Threw my head back and vomited

[Jarvisimo]

Oh our native tongue! I do love hearing the vernacular on media. For various degrees of authentic scottish language see the following:

Sweet Sixteen (dir: Ken Loach)

NEDS (dir: Peter Mullen)

Trainspotting (dir: Danny Boyle)

The Scheme (BBC documentary)

For some serious language:

First Minister's Questions (Scotland's political debate)

Nicola Sturgeon (on BBC Newsnight)

 

[Jarvisimo]

On the nature of verbal ticks: one thing that has saddened me with treklit in general is the lack of attempts to create linguistic traditions and commonly used variations: words, phrases and cultural names (from popularly known music to insults, like 'bam' and 'ned' in the above links) that are widespread in the Federation through media and other sources. These ticks can be annoying to a reader - in Martin the phrase 'Dark wings, dark words' repeats in A Dance of Dragons to an almost chaptorial appearence, yet as I argued above about ticks, the annoyance of its appearance is based on our non-familairity with the term, our alienation from it. Its repetition adds ultimately to its authenticity, it becomes part of the normal fabric of language within a particular society in Martin's world.

Other examples that can be used repetitively, at first alienating the reader but then becoming part of the world, are descriptive words for clothes, music styles, fashion, art, politics, etc. These are both suggestive of a certain cultural saturation (they are part of the fabric as much as 'pound of flesh', 'bolshi', 'nazi', 'simon and garfunkel', etc) and emblematic of differing cultures within an overall world too (since these terms are appropriate only to certain groups in the world).

I know it is an impossible complaint. I am making a silly request for a more cohesive yet more authentically culturally diverse and repetitive world-building across Treklit - which won't happen. But do not the underlying cultures of the Federation, the empires and other commonly featured nation states & worlds seem rather dull, tasteless, depthless? Perhaps this is because they are too heavily based on late-20th/early-21st century ideas, dualisms and senses of reality, and therefore there is no need for detailed world-building, including linguistic differentiation and new conceptual frameworks? Perhaps this is related to the humanocentrism and especially the anglo-american nature of the trek of today?

[But this is not a complaint about treklit as such, since I enjoy it greatly and guiltily. Merely its conceptual limits.]
[And an interesting book on world-building, although not quite of the above text, is the volume of essays, World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination, which should be obtainable at at least a reference library.]

 

[Christopher]

^Jeri Taylor made an attempt to inject some 24th-century slang into Voyager; in both the episode "Real Life" and the novel Mosaic, she has young human characters use "vulky" as an equivalent for "nerdy" or "square." Which is, unfortunately, a bit racist, since it's clearly based on "Vulcan."

If you want books that invent a vernacular and background culture for their fictional societies and eras, you might be interested in my upcoming Only Superhuman. There's a fair amount of futuristic slang and profanity, a bit of Firefly-inspired Chinese-English pidgin (actually trying to handle it better than Firefly did by coining new, merged words and phrases rather than just going back and forth between two languages), and some references to popular shows, comics, and songs of the era.

And I've tried to do something similar in my Trek fiction once or twice, like having some characters in Greater Than the Sum talk about one of their favorite holoserials.

 

[Sci]

I think there's a limit to how much 24th Century UFP slang and new idioms you can do in a Star Trek novel, though. For better or for worse, these are tie-in novels, and Star Trek's particular use of language has been very firmly established in the canon. I don't think linguistic conventions are something that can be altered too much.

I object to the idea that the cultures of Treklit are shallow, however. If anything, I find the different Treklit cultures to be quite deep, and quite a bit deeper than what the canon often featured.

 

[Deano2099]

For instance, as Greg mentioned before, most American readers or audiences would be puzzled by the constant use of "ginger" to mean "redheaded" in British books and shows. Or "brilliant" to mean "wonderful, awesome" instead of "exceptionally intelligent." And it took me a while watching Law & Order: UK before I figured out that "Cheers" means "Thank you" in current English vernacular (as does "Ta," apparently). There are countless phrases that the British use casually that Americans would find baffling or strange. But it's not wrong for British authors to use those phrases, because it's just part of the language and dialect they're working in. It's no more wrong for a British author to use "ginger" or an American writer to use "salt-and-pepper" than it was for Chaucer to use "ycleped."

Interesting. I'm from the UK and had literally never heard the 'salt-and-pepper' phrase used in that context before reading this thread. Probably because it's something used more in prose than in speech. I think over here most of us are a lot more exposed to US speech through TV and film than necessarily prose - obviously we read US books, but not newspapers and such. So we know all about the pavement being a sidewalk and so on but less things that are more visually descriptive.

As to the original point, I think it's brilliant that someone who wasn't enjoying a book because of one tiny insignificant thing could go and fix it for himself and then enjoy the book. I really can't see how that is possibly a bad thing. Sure, it would be awful if somehow his 'fixed' version of the book became the only one available, but this sort of remix culture has been prevalent in music (and even film - see the re-cut Star Wars Ep1 for example) for years. The originals are still available, and often the only version still available.

 

[Tiberius]

^Jeri Taylor made an attempt to inject some 24th-century slang into Voyager; in both the episode "Real Life" and the novel Mosaic, she has young human characters use "vulky" as an equivalent for "nerdy" or "square." Which is, unfortunately, a bit racist, since it's clearly based on "Vulcan."

If you want books that invent a vernacular and background culture for their fictional societies and eras, you might be interested in my upcoming Only Superhuman. There's a fair amount of futuristic slang and profanity, a bit of Firefly-inspired Chinese-English pidgin (actually trying to handle it better than Firefly did by coining new, merged words and phrases rather than just going back and forth between two languages), and some references to popular shows, comics, and songs of the era.

And I've tried to do something similar in my Trek fiction once or twice, like having some characters in Greater Than the Sum talk about one of their favorite holoserials.

It would be interesting to think about what kind of slang people in the 24th century would use. Perhaps "repped" for replicated? We're familiar with "Beam" used to describe the process of going through the transporter.

 

[Jarvisimo]

^Jeri Taylor made an attempt to inject some 24th-century slang into Voyager; in both the episode "Real Life" and the novel Mosaic, she has young human characters use "vulky" as an equivalent for "nerdy" or "square." Which is, unfortunately, a bit racist, since it's clearly based on "Vulcan."

If you want books that invent a vernacular and background culture for their fictional societies and eras, you might be interested in my upcoming Only Superhuman. There's a fair amount of futuristic slang and profanity, a bit of Firefly-inspired Chinese-English pidgin (actually trying to handle it better than Firefly did by coining new, merged words and phrases rather than just going back and forth between two languages), and some references to popular shows, comics, and songs of the era.

And I've tried to do something similar in my Trek fiction once or twice, like having some characters in Greater Than the Sum talk about one of their favorite holoserials.

I really am interested in your book, and now more so: I imagine your taste for world-building would be better served by your original fiction. Is that always the case, do you think?

thanks for seeing my point, I was a bit afraid my post would read ... negative. It wasn't meant to be.

I think racism was an element that Trek shouldn't have fled? The fear of the different occurred anyway throughout the show: people were often racist or specist or whatever anyway based on the threatening nature of the other. This could be from good cause, but still ultimately from unacknowledged xenophobia. You even addressed this in your first Titan novel: the crew's reaction to the hunter economy was somewhat xenophobic? It seemed a poke at the racist elements of western cultural superiority over the 'wild' or 'uncultured' aspects of the rest of the world, be it in the past during the age of imperialism, or today's scorn for the 3rd world. Ultimately the crew learned to let go somewhat of their superiority?

And DS9 embraced that racism could still occur, we had words like 'spoonhead' and 'cardie', which did help to establish that certain xenophobia/racism was ... understandable. I don't know if that counts as condoning the trend, or not. And I remember the DS9 companion, for I think the episode on Empok Nor, but it may be another, is proud of the racism expressed by a Starfleet officer (which wasn't scripted but included as an adlib)

 

[Jarvisimo]

I object to the idea that the cultures of Treklit are shallow, however. If anything, I find the different Treklit cultures to be quite deep, and quite a bit deeper than what the canon often featured.

I wasn't clear: I think that was a more general point about the franchise in general. You are right, the lit has done at different points much to deepen certain groups: in the 80s under certain authors, and since the commencement of the relaunches last decade. I wouldn't deny that: from Andorians to Cardassians to Klingons to Romulans to Tholians to now Breen, Tzenkethi and others, they have become distinct: more than bumpy foreheards or coloured humans.

I used 'shallow' only in the sense that there is (dependent on the author) little to suggest a great depth of culture, history and emotion behind each race in general, only little touches and little senses. Each race doesn't have a unique way of talking, in general, nor a unique way of referecning history, nor a canon of culture. Nothing suggests their alien (from one another) ways of perceiving and thinking. Nor does much suggest the cosmopolitan nature of the Federation, the two main empires, and other worlds. Each race also doesn't quite have the suggestion of the variety that humans are depicted with, except usually through the relatively simple presentation of dualistic political ideology (such as the Andorians in PoD, the Romulans over the past decade, or the Cardassians after the war). This still leads to the sense of monoform cultures, with the Federation (most of all) an Anglo-American (mainly the latter) hegemony with occasional, rather anglophone contemporary western-cultured, member aliens. They encounter rather anglophone, contemporary-western-cultured aliens and empires. It doesn't matter that the President is based in Paris, there is nothing French about the political system of the Federation. It's rather similar to the rather English Jean-Luc Picard (although thank you authors for making him more French!). Does this make sense?

Anyway, as I stressed before, this is not an attack on Treklit, which I find really rewarding - most espeically those books which go to such lengths to build 'worlds', even if drawn from normal western tropes. So books like The Never-Ending Sacrifice, many of the Typhon books, the DS9 relaunch books, the works of various authors, even the 'viking'-esque Left Hand of Destiny books and the eponymous head-throwing books of this thread: I really appreciate the attempts to continually do more with the ip.

And as you say Sci the TV shows set the frame. But consider how revolutionary the literature has been concerning the de- or reconstruction of TV trek's frames: be it the dark militarism only suggested in TOS and its movies taken to a massive, logical and very deadly highpoint in Vanguard, or the sexual habits of many characters, or the actions of certain characters, such as Sisko, that can be extrapolated from the show, but which are wonderfully darker or more dramatic than the show would ever go. These show that the lit can escape the ... less ambitious or sometimes rather dull conceptual ... confines of the show, and surely extensively introducing language differences, senses of dialect and senses of history/culture through idiomatic difference are potential ways to subtly and rather literarily develop on the relatively monoform, American, presentation of television?

 

[Shane Houston]

Then may I respectfully suggest that if it's the attack that's important, you just omit talking about somebody's hair? If somebody was about to unleash phasers/photon torpedoes on my ship, the last thing I'd be worrying about would be the color of somebody's hair!

What? What's important is conveying the scene to the audience so they can visualize it. You want to differentiate the characters so the reader can keep track of who's who, and giving concise descriptors of their appearance can help achieve that. Of course if they're TV characters and the reader is familiar with the show, that's not an issue, but when reading about new characters, I often have a hard time keeping track of who's who unless I have visual descriptions to help me distinguish them.

Yeah, it's not like Picard is mentioning the color of a character's hair in dialog while ordering a photon barrage.

PICARD: Weapons officer with the salt and pepper beard, fire photons at the Klingon ship while its commander is busy throwing back his head and laughing!

This is the funniest things I've read on the board in years! Thanks Nerys.

 

[Christopher]

I really am interested in your book, and now more so: I imagine your taste for world-building would be better served by your original fiction. Is that always the case, do you think?

Well, I'm freer to build a world entirely from scratch in my original fiction, but I've been able to do a lot of original worldbuilding in TrekLit by filling in the gaps or elaborating on undeveloped races -- the Lorini and alien crewmembers in Ex Machina, the Pa'haquel and other Gum Nebula cultures and wildlife in Orion's Hounds, the Manraloth and galactic deep time in The Buried Age, fluidic space in Places of Exile, Droplet in Over a Torrent Sea, etc.

Also, worldbuilding can sometimes be easier when you have an established framework and building blocks at your disposal -- although it can be frustrating when the laws of the universe aren't as plausible as I'd like or where existing continuity puts limits on where I can take a story. So both original and tie-in writing have their own pluses and minuses when it comes to worldbuilding -- at least for something like Trek, where you can always find new uncharted territories to explore. If it were an Earthbound franchise, it would be a lot more limiting.

I think racism was an element that Trek shouldn't have fled? The fear of the different occurred anyway throughout the show: people were often racist or specist or whatever anyway based on the threatening nature of the other.

Oh, sure, I'm not saying they should never acknowledge it; I'm just saying it's regrettable that practically the only example we have of 24th-century civilian Federation culture is a borderline ethnic slur.

 

[Relayer1]

Interesting. I'm from the UK and had literally never heard the 'salt-and-pepper' phrase used in that context before reading this thread. Probably because it's something used more in prose than in speech. I think over here most of us are a lot more exposed to US speech through TV and film than necessarily prose - obviously we read US books, but not newspapers and such. So we know all about the pavement being a sidewalk and so on but less things that are more visually descriptive.

Being English (and ginger !) I'm surprised you were unfamiliar with the salt and pepper' thing. We're so saturated by American programming - at least the decent stuff - I only rarely come across unfamiliar terms. Obviously, the reverse does not apply. Even Downton Abbey was edited for showing to a US audience to avoid confusion. To make things worse, the editing was done by the UK showrunners, which I find patronising...

My familiarity with Americanisms sometimes catches me out when posting here. I've changed a post or two thinking a phrase was 'English' and American readers may not 'get' what I am saying only to find the phrase I changed in a US show shortly afterwards...

 

[Christopher]

^Well, Deano's right -- it's not the sort of phrase that would be used a lot in TV or film. You don't need to have a character mention that someone has salt-and-pepper hair, because you can just see it. So it's something you'd come across more often in print than onscreen.

 

[Deano2099]

Of course, the evening after I right that I sit down with Reap The Whirlwind and it comes up!

 

[Captaindemotion]

^What, your vomit?!

 

[Relayer1]

Of course, the evening after I right that I sit down with Reap The Whirlwind and it comes up!

Sod's law in action !

Does that make sense in America ?

 

[CNash]

It was not my intention to spark a massive debate over descriptions of hair colours (and then completely forget that I'd posted, but that's another thing...), but nonetheless it's been interesting to read the responses in this thread.

I'm very much in agreement with Captainindemotion that "salt and pepper hair" seems to be more of an American phrase that isn't well-known in other English-speaking countries (such as the UK, where I'm from). For this reason, it feels more jarring when it appears - it may be something to do with the mental "voice" that the reader reads narration in, and words not sounding "natural" in that voice if they're unfamiliar.

I do also agree with Mr. Bennett that authors using words and phrases more common to their own vernacular is not something that should be discouraged. That's part of what makes an author's work individual, after all.

 

[Christopher]

Sod's law in action !

Does that make sense in America ?

Never heard of it. I know that "sod" is a mild (?) expletive in British usage, but that variant is new to me.

 

[CNash]

It's a UK variant of Murphy's Law - "anything that can go wrong will go wrong". The "sod" part is because anyone affected by it can be said to be an "unlucky sod" - here, "sod" is used to describe somebody who is particularly put-upon, rather than an expletive or insult.

With this in mind, Relayer's usage of it doesn't make sense in that context - Deano simply came across the phrase we'd been discussing in the novel he's reading, which is either a coincidence or Alanis-style irony.

 

[Deano2099]

It's a UK variant of Murphy's Law - "anything that can go wrong will go wrong". The "sod" part is because anyone affected by it can be said to be an "unlucky sod" - here, "sod" is used to describe somebody who is particularly put-upon, rather than an expletive or insult.

With this in mind, Relayer's usage of it doesn't make sense in that context - Deano simply came across the phrase we'd been discussing in the novel he's reading, which is either a coincidence or Alanis-style irony.

Well it did undermine my point a tad.

Though I suspect what actually happened was that I've read it before, not understood what it meant, and kept reading. Because it's very rare that a character's hair colour is a major enough point for me to stop reading and go to Google to find out what it means.

 

[Christopher]

It's a UK variant of Murphy's Law - "anything that can go wrong will go wrong". The "sod" part is because anyone affected by it can be said to be an "unlucky sod" - here, "sod" is used to describe somebody who is particularly put-upon, rather than an expletive or insult.

Ah, yes, I have heard that form of "sod."

I was wondering what the etymology was -- why would a word for turf or greensward be an expletive? -- so I looked it up. Turns out it's less innocuous than it sounds; it's short for "sodomite." So it's basically synonymous with "bugger(er)."