Every culture has its own set of taboos surrounding bodily functions, religion, and naming things. In Anglophone cultures, our taboos generally involve waste excretion, particular body parts, sexual acts, and Christian deities. But we can still talk about these things (with varying degrees of comfort) by replacing them with non-taboo words, or we can “soften” them to non-taboo forms by changing something about the word itself. This column will unavoidably include cusswords, though I will try to keep them to a minimum…
Taboo words in English have non-taboo counterparts and, in many cases, elevated/clinical terms as well. (As a native US-English speaker, I’m focusing on that variety, but I’ll mention some British as well.) Take, for example, the word feces. It’s a dry, clinical, neutral term for solid bodily waste. We also have crap, less clinical, slightly vulgar but still allowed on TV, poo or poop and all its variants, a childhood word, and the delightful, vulgar Germanic word shit. Each of these words has situations where it’s appropriate and inappropriate, and they all indicate something about the person using them (and the situation they’re in).
Medical records will use feces (or possibly stool, excrement, or excreta) but none of the others; when people step in dog feces on the street, they don’t refer to it as dog feces, but use one of the other words, like dog crap, dog poo, doggy doo-doo, dog turds, or dog shit. Some of these things are more okay to say in front of a child than others, and one of them is too vulgar for broadcast TV.
When used as an exclamation or interjection, we don’t use feces, turd, or doo-doo; these are strongly tied to the object. Instead, we’ll say crap, shit, or poop, depending on our personal preferences and who’s around us at the time. I try really hard to avoid cussing in front of my five-year-old niece, because she’s a sponge for that sort of thing, and we don’t need her to go to school sounding like a sailor.
We can also say shoot or sugar or something similar, where you can still recognize the vulgarity, but it’s been changed. When I was a young 3dgy teen, my mom would give me this Look and say, “it’s gosh darn it.” She still doesn’t like me cussing, but I’m 44 now, and here I am, writing about swear words.
Reading Shakespeare as a teen, I saw all these zounds! and the like, and had no idea what it meant, but, based on context, I could tell it was some sort of swear. I pronounced it rhyming with sounds, because that’s what it looked like, but I later learned it was derived from God’s wounds—and thus a blasphemous swear. Bloody also stems from religion: God’s blood. Jiminy cricket is also a deformation of a blasphemous swear, as are gee, geez/jeez, and a whole plethora of words.
As language users, we thus have a few tricks in our bag for how to avoid taboos, and we use them all the time. In many cases, we use avoidance words without even knowing that they’re avoiding something!
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Fugitive Telemetry
When script writers had to avoid bad words because of FCC broadcast rules, they could take a variety of tacks, just like we do every day. You get lots of “oh, geez” and “shoot” or “freaking” in your contemporary (and historical) fare, but in SFF-land, writers have another trick up their sleeves: alien languages, or even made-up future-English words. That’s where our fraks and frells come in (via Battlestar Galactica and Farscape, respectively). Sometimes you get other inventive ways of evading the censors, like Joss Whedon did with Firefly and having people cuss in Chinese.
Of course, now, with the rise of Netflix and Prime originals, people can swear to their heart’s content. In the Expanse books, Chrisjen Avasarala uses fuck freely and creatively. In the SyFy seasons, she doesn’t swear much, but once the show switched over to Amazon Prime, she now gets to use her favorite word almost as much as in the books. It’s delightful to see this respectable grandmother and politician with a gravelly voice talking like a sailor, and I love it.
Of course, evading the censors isn’t the only reason to deform taboo words. Some authors use invented swears as worldbuilding or because they aren’t as potty-mouthed as I am.
In his book The Widening Gyre, Michael R. Johnston has the main character comment that Kelvak, one of the non-human languages, is his favorite to curse in, because there’s “nothing as satisfying as the harsh consonants” in the word skalk.
There’s something to that statement. The two most common vulgarities, shit and fuck, are characterized by a fricative at the word onset and a plosive as the coda. A successful deformation of these words—one that leaves the speaker satisfied—follows that pattern. Deformations that are closer to the original are also more satisfying. Shoot is more satisfying than sugar; frak is more satisfying (to me) than frell. Judas priest is more satisfying (and blasphemous) than jiminy cricket. The Kelvak word skalk starts with a fricative (albeit in a cluster) and ends with a plosive, so it feels “sweary.”
You could theorize that there’s some sort of sound-symbolic connection with the fricative-vowel-plosive combination, where the plosive represents a closing or hitting, but that gets a bit Whorfian. We don’t need psychological justification for it.
So: what are some of your favorite SFF swears and taboo deformations? I’m partial to “Bilairy’s balls!” from Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series, in which Bilairy is the god of the dead.
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke. You can find her current project, a book on practical linguistics for writers, on Patreon.
Good frikkin’ essay!
Gotta love it when someone gets it almost right, as in the case of Heinlein having an early-twenty-first century time traveller get in trouble by using a word which didn’t mean sex in his day–namely, the word “kink”.
I enjoyed the Middleman’s aggressively wholesome expletives, which had him swearing primarily by pop culture titles. “My Little Pony!!!” “Flowers for Algernon!!!!”
The RED DWARF cast was part of PBS’s annual fund drive some years back, and they were answering questions from loyal viewers. One question was, “What does ‘smeg’ mean?” They almost fell off their chairs laughing. I’m assuming the American questioner thought it was British slang instead of a made-up word to fit every normal swear word by context.
@@.-@ MByerly
Ummm … ‘smeg’ is not an entirely made up word, see ‘smegma’, I may be wrong about the link, but as soon as I heard the word I assumed it was a shortened version of smegma. And I know I was not alone in that assumption, for the record I and my fellow assumers are all British.
I enjoyed all the crow-related expletives in Codex Alera (bloody crows, crowbegotten, etc). It helps that “go to the crows” was an actual Roman curse.
Final Fantasy XIV keeps to their “T” rating while letting characters swear by going back to archaic terms; they can get away with “shite” and “arse”, but use “swive” in several places one could/would use “fuck”–but while “swiving” works great in some contexts, it doesn’t have that same consonant-driven impact as “fucking” in others.
This is among other old or obscure spellings and word choices the game (in English, at least) often uses, leaning into the juxtaposition of the non-technological magic-based societies versus the more industrial/tech driven ones.
In Scott Westerfield’s steampunk “Leviathan” trilogy, the word for excrement is “clart,” which I’ve found out is a somewhat archaic British dialect word meaning “a glob of mud.”
I’d add that swear words should be monosyllabic in origin. “Felgerkarb” (in context, “shit”) in the OG Battlestar Galactica was weak for that reason.
Multisyllabic swears should have a monosyllable root, and the emphasis should be (or possible to be) on the root swear, e.g., “bull-SHIT”, “moth-er-FUCK-er”
Fun article!
Then there was the delightful twist of Star Trek, where apparently profanity was as endangered as humpback whales, finding its newfound big screen freedom to curse. “Double dumbass on you!”
While it’s fantasy, not Science Fiction, – I LOVE the swears in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. Each planet has swears that make sense in the context of their dieties and cultures. Particularly in Warbreaker there are swears in the drab country that aren’t swears in the colorful country.
I always liked the rhyming substitutions (What the duck?) or maybe the reverse acronym (Sugar Honey Iced Tea!)
The Wheel of Time has some very colorful cursing from Flaming and Bloody, to Mother’s Milk in a cup and Sheep Swallop and bloody buttered onions. I especially like the character Uno who uses swear words in every sentence. It takes real effort for him to talk cleanly when he needs too.
Bavarian swears can become very long. The phonetic analysis is also very English-centric.
My wife’s Xbox gamer tag was Frelling Frak. She rarely encountered anyone who recognized the words. Not sure she ever encountered anyone who recognized both.
@11 – That’s why there’s an extra “F” in “SFF” ;)
Blood and bloody ashes!
Each culture has a range of profanity, from mild words that are mostly acceptable even in polite company to words whose use marks one as a bad person who should be permanently shunned. This range is often not obvious to non-native speakers, which is why one should avoid cursing in a language in which one is not fully fluent – you might seriously offend people.
400 years ago, blasphemy was the primary category of seriously unacceptable cuss words in English. A “dammit” which barely raises eyebrows today would draw significant opprobrium then. By contrast, sexual or excretory terms were not nearly as problematic for them.
In 21st century America, the most offensive terms don’t fall into any of the categories described by the author of this article. Instead, they are racial or misogynistic slurs – the N-word, the C-word, etc. Using any of these words, even once, may result in one’s removal from polite society for an extended period of time.
These changing mores do suggest something about what each society cares about and where the fracture points are. 17th-century Europe was in the middle of a series of extremely bloody religious wars and waves of persecution. The United States today is confronting its centuries of discrimination, and that fight creates a minefield in which one should only very carefully tread.
The Good Place‘s “fork” and “shirt” deserve mention here. (Yes, the show is totally SFF, as much as Good Omens and the like at any rate.) Bonus points for the in-universe explanation!
I always love when the swearing seems to have grown out of the world. Good examples of this include Sanderson’s Cosmere and Rothfus’s Kingkiller Chronicle. They all tie back to the theology of the world(s) instead of just being some random words or phrases that don’t seem to fit anywhere. It adds to the worldbuilding, especially when coupled with swearing that doesn’t have a direct link to anything we know, or is just our own profanity. It makes the language feel more… I don’t know… lived in? Well worn? Comfortable?
Great article!
I’ve always been partial to “frak,” ever since I first heard it at six years old and knew immediately what it was replacing (dad was an ex-Marine and worked with truckers; I heard a lot of words before I should have). “Frell” was understandable, but not as fun to say. And I agree with the commenter above that “felgercarb” never worked because it was too long.
“Skalk” is actually something I used to say myself, because I didn’t want to curse in front of my daughter. She never picked it up, but it became enough a part of my daily life that when I needed a Kelvaki curse, it just made sense.
These days, my favorite fake curses are things I make up myself on the spur of the moment, but “frak” will always be part of my lexicon.
As a former boatswains mate in the US Navy I have to comment on the term ‘swear like a sailor’. We swear a lot more than that.
Empirically, I like “frack”, which I got from my sister-in-law (who I’m sure got it from BSG, which I’ve never watched). Also occasionally “shiny”, which is not a swear, per se (from Firefly, of course, which I did watch). Also “freaking” and “frikkin'”, whose antecedents I don’t know.
#18 mentions “fork” and “shirt” which I also occasionally use. “What the fork?”
I recall in one of Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 tie-in novels a minor exchange in which an inquisitor assumes “feth” and its usage is equivalent to our “fuck”…and it isn’t (actually a Tanith forest deity), which lets Gaunt know she’s messing with him psychically. Having seen a number of SFF swear substitutions before and since, I found that amusing.
@@@@@ 4 MByerly – I haven’t seen it asked by an American, but I’ve seen it asked by a young boy (about 8 years old at a guess) at a convention Q&A session; Craig Charles hid under the desk because he was too embarrassed to explain to a kid what “smeg” meant. What with it not being a made up word and all.
This article is shiny.
“Oh, Belgium man, Belgium!”—Zaphod Beeblebrox to Ford Prefect
I got sick and tired of the BSG reboot long before the Big Reveal,* but I did think that there was some wit in it. I liked the bit where the nice quiet schoolteacher lady who accidentally became president says “frak” in the presence of her staff and they just…go quiet…and she immediately apologizes, because she is supposed to be better than that (or at least appear better than that).
Obscure Tolkien nerd moment: Tolkien has one of his Orcs use the word skai in the Black Speech, but he doesn’t translate it except as a non-specific “Gah!”. It hasn’t gotten any traction in fandom or in moviemaking as far as I can tell, even though it would have excellent hang time. Compare “Ssss-ka-i-i-i!” and “Oh, God…damn…it.”
*Gurl qba’g svaq Rnegu, ohg gura gurl qb, naq rirelobql qrpvqrf gb dhvg yvivat va n grpuabybtvpny fbpvrgl va beqre gb orpbzr n ohapu bs Nqnzf naq Rirf orpnhfr qlvat bs na vasrpgrq gbbgu vf whfg fb cher naq jubyrfbzr, naq gura gur Fgbar Ntr unccraf, naq gura jr unccra. Rot13 this to save yourself some time watching Sexy Torcha and people juggling Idiot Balls.
I say bitca all the time (from Buffy).
Well, in the Matrix Reloaded the Wachowskis let the Merovingian swear not in an alien language but something very close to it. French. It sure sounds classy.
In print SF, Larry Niven has given us “tanj,” a favorite expression of Louis Wu. “There Ain’t No Justice.”
Back to “frak” from BSG, in the original series, it served as a universal adjective, but in the re-boot, it was promoted to a verb form, as I recall one character bit of dialogue as something like, “Well, you’re frakking the XO’s wife.” (Someone who’s watched it more recently than I, please feel free to correct me.)
Agree that “frak” is a pithy swear word. “Frell” never did it for me, sounding too soft.
I remember my dad, who was religious and against any form of swearing, using a word in his native language as an expletive. It translated as “temptation!”, as in “Satan made me do it” or “the devil’s messing with me.” It’s closest analogue would probably be “goddammit”, or “godsdammit”, as BSG would have it. We had several conversations where I tried to tell him that he was, in fact, swearing. It’s the intent that matters. Substituting a more innocent sounding word doesn’t get you off the hook. Not sure he ever agreed, though he did tone it down for awhile.
And speaking of “frak,” I’ve recently started a BSG rewatch (am somewhere in middle of season 2). I’m actually dreading an upcoming episode where Adama Sr. and Tigh are featured in a flashback of a drunken night in a bar. The scene features a plethora of bodily excretions: sweat, tears, mucus, vomit, piss, blood… maybe some I’m blocking out. I really hate the Bodily Fluids School of Acting. It doesn’t need to be shown for the most part. Perhaps if BSG writers had been as creative as inventing frakking, they would’ve come up with some other words for the other functions…
Much love to Farscape’s stable of swear words, special mentions should also go to Tralk, as ‘you look such a tralk in that dress,’ and Mivonks, as in ‘I kicked him in the mivonks!’ In fact, there was so much swearing happening in a show that used to air at 18:00 in the UK, it’s impressive.
Frell mightn’t have worked as a swear-word, but it does sound a lot sexier than frak, esp when Aerin was suggesting it to Crichton . . .
@23: Yes, Gaunt’s Ghosts is amazing. Also, it’s mentioned in Straight Silver how the regiment’s senior officers know that the Tanith and Verghastite portions have finally succeeded integrating when they start using the curses from the other culture.
@33. carla: well, Aeryn Sun had a lot of frelling sex appeal…
@35: Had, nothing. Claudia Black is still an exceptionally beautiful woman with a fantastic voice.
@@.-@ & 5: I’ve never heard of Red Dwarf but I always snerk when I see magazine ads for the high-end European appliance brand SMEG. It just sounds deliciously filthy.
I’m not familiar with the Nightrunner series, so when I saw “Bilairy’s balls!” I thought it was a similar situation to “zounds!” where the original form was “By Larry’s balls!” and I was wondering who Larry was, lol.
@17, I would argue there’s a difference between rude and offensive, as well as a difference in where/how/to whom the words are directed between words mentioned in this article and things like the N-word or C-word. “Shit” and “Fuck” don’t necessarily refer to people, they can be used when an undesirable event occurs, whereas the N-word and C-word are always directed at people, or if “fucker” or “asshole” is used, these terms can be applied generally/equally to anybody whereas N and C are targeted at specific groups, so yes, N and C are more taboo but it’s also a difference in kind, not just in degree.
@19, I’m the same way, but what I notice is that authors will go one way or the other, I can’t think of too many that use both in-world and real-world curses in a mix. The only one I can think of right now is Robert Jordan in Wheel of Time, mostly because of the “bloody”.
French is interesting to me in the swear words department because Quebecois French uses items of religious (specifically Catholic) paraphernalia–calice, tabarnac–that are completely mundane in Metropolitan French.
@devin: I agree. But I was referring to the character, who’s run has ended…
@2 JohnArkansawyer,
‘time traveller get in trouble by using a word which didn’t mean sex in his day’
Doesn’t have to be a time traveller for this to happen.
US v Australia: If you ever watch an Australian Rules Football match you might think you have heard the crowd bellowing ‘ball’ after the player with the football is tackled. And indeed you have, because ‘ball’ has no sexual connotations in Aussie English but holding the ball when tackled can be a rules violation, so the crowd is suggesting to the officials that the tackler should be rewarded with a free kick. No salacious intent at all.
HOWEVER,
The word in Aussie English which DOES have a sexual connotation is ‘root’. So if you’ve ever wondered why your Australian friend gave you a strange look when you told them you rooted for a particular team . . .
I’m very, very fond of “Belgium,” as well as the liberal use of “Shuck” in Scott Sigler’s GFL novels. Shucking massive hardbacks, though! #girthy #bookboner
In the Anne McCaffrey Ship Who… universe they use Fardling as a swear. It is a fun word to say but I don’t know if it’s as punchy as other words
My favourite is probably Niven’s “tanj”. But it isn’t really offensive even in its full form so maybe doesn’t qualify for this list (which may be why it is my favourite, I’m not much of a one for swearing myself).
There’s also Harry Harrison’s “bowb”, which hasn’t been mentioned yet, but which I felt sounds like a swear word.
And of course the Lensmen of Doc Smith (or maybe only Kimball Kinnison?) swear by most of Klono’s body parts, including but not limited to “Klono’s gadolinium guts”, “Klono’s tungsten teeth” and “Klono’s indium intestines”… (oh, and also “Klono’s maiden aunt” for some reason).
1) I had always heard that “Bloody” was derived from “by our Lady” a reference to Mary
2) Best part of Frak: reading a headline stating that “President demands an investigation into frakking” or “Concerns raised regarding effects of frakking on the environment.” Yes, I know that the energy industry spells it with a C but still…
An honorable mention to Spongebob Squarepants, whose go-to curses of “Fishsticks,” and “Tartar sauce,” in light of the fact that he lives in a world populated by sapient sea creatures, take on a rather dire cast. (Although, invitations to bite or ‘eat,’ sundry parts of anatomy aside, I’m not sure of anyone else who swears by anthropophagy).
The UK comic 2000AD (home of Judge Dredd) had “Grud” and “sneckin'”.
As to changing mores, George Bernard Shaw caused a scandal in 1913 with Eliza Doolittle speaking the line ‘Not bloody likely’ in his play Pygmalion. This had to be updated to ‘Move your arse’ (if memory serves) in the musical version My Fair Lady.
A thought occurred to me about swear words the other day. I often hear people use “jesus christ” as an explanative. I wonder why that is the case and why do I never hear “mohammad” , “brahma”, “vishnu” or “shiva?” Or better yet, “torngasoak” now that would be an awesome sounding swear word, but I never hear those.
I’m fan of Niven’s “bleep” and “censored” as swears. At one point Louis Wu comments on the evolution of language and how those words became the thing they replaced.
@5 Jazzlet has it right. ‘smeg’ is not a made-up word. It was in common use in the UK before ‘Red Dwarf’.
‘Red Dwarf’ did, however, do its best to popularize the word and its variants. I once read a comment that said: “People are under the mistaken impression that ‘Red Dwarf’ is a sci-fi TV show. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is a monstrous, malicious conspiracy to introduce the word ‘smeghead’ to the English language.”
I believe that this analysis is entirely correct.
Shazbat!
I’m surprised this entire article was written without mentioning (possibly without the author being aware) that there is a term for the phenomenon of word substitution (eg sugar for shit, damn becoming darn or dang, cheese and rice, frak instead of fuck): it’s called “mincing” oaths.
I’m a fan of “Verra-be-damned” from the Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust. I have also enjoyed various oaths involving gods and goddesses in the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance series. They often invoke body parts and can be quite pithy (similar to Bilairy’s balls). And I don’t remember where I hear this particular insult, but it’s fun to say: “You son of a motherless goat!”
I love the swearing in Red Rising, because you can tell it definitely evolved from current English. There is “Bloody-damn” and the more proper “Gory-damn”.
There’s also the time-honored tradition of using foreign-language swear words. Even milder ones can be satisfying to say and a way to work around censors, children, and parental units. ;-)
@42, I say “fardling” fairly often, as I imprinted on McCaffrey at a young age. My wife hates the sound of it, though, and gives me grief every time.
Absolute favorite is in Watership Down. After introducing the terms for graze/eat and excrement early in the book and using the terms in context throughout the story, the author sets up a beautiful moment late in the story when one character responds to another “eat shit” in the rabbit language and it’s completely organic and hysterical.
Eating shit is normal behavior for rabbits.
@40 ozajh:
A bunch of years back (I’m thinking early 2000s or late 1990s), MLB ran a self-promotion ad featuring a succession of players singing “Take Me out to the Ballgame”, each one singing a line or so.
I’m blanking on the guy’s name now, but an Australian-born pitcher sang the line: Root, root, root for the home team
It was wondered at the time if he asked for that one specifically.
When I was younger, words used instead of, horror, “dirty” words were “Clirtys.” — Cleaned-up dirtys. There was a book about it in the ’60s. I couldn’t find a quick link to it, but it may be buried in my library somewhere.
Harry Dresden swears by saying
“Empty night”
“Stars and stones”
and one or two more.
In the most recent book, he is chided for not understanding the meaning of a curse word/phrase he used. He and the reader do not get an explanation.
@60- “Hell’s bells,” as I recall. And, speaking of minces, on one memorable occasion, “Oh, shit, heckhounds!”
A few have already mentioned Niven’s “tanj”. That one never resonated with me: I didn’t find it logical that “there ain’t no justice” could evolve to sound vulgar or profane. It sounded mealy-mouthed to me, or as Della mentioned, it sounded like mincing.
Birgit @14: If you can even call it a phonetic analysis, yes, it’s English-centric. That’s the language I’m writing in and about. But the most satisfying English swears are the Germanic ones, so German Scheiße and fick meet the same criteria. (English -t- in many cases occurs where an -s- or a -z- occurs in German, because of sound shifts.)
@46 I also like “Drokk” from Judge Dredd.
Robert Stadler @17 – I really enjoyed Holy Shit: A Brief History of English Swearing by Melissa Mohr, and I meant to mention it here but must have forgotten. For anyone interested in the subject, I can recommend it as entertaining and informative. It’s a rather deeper analysis that shows what this comment said succinctly.
@38 – Bilairy is the god of the dead :D
@51 – I hadn’t come across that term in my reading, but now the phrase “he doesn’t mince words” makes a lot more sense!
Re “bloody,” I should modify that statement. It’s generally believed by the public to come from religion, but apparently there’s another origin story of there being a group at Oxford who called themselves the Bloods and got drunk a lot, so “bloody drunk” meant drunk as one of these bloods, then its use as an intensifier broadened.
When I’m “on the clock”, I subconsciously switch to less-bad words. I said “blast” in front of clients one time (I needed a fresh battery in my camera or something) and they laughed, saying I sounded like a cartoon villain.
I discovered Pern as a teen, and got around my conservative mom’s ban on swearing with a whole lot of “Shards!” and “Shells!” and “Faranth!” My current speech patterns are still peppered with those, with “frak” and “frell”, and occasionally with a heartfelt “Maker’s breath!” (thank you, Dragon Age).
I watched the original Battlestar Galactica way back when I started using Frack and felgercarb instead of the usual words I had before. Still use them now as I am considerably older and try not to sound like a longshoreman anymore. I have been known to use Latin too as few people tend to understand it today.
Question: I always thought that “frak” originated in Johnny Hart’s cartoon series B.C. I haven’t verified whether this is the case; I know that the cartoon started in 1958 which certainly predates Battlestar Galactica, but I may well be mistaken about that word being used in the comic. While I don’t particularly care beyond being curious, can anyone confirm or deny that?
(B.C. would count as fantasy, so it would still be a perfectly valid example for this article.)
IIRC The Mote in Gods Eye uses “Rape” as an obscenity. Thus the moment when one character tells another to “Rape the engines”.
And the early Kick-Ass comics featured a subplot in which a couple of teenagers made up the word “Tunk” and tried to popularise it as an obscenity, leading eventually to one agonised gangster to exclaim to his fellows “He shot me in the tunk!”
Niven’s Smoke Ring books had all waste including corpses fed into the trees for nutrients, so “feed the tree” was a very broad insult.
@38 There are SF equivalents of those taboo words too, for fictional minority groups. John Barne’s Earth Made of Glass has “starver”, which is so offensive it starts a riot.
@54 American pop culture seems to permit more swearing if it’s specifically English, from actual England. So much so that some Buffy fans thought that “bint” was a swear word when Spike used it.
The 100’s use of “Go float yourself” was a great deformation. We know the true intention of the phrase, but it was also culturally appropriate for those living on a space colony.
@@@@@ 71 – Ofcom put “bint” in the same category as “bitch” and “bullshit”, i.e. “Medium language, potentially unsuitable pre-watershed” so it’s not entirely unreasonable for yanks to think it’s a swear word; it tends to get treated as one.
“Bint” is British slang. It’s an insulting term for a woman, implying she’s lower class / rough.
Huh, I really didn’t think “bint” was that bad. Maybe I read too many Adrian Mole books.
In Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark series, my favorite character by far is the Valkyrie Nucking Futs Nïx !
My favorite expletive is “Jesus wept!”, because it’s quoting a verse in the Bible yet sounds so satisfying when I’m mad or disgusted.
@Lara I love that you actually used these! I also agree the swears in the Pern books work really well. Shells! and Shards! have that excellent plosive (other favorites: Scorch it! and calling something “crackdust”), their meanings are clear, AND they make sense in the context of the society.
I was 11 when the original BSG came out, so count me as another “frak” user. I did pick up “smeg” from Red Dwarf.
On the rare occasions when my brain processes faster than my mouth, I’ll use “fudge” instead of a certain other F-word. If I’m really upset, “fudge-sicles!”
Klingon is a lovely language, just saying ‘good morning’ can have an impact.
And ‘shazbot’ was very helpful when I found an earwig where no earwig should be around a curious, loquacious two-year-old.
I love Seanan Mcuires October Daye series has some great curses.
“By Moms Tits!” is my favorite!!
@11: I’m partial to “storm” as an all-purpose cussword substitue in Stormlight Archive, though it sounds weird when someone says “I don’t give a storm.” I’m still waiting for some character to say “Go storm yourself.”
@45: I sometimes say “Barnacles.”
@61: I’m currently reading Dresden Files, and “Oh shit, heckhounds” is my favorite quote thus far — Harry pretends to comically miss the point, in his typical smartass fashion, and I laugh every time I think about it. Before I started the series, I had almost trained myself to say “Heck’s pecs” instead of “Hell’s bells,” but that’s more challenging now.
@81: October Daye has an excellent array of original cuss-phrases.
In Destiny of the Daleks, there’s a scene where Tom Baker’s doctor threatens Davros while shouting at the approaching daleks to stay back. My guess is that the original line was probably “Now just back off,” but in the heat of the moment it comes out “Now ’sback off!”
So for my local fan group “spack off” became a favourite expression, and arguably canon.
(Boy, CAPTCHA is really making my work for this one.)
@40 ozajh: or the fact that calling a belt tote a fanny pack will get you strange looks at least in the UK (and possibly other parts of the Commonwealth).
In I Will Fear No Evil, Heinlein invented “frimp”, which was both more acceptable than “fuck” and broader. I assume Spider Robinson (a heavy fan of RAH) was borrowing this in “Half an Oaf”, when somebody describes the “gimp-frimping, turtle-tupping” person who sold a defective time belt.
Mincing oaths (thank you, @51 Della!) has a history. W. S. Gilbert once confronted someone putting down Ruddigore (a fantasy) as “Bloodygore” and claiming they were equivalent: “You’re saying if I admire your ruddy countenance (which I do), I like your bloody cheek — which I don’t!”
“Moistened bints lobbing scimitars…”
FYI, “Bloody” has nothing to do with God’s blood. It is an elision of “By Our Lady” as in the Virgin Mary. It is blasphemous by association (taking the name of God’s mother in vain). At a certain periods in medieval British and European history, veneration of the Virgin Mary bordered on cult status, particularly among the craft guilds, as well as the medieval equivalent of the benevolent societies (modern day Shriners, the Elks Club, the Lions Club, etc.), in which charitable works were undertaken out of Marian devotion.
As other have already mentioned, Farscape was very creative in the department of alien swearing and getting naughty ideas past the radar: in addition to frell, tralk, mivonks etc they gave us lumers (breasts), fahrbot (crazy), dren (shit) and others.
The Expanse is keeping up the tradition via more than Avasarala’s fondness for the word fuck – LangBelta/Belter Creole features evocative terms such as felota, which means a turd floating in zero g (hence Drummer’s sour comment that being in charge ‘sucks the big felota’).
Melissa Scott’s Astreianters tend to swear using the names of gods and astrological signs, so you get a lot of ‘Seidos’s Horse!’ and so on from them. Eslingen has a surprisingly restrained vocabulary for a former soldier, though, now that I come to think of it.
@22 Frick is an odd one. I’m not sure of any validated origin, but the two I’ve heard are:-
– From the german swear word “Fick” which is the same as the english word with the u in it.
– From the english swear word “Frig”, as in the sailors’ song Good Ship Venus: “Frigging in the rigging / we’re frigging in the rigging / frigging in the rigging / coz we’ve fuck all else to do”
Blistering barnacles, surely _Destination Moon_ and _Explorers on the Moon_ entitle Captain Haddock to a nod here? Bashi-bazouk… ectoplasm… don’t tell me I’m acting the goat!
Interesting that we now have three proposed derivations for ‘bloody,’ although I’ll admit I’m having trouble wrapping my tongue around “B(y our)lady.”
I’ve found that Shtako from Defiance migrated into my vocabulary shortly after watching it…It’s still there, years later, along with Shazbot, dren, Hydatha’s tits, good old frak, and feldercarb.
I always enjoyed when Cisco on The Flash would say use frak…a tiny nod to BSG and a way to get around censors. Also enjoy all of the creative swears from Margot on The Magicians even though the show used its network allowed ‘fuck’s very well.
As always, but especially right now, we ask that you try to avoid bringing current politics into the conversation, as this tends to quickly derail the discussion. Thanks!
Yarbles.
tkThompson, Québécois French also comes with an accent that does a number on spelling them cusses!
Tanj. To the point and meaningful.
My favourites are still the Mando’a swears Karen Traviss invented in her Republic Commando books. Aside from the ever-popular osik (sh*t) and shab (“f_ck”), Mandalorians mostly swear by cowardice (hut’uun), unreliability (aruetyc), and stupidity (di’kut). Though aruetyc’s popularity as a swear is less popular in some quarters, as the word literally just means “foreigner” (i.e., non-Mando).
They also have some colourful phrases; kaysh mirsh solus (“his brain cell is lonely”), mir’osik (“dung for brains”), ori’buyce, kih’kovid (“all helmet, no head” –someone with an overinflated sense of their own importance), and my absolute favourite: mirsh’kyramud (“brain-killer” –someone so stupid/boring that they make you stupider just by talking to them).
Seanan McGuire’s October Daye features swears based on the founding fae’s–Oberon, Titania, Maab–body parts. Which leads to first-borns like the Sea Witch swearing, “Mom’s tits!”
It’s amusing to see less successful past attempts at creating future oaths based on contemporary modes of speech. For example, there seems to have been a late 19th/early 20th Century vogue for elaborate, grandiloquent oaths along the lines of “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (something used in, for example, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which was also a favorite of Clark Kent’s editor Perry White, at least in the Superman radio serials). I assume this is the source of Isaac Asimov’s “Great Galloping Galaxies!” in Foundation.
(It would be kind of awesome if “Great Galloping Galaxies!” shows up in the forthcoming Apple TV+ Foundation series, but I’m not holding my breath.)
The Malazan curses are probably amongst the most interesting: “Hood’s breath” while Hood is the god of the death. And, of course “Hood’s hoary balls!” has a lovely ring to it.
“Mother’s milk in a cup” is also very interesting.
I’m surprised no one has mention Sword of Truth’s “fark” yet.
Another example of swearing in another language to get around the censors: Picard said “Merde” at least a couple of times in The Next Generation.
I remember reading a Star Trek novel in which Scotty says “bloody” – and then apologizes to Uhura for it. As an American, I was baffled – it took a while before I learned how strong that word is in Great Britain.
Buckaroo Banzai had several lines of dialog in the middle using that sort of colorful metaphor. “The Deuce, you say!”
Speaking of made up swear words – in the old cartoon series Recess they made up the word WOMPS so the kids could swear without cursing. They even had an episode of why it was created and how every one including the schools principle was using it.