You called me a what???

[sartorias]

A revisit to cussing, cursing, and swearing.

Something worldbuilders need to think about!

Comments

[whswhs]

When I was in a friend's campaign set in Steven Brust's world of Dragaera, I fell into the habit of having my character speak in Dragaeran locutions. It came to seem very natural to have him exclaim, "The Horse!" or suggest, "I nearly think. . . ." Brust did a really good job with the idiom; it was utterly distinctive but at the same time it easily came to seem natural.

[sartorias]

Yes--I love the expressions in his world.

[rachelmanija]

I don't buy that people are more honest or likely to keep their words in small towns than in cities. I think the only difference is that in a very small community, everyone knows who the liars and deadbeats are... but they're still liars and deadbeats. And if they're wealthy and powerful liars and deadbeats, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it

[sartorias]

I don't believe people are more honest or reliable in small towns, either, for exactly the reasons you say. I think, however, it is easier to move away in a big city--easier to be anonymous. If you are a stranger, your word means nothing. In a small town, if you break a promise, people will gossip.

[rachelmanija]

Sure, but other than itinerant con artists, people in cities still have social circles and are still accountable within them. People notice if one of their friends or co-workers consistently lies and breaks promises, regardless of where they live.

[sartorias]

And it's easier to move away, isn't it? (I'm comparing not to small town life USA 2013 but small polities nine hundred years ago, when Western Europeans were struggling to recover from waves of plague. According to Chaucer, etc, peasant or noble, your word was vitally important, and kinships relations appear to me to be different than now.)

[harvey_rrit]

Of course expletives have a practical purpose. People who waste energy on stuff that doesn't work perish quicker than people who don't.

The greatest insult I know was devised by Poul Anderson:

"Your parents were brothers."

Now that has some serious depth, forcing the target to think about it.

I myself came up with the expletive, "God's tits!" I believe that an important part of the value of an expletive is enabling you to find out who, around you, is going to be of absolutely no use in an emergency. Thus anyone who would rather discuss blasphemy, vulgarity, sexism, or heresy than find out if you need medical attention can be immediately written off.

(It has long been my position that Jesus gave up a successful carpentry career to become an itinerant preacher because he had nothing to say when he hit his thumb.)

[sartorias]

My favorite expletive of all time is "Hot butts!"

[rosefox]

Tanya Huff attempted to create setting-specific cussing for her Quarters books, most of it religious; people who believe in the Circle that encloses all things will say "unenclosed" the way Christians say "damned", devotees of the Goddess of War will say "Oh, slaughter it!", and so on. Unfortunately all these attempts had too many syllables for really effective blunt cussing, in my opinion.

[whswhs]

A coinage I liked occurred in C. J. Cherryh's Chanur series: The use of "sons" as an epithet. When I first encountered it I assimilated it to "sons of bitches" or "sons of whores." But then with repetition it sank in that it meant something different, especially when I saw really angry hani saying to each other, "Gods give you sons!" Cherryh had created an alien species and culture where that made sense as a curse, which I thought was a good bit of sfnal worldbuilding, but one that she didn't shove in the reader's face.

[sartorias]

yeah--and certain consonants have force.