21st Century Books and 21st Century Slang

[publiusr]

I try to be creative

Hell to the fuckth power no!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Plus fake curse words sound like gibberish ("froopy madoodle", "glidbing snorp" and such - I just made those up myself, but you get the idea.

The Red Dwarf ones are funny, though. I'm fairly sure that every swear word they used was made up. Like "twonk", "gimboid", and "smeg".

I mean, we're all so used to hearing "smeg" that I thought it WAS a real swear word!

Spoiler: don't read this if you're offended by bodily functions

IIRC, Grant & Naylor always denied that the word "smeg" was derived from "smegma" but it seems obvious that it was.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I mean, we're all so used to hearing "smeg" that I thought it WAS a real swear word!

Could have made walking into the wrong kitchen kind of awkward....

 

[TheAlmanac]

The use of slang tends to date things quite badly. That's fine if whatever it is is intended to be ephemeral but if you want something to last, invented slang and creative cursing stand the test of time better.

Few things are as dated in Star Trek for me as the use of "in the zone" on Deep Space Nine, and that has nothing to do with cursing.

 

[Christopher]

Few things are as dated in Star Trek for me as the use of "in the zone" on Deep Space Nine, and that has nothing to do with cursing.

How about Captain Kirk implying that he dipped girls' pigtails in inkwells when he was a kid?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Indeed. School desks with inkwells were antiquated long before I was born.

Note that my writing instrument of choice is a fountain pen. And if you were to meet me face to face, you'd find that my breast pocket contains five low-end Pelikan fountain pens (instantly recognizable by their trademark pocket clips), and a flashlight.

A flock of Pelikans. This is the workhorse of the flock.

pelikan blue by James Lampert, on Flickr

 

[Christopher]

Indeed. School desks with inkwells were antiquated long before I was born.

I think I remember my school desks having inkwell receptacles without inkwells in them.

 

[Fuddles]

I think I remember my school desks having inkwell receptacles without inkwells in them.

Yes, me too.

 

[Stevil2001]

As far as contemporary slang goes, here's my anecdote: when Michael Schuster and I got our proposal for What's Past: The Future Begins back from Paramount Licensing, they had two main comments. One, they didn't like the central maguffin. (Fair enough, and the final book was better on this score.) Two, they didn't like where we said that Scotty "hacked" something, because that was a twenty-first-century colloquialism and not appropriate for the twenty-fourth century! So could we please make sure not to use it in the actual book.

Imagine my surprise when a couple months later I read Trill: Unjoined and it used the word "hack"! I'm not complaining or anything, it's just always amused me.

 

[Christopher]

Whenever I wrote something for Margaret Clark, she changed all my uses of "monitor" to "screen" because she apparently believed "monitor" was too specific to present-day personal computers, even though the term was used in onscreen dialogue in mulitple Trek series as early as Spock's "on my monitor screen" in the second pilot, and even though I and other authors had used the term in Trek books for other editors. I tried pointing this out to her, along with the fact that the term "monitor" for a display screen has been around since the 1940s in reference to display screens for TV camera feeds, and perhaps since the 1930s for computer status displays. But she kept on preferring "screen" for whatever reason.