need a spoon. They pour Milk In First, premixing their cuppa.
Rhyming Cant is even more obscure. “Butcher the Bristol’s on that girl!” What on Earth? It’s because “Butcher’s Hook rhymes with Look” and “Bristol City rhymes with Titty.”
um, the reason for moving your soup spoon away from you is so that you don’t spill soup all over yourself when you are young and uncoordinated
I like Patricia Briggs character Ben Shaw who uses bad language to fight back against an abusive, but upper class background. His use of sodding and motherhumper add flavor, and his fictional Aunt Fanny has an interesting sex life.
Having grown up around dogs it struck me long ago that humans and dogs curse almost identically. That is the short, sharp outbursts of dog vocalization when upset or scared lines up closely with the sharp syllables of human cursing. At least in English, not going to speak for other languages. Many a time I’ve interpreted the barking of an outraged dog (especially when you invade their territory) as the equivalent curses: ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ ‘F-you!’ ‘Son-of-a-Bitch!’ et cetera. Guess we’re all just mammals together…
As far as the rest of the discussion is concerned, I tend to fall into the ‘Made up Curses’ camp. The only thing that takes me out of a story set a thousand years from now on another fricken planet faster than contemporary curse words is early 21st Century mannerisms. Well, that and modern dialogue in historical settings. Hang the frelling writers!
ChristopherLBennett@39, actually, the profanity “fuck” has little to do with sex. Linguists starting with the late lamented Jim McCawley (often writing as “Quang Phuc Dong” of the “South Hanoi Institute of Technology”) have analyzed it as a modification of “damn”, from the days when *that* was a really severe swearword.
Many formations, like “Fuck you” make no sense otherwise: why is that an insult? I mean, it’s going to be enjoyable! Because it’s a modification of “Damn you”, that’s why, and that was never going to be much fun. (There’s significant evidence for this, largely based around peculiarities of the phrase, which cannot be transformed in many ways you’d expect it to be able to: it has a lot of oddities to crank on.)
My personal favourite strange SF swearing has to be Nick from Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey C. Wells’ Skin Horse. Nick spends much of the strip as a brain in a jar with a filter attached that not only transforms swearwords into prosodically matched non-swearwords, but detects any attempts to use its replacement words *as* swearwords and changes up its substitutions! This is so catching that even after the filter is, ah, removed, Nick still speaks as if it’s present much of the time!
Mazdin@125, dog barks and human profanity are even generated by homologous parts of the relevant species’ brains. Profanities are our version of mammalian response cries (of which howls when a tail is trodden on are an example too). They are evolutionarily fairly old: we just nailed language onto them.
@20 Smeg is from smegma … you might want to look that up ;)
@126/Nix: “ChristopherLBennett@39, actually, the profanity “fuck” has little to do with sex. Linguists starting with the late lamented Jim McCawley (often writing as “Quang Phuc Dong” of the “South Hanoi Institute of Technology”) have analyzed it as a modification of “damn”, from the days when *that* was a really severe swearword.”
I find no evidence of that in my etymology searches. The consensus is that it’s been attested as a synonym for copulation since at least the early 16th century, and appears to be related to the Dutch fokken, to strike or penetrate, or Swedish fock, the penis.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/fuck#etymonline_v_14228
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fuck
I have no idea how it can be claimed to be a “modification” of a word it has zero phonemes in common with. Even Nick’s computer-imposed euphemisms in Skin Horse generally give some idea of what words they’re substituted for.
Oh, the *word* has had that meaning since ancient times: but the “fuck” in “fuck you” likely does *not*. It is very odd. It is probably not a verb at all; the sentence as a whole is not an imperative; in fact it might well not even be a sentence! It may be so odd that, like the particle “to” in (sufficiently comprehensive) modern grammars, it might well end up being assigned it’s own unique grammatical category. The aforementioned very old research on the subject: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/quangphucdong.pdf
@130/Nix: It seems to me that there’s a certain interchangeability to curse words; since they’re used the same way, as terms with shock value or emotional impact, they can thus be swapped out easily, so that, for instance, “What the hell?” may become “What the f—?” or even “What the sh–?” So I would imagine that “Damn you” could have mutated into “F— you” in the same way, through substitution, perhaps by people reluctant to use religious oaths. But that doesn’t mean the word itself isn’t sexual.
There’s a similar form of “plugging in” a profanity in a way unconnected to its meaning that’s always been very weird to me, and that’s the tendency to use “-ass” as an intensifying suffix for any given adjective. Thinking it over now, it occurs to me to wonder if “dumbass” was the earliest form, with “ass” in the sense of a donkey (an animal often associated metaphorically with stupidity), and then people started to perceive the “ass” part as an intensifier and started sticking it onto “bad,” “sorry,” and other words. Although the Etymology Dictionary doesn’t support my conjecture, attributing both “dumbass” and “badass” to 1950s slang.
@131:
John McWhorter discusses this https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/conversation-theres-no-one-real-english-a-linguists-take-on-the-brilliant-complexity-of-black-english/20538/
@132/AndyLove: Interesting, but my point is, why is it “ass?” How did that word end up being the intensifier in a context having nothing to do with its anatomical meaning?
@@@@@ 75. Corylea:
By Klono’s titanium horns, there’s even a discussion of the FUNCTION of swearing in Doc Smith’s Lensman series!
Do you mean, “Men swear to keep from crying. Women cry to keep from swearing.”
@133: I think McWhorter has written a paper on that question. I’ll look
@133 ChristopherLBennett, could it possibly be a mutation of “as”? It seems that it’s used in the same places that comparison would be.
The phrase “As X as a Y” shortened to “As X as” (letting the listener fill in the blank, possibly with profanity), shifting to “An Xas” then “Xass.” Those kinds of shifts can happen very quickly, even more so if it shifts into and out of a dialect or minority group or dialect useage.
I am not a linguist, but it does fit with patterns we’re even seeing today (not going to mention some of the obvious examples because I don’t want to set certain people off and cause trouble for the mods).
In Janet Kagan’s Hellspark, Buntec is from a culture that considers feet obscene. When she curses, she says “Toes!”
After a particularly frustrating incident, she rants “Foot! Heel! Sole! Toes, with green toenail polish!”
@133: From “GRAMMATICALIZATION IN ENGLISH: A DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC ANALYSIS OF THE “ASS” INTENSIFIER“
excessivelyperky@106: If you’re gonna issue corrections, it behooves you to be right yourself. The claws ain’t brazen. It’s “KLONO’S tungsten TEETH and CURVING CARBALLOY CLAWS!!!”.
Boeing airplanes do have larger vertical stabilizers than most others – a first glance distinction between Boeing and Airbus airplanes to this day. The usage “Hey Bo Diddley have you heard, we are going to jump out of a big ass bird” was issued as a 45 in 1957. A more common usage was airborne airborne have you heard and big ass scanned but I don’t think was a distinctive vertical stabilizer for transports of the time.
@138 & 140: Okay, that would explain it. It originated as a reference to the large “rear end” of a plane, but it was used in popular culture in a way that took it out of its original context, so people reinterpreted its meaning based on how it sounded in its pop culture usage. They heard “big-ass bird” without recognizing the specific thing being alluded to, and just figured it was an intensifier for “big,” so that they started using it as an intensifier for other adjectives.
It’s like how “Nimrod,” the name of a Biblical king described as a mighty hunter, came to be a slang term for an idiot or dweeb. In the 1948 Daffy Duck cartoon What Makes Daffy Duck, there’s a point where Daffy mocks Elmer Fudd by calling him “My little Nimrod.” He meant it as sarcasm, mocking the incompetent Elmer’s aspirations to be a great hunter, but children who saw the cartoon and didn’t get the Biblical allusion just thought it was an insult word and started using it that way. (I thought it was Bugs Bunny in Little Hiawatha, but Wikipedia cites the Daffy cartoon.)
This brings to mind swearing in Firefly, which is all in Chinese while the characters mostly speak in English. It reflects a different world order in a clever way.
@142/Suz: I’ve already commented on how not clever I felt Firefly‘s simplistic version of linguistic creolization was.
don’t know if it’s been mentioned, in Red rising, the use of a cuss was a possible reason for the protagonist to be discovered; he should use ‘gory’ or gorydamn, common in the slang of the powerful, instead of bloodydamn, typical of his neighborhood of birth.
@144/gonzalowski: So they used the curse as a shibboleth, pretty much literally. In the Bible, the Gileadites identified hidden Ephraimites by demanding that everyone say the word shibboleth, which was pronounced sibboleth in Ephraimite dialect. I imagine if there was no “sh” sound in Ephraimite phonology, few of them would’ve had the practice to fake the sound, never having learned how.