# Frick on a stick!



## Le_DÃ©mon_Sans_Visage (Jun 29, 2008)

What makes for a good fake swear word?

If you write the sort of stories where the characters are basically just modern humans with tails and fur you don't need to worry about this, but if you're doing any degree of worldbuilding the problem is bound to come up. I've been working on it for something I'm writing so I thought I'd share a few observations and see if anyone else wants to contribute. And pardon the coy astericks, but I don't want to be banned. 

One problem is coming up with a curse that is meaningful to an alien culture. 

For members of western society, the three main things we use for curses are scatology, sex and blasphemy and a lot of this can be traced back to the peculiarities of religion. Many curse words are literally curses - which can be rather pointless if the speaker happens to be atheist. With English speakers particularly, we use the Anglo-Saxon derived words as curses and their Norman or latin-derived synonyms for 'polite' speech - sh*t vs defecate for example. Just about anything related to sex doubles as a curse word - a less puritanical society wouldn't rely on that so much. There's also a bit of a culturate imbalance regarding gender. There's no word that is quite as equivalent for men as b*tch or c*unt is for wome, we can insult a man by calling him a p*ssy but not a women by calling her a d*ck, motherf*cker is an insult but father*fucker isn't.    

When your characters live on another planet, or another version of reality, and aren't human they shouldn't be spitting out the same f-bombs as your dad when he hits his thumb with the hammer. You can be lazy and just have the god being called on to damn someone to hell be the goddess Glorpneep casting someone into the seventh pit of incandescent viper-pigs. So far what I have is this: my satyr characters believe in aloof but powerful godlike beings they call powers and more homey, earthbound ancestral spirits they call Presences. So their exclamation of surprise, anger, etc is "Powers and presences!", or simply "Powers!". They beleive in nine hells, and there's a curse related to each one used in specific circumstances. A character who belongs to a race of strict carnivores snarls "Maggots!" when he's pissed and calls those he doesn't like "rotgrubs", since spoiled meat is the worst thing he can think of. 

The other consideration is the actual sound of the fake swear. I've noticed most popular curses in English are a single syllable and have a consonant that is hard and sharp or hissing, spitting like f*ck, sh*t, s*ck my d*ck and so on, ditto for terms used for hopelessly inept or stupid people, like pr*ck, j*rk, twerp, dork, idjit (idiot), geek, ass and so on. There are a few exceptions, but they tend to stick to one rule or the other. Son of a b*tch has four syllables but a lot of those spitting, snappy phonemes.

My favorite fake curse of all is smeg, from the television show Red Dwarf. A short form of 'smegma', it allowed the character's dialog to sound realistic (that is, full of swears) while not offending censors. Smeg could be modified in various ways (smegging hell, smeghead) and had the advantage of actually sounding quite dirty.


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## Phoenixwildfire (Jun 29, 2008)

hmmm, I'd have to say the swear word from the ORIGINAL (not the new >_<) Battlestar Galactica...

Felgercarb!

or

Frak!


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## Furthlingam (Jun 29, 2008)

If somebody called me a smeg, or smeghead, in real life, I would immediately conclude they were indeed referring to smegma, and be as scandalized as mere talk ever makes me. ^_^

I think the problem of imaginary cursewords in most scifi and fantasy is that the rest of the langauge used is already transcribed to english. "Frack" is hardly concealed as the word "fuck" but sounds like-- in fact, I have known a kid to-- a kid disguising the word fuck. So it sounds kidlike, not dirty.

Now, I think that if the word is completly not identifiable as english, and is explained as part of a translation-- even if that means you insert a gibberish word in an even line of translated-to-english dialogue," then you have a dirty word.

Think about the word "geek." What an arcane definition-- "A person who bites the heads off of rodents, snakes, and so on." Yugga! I mean, it's pretty attenuated now, but "geek" at one point musta been pretty obnoxious.

So, made-up word, obnoxious meaning explained. I really like explaining what "cul" means in french, since I can't give a precise translation-- especially if I'm trying to scandalize.

As for what thing you're tagging as a swear word in some unknown culture, I can't think of anything particular; I might just reverse engineer points about the culture in order to make a swear word obscene, frankly. But it oughtta be an area that can one way or another lead to violence or disease I would think. Some kind of bioloigcal harm must be at the root of all swear words used by organic beings, ya?


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## M. LeRenard (Jun 29, 2008)

I hate to sound lazy, but I actually don't care about this.  My opinion is, if we're translating all of these folks' dialogue into English anyway, why not just do what suitable English translators do and find the English equivalent (as best we can) of the curses we're given to translate?  So like, if the arthropod race thinks 'non-segmented' is the worst curse you can think of, we translate it by the worst English curse we can think of (which might be cunt or something like that).  It's an imprecation: all it means is that someone is angry at someone else, so it's more the sound of the word and the cultural reaction to it that's important, rather than what it actually means.  Get what I'm saying?
Rather than making your reader laugh when someone says "May the goddess Blithergoogle beam you to the seventh layer of Katzbwigle!" because that's literally what they say, just write "God damn you!"  Your English-speaking reader will understand, and it will have a better effect.
Not that you couldn't change up the regular ones every now and then.  I tend to have my characters curse the gods themselves a lot, rather than asking the gods to curse someone or something ("Gods be damned" rather than "Gods damn it").  But all in all I stick with English, especially for things like 'fuck', which really doesn't mean anything in particular anymore anyway (much like the French words 'cul' or 'putain').
This is just me, though, because I'm lazy about worldbuilding.


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## TakeWalker (Jun 29, 2008)

M. Le Renard said:


> I hate to sound lazy, but I actually don't care about this.  My opinion is, if we're translating all of these folks' dialogue into English anyway, why not just do what suitable English translators do and find the English equivalent (as best we can) of the curses we're given to translate?  So like, if the arthropod race thinks 'non-segmented' is the worst curse you can think of, we translate it by the worst English curse we can think of (which might be cunt or something like that).  It's an imprecation: all it means is that someone is angry at someone else, so it's more the sound of the word and the cultural reaction to it that's important, rather than what it actually means.  Get what I'm saying?
> Rather than making your reader laugh when someone says "May the goddess Blithergoogle beam you to the seventh layer of Katzbwigle!" because that's literally what they say, just write "God damn you!"  Your English-speaking reader will understand, and it will have a better effect.
> Not that you couldn't change up the regular ones every now and then.  I tend to have my characters curse the gods themselves a lot, rather than asking the gods to curse someone or something ("Gods be damned" rather than "Gods damn it").  But all in all I stick with English, especially for things like 'fuck', which really doesn't mean anything in particular anymore anyway (much like the French words 'cul' or 'putain').
> This is just me, though, because I'm lazy about worldbuilding.



I hate to say it, but this has always been my opinion on the subject. Words like "god" (but not "God"!), "hell" and "damn" are easily translatable, and can be tweaked slightly to fit a religious setting (e.g., "The gods damn you to the hells!")

However, that's best utilized in a completely alien setting. We're back to the spot described in the OP if you've got a case of alien cultures and Earthly ones clashing. Is everything automatically translated into English by some magical Trekkian universal translator? If so, can it translate culture or would it have to leave the words alone, perhaps taking a 'best-fit' approach?


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## Le_DÃ©mon_Sans_Visage (Jun 29, 2008)

M. Le Renard said:


> Get what I'm saying?



Yeah, but I LIKE worldbuilding, and reading something that takes the easy way out makes me wonder - why am I bothering to waste my time reading this if the author didn't even care enough to think for a few minutes about a detail like that? In the case of what I'm writing, the religious beliefs of the characters aren't comparable to jehovah-type religions and they're an important part of the plot. You can't have a character say "God damn you!" because not only did the gods go insane so you wouldn't want to call on them to do anything, they've been (supposedly) long since been destroyed.


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## Roose Hurro (Jun 30, 2008)

You're also forgetting the swearwords that translate as "tame"... I have a non-human character whose favorite expletive is "Mouse farts!"... used whenever something goes wrong, mostly.  It's like an insult that is offensive in one culture, yet doesn't mean anything in another.  Therefore, a foulness of speach that translates "tame".  I also remember hearing that President Bush made a habit of mispronouncing Sadam Husein's name, so it meant "shoeshine boy".  It can make for humorous incongrueities, to play this angle of "translation" in a fictional work... English words, but with a meaning that is non-offensive, except to the swearer (or another of that swearer's species).


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