21st Century Books and 21st Century Slang

[Captain Dax]

Just read "Last Best Hope" and the word fuck appears 19 times during the book. when i was a kid, star trek characters had outgrown crass language and were the best of humanity. Now the writers of on screen trek and lit trek are just trying to be "relatable".


Stop It.

 

[The Wormhole]

Fuck was used in Trek novels long before Tilly declared canonically that swearing was fucking cool in 2017. Indeed, I think the first use of the word fuck in the entire franchise was a Vanguard novel, though don't hold me to that. Meanwhile shit has been in the onscreen lexicon since 1994, when Data said it while the Enterprise D crashed in Generations.

IIRC, back when Picard S1 aired Michael Chabon even said there was never any worldbuilding reason for why we never heard profanity in the previous Treks. It was just that they aired on network TV or first run syndication where profanity was forbidden. Certainly the novels have never avoided profanity, with fuck and shit being spoken quite regularly in novels for at least the last twenty years.

I have no problem with it anyway.

 

[Christopher]

I think that, realistically, profanity would evolve over time, and different cultures and eras would have different ideas of what words were obscene. "Golly" was a serious profanity in Elizabethan times because it was short for "God's body," and referring to a physical form for God was considered profane. But by the 20th century, it had become a quaint and childish euphemism.

Heck, these days the f-word is used so casually that it hardly even seems like a profanity anymore. I suspect that in the future, it will be replaced by different curse words, because it's lost its power through overuse. That's why the spacegoing civilization in my novel Only Superhuman uses the f-word only to refer to sex and uses oaths like "vack" (for vacuum) and "punk" (for meteoroid puncture), invoking things that space dwellers would find threatening or unpleasant to consider.

Trek, however, has always used contemporary language instead of trying to postulate linguistic evolution. But it's been around so long that contemporary language has evolved, and thus it's natural that newer productions write the language more in keeping with contemporary norms.

The tricky part, of course, is that The Voyage Home made the textual claim that 23rd-century people found "colorful metaphors" an unfamiliar quirk of the 20th century, which conflicts with Discovery characters using such language. But continuity errors are an inevitable part of any long-running franchise too. Ultimately, writing for the current audience is more important than staying slavishly consistent with a minor detail from decades in the past.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

The tricky part, of course, is that The Voyage Home made the textual claim that 23rd-century people found "colorful metaphors" an unfamiliar quirk of the 20th century, which conflicts with Discovery characters using such language.

I suppose that might apply more to 23rd century civilian "polite society" than Starfleet. The two spheres could have developed very different linguistic practices. Curse in a 23rd century restaurant or public park and everybody's ears perk up; swear a blue streak in the ship's mess hall and nobody bats an eye. Or at the very least, people aren't prone to dropping at least one almost certainly unnecessary curse every few sentences.

Kirk takes his view on 20th century swearing from novels of the time which probably would tend to exaggerate the frequency of usage of those words, although I suppose you could argue that works which didn't feature these words are the opposite extreme.

Swearing aside, any issues with other kinds of slang?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Just read "Last Best Hope" and the word fuck appears 19 times during the book. when i was a kid, star trek characters had outgrown crass language and were the best of humanity. Now the writers of on screen trek and lit trek are just trying to be "relatable".


Stop It.

They say "fuck" in Picard, the show the book is based upon and tying into, as well. That's just a tie in using the same vernacular as the show.

 

[David cgc]

The tricky part, of course, is that The Voyage Home made the textual claim that 23rd-century people found "colorful metaphors" an unfamiliar quirk of the 20th century, which conflicts with Discovery characters using such language.

The impression I got was that it was more about how profanity was being used (and how much of it) rather than that it was around at all. Even since the dam broke in the novels and on-screen, f-bombs in Star Trek still don't approach how common they are IRL or in contemporary adult dramas.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Fuck was used in Trek novels long before Tilly declared canonically that swearing was fucking cool in 2017.

ROFLMFAO!!!

Which is not to say that hearing a conjugation of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon word for, well, "conjugation" of the non-grammatical form, coming out of the mouth of a character who'd been established as the shyest, most innocent member of the Discovery crew didn't have tremendous shock value at the time. Which was probably intended.

The tricky part, of course, is that The Voyage Home made the textual claim that 23rd-century people found "colorful metaphors" an unfamiliar quirk of the 20th century, which conflicts with Discovery characters using such language.

Which is why I find "colorful metaphors" particularly incongruous in ST fiction. That and the fact that I've always regarded ST as a family-friendly franchise. Not one for which children are specifically the target audience, but one for which children are not specifically excluded from the target audience. (And of course, Picard says "Merde" more than once during the run of TNG, and I'm sure everybody on this board knows what it means.)

In my own long-gestating novel, I can't, off the top of my head, recall anything on George Carlin's original list of "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" (nor the three that were added on the Class Clown record) ever appearing. Nor in any of the short stories I've written in the same milieu. I think once or twice I've circumlocuted around obscenity, sort of the same way every sex scene (and the scene of attempted date-rape) is written to leave everything to the imagination of the reader.

At the Printing Museum, when I'm casting souvenir Linotype/Intertype/Ludlow slugs, I ask visitors to "please keep it clean; we are a family museum" (which I've also put on the slug-request form itself), and I also ask "And please no partisan politics, right or left: that didn't even used to be a thing until a couple of years ago, somebody handed me a slug-request that had me suppressing the urge to issue a different kind of slug."

 

[Christopher]

Honestly, I find modern profanity boring, since it's just the same few words repeated over and over. There's no creativity to it. Back when public discourse was more censored, people had to be a lot more creative about their insults and oaths. I mean, "Great Caesar's ghost!" or "Holy jumping catfish!" is pretty colorful.

And then there's Falstaff's tirade from Henry IV, Part 1, Act II, Scene 4:

"'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like thee! you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck[!]"

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

There was a TOS novel, many years ago (maybe all the way back to the Bantam era, or it might have been DD's My Enemy, My Ally), in which "engine room cursing" was considered a high art, and an imprecation to the effect that somebody's engine room should become "a test lab for Murphy's Law" was considered a particularly weak example, and an indication of the amount of stress Scotty was under at the time.

 

[Christopher]

There was a TOS novel, many years ago (maybe all the way back to the Bantam era, or it might have been DD's My Enemy, My Ally), in which "engine room cursing" was considered a high art, and an imprecation to the effect that somebody's engine room should become "a test lab for Murphy's Law" was considered a particularly weak example, and an indication of the amount of stress Scotty was under at the time.

You're thinking of the opening 2 pages of Chapter 9 of David Gerrold's The Galactic Whirlpool, one of the book's many colorful worldbuilding digressions, which talks about how Starfleet Academy informally promotes the study of creative cursing as a healthy stress outlet. It wasn't specific to engineering, and it was Kirk, not Scotty, who came up with "May his engine room become a test lab for the seventh corollary of Murphy's Law" and was embarrassed that that was the best he could come up with.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I think you nailed it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Picard said "merde" in season one TNG.

Hell, Loki called Black Widow a "mewling quim" in Avengers. And that was for kids. A decade later I learned that was a very flowery way to call her a C U Next Tuesday.

 

[Christopher]

A decade later I learned that was a very flowery way to call her a C U Next Tuesday.

I don't think it's flowery, just British.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Ooh, I like that idea of Starfleet promoting the art of cussing as a stress outlet.

And also I hope that if Admiral Kirsten Clancy writes her autobiography, she calls it My Sheer Fucking Hubris.

 

[thribs]

Personally I'm not a fan of curse words in Star Trek. The franchise should be better than that but they use them since they know it will get them attention.

 

[Christopher]

Personally I'm not a fan of curse words in Star Trek. The franchise should be better than that but they use them since they know it will get them attention.

I'm not prone to curse much myself, but I'm uncomfortable with a value judgment like "better," since many of my friends curse heavily and that doesn't make them bad people. They were just socialized differently than I was. If anything, I'm the odd one out by present-day cultural norms.

It's not about "getting attention" -- profanity is so commonplace these days that it doesn't stand out in the least. It's just writing without the artificial restrictions that were imposed on Trek on commercial TV and in PG or PG-13 movies. People cuss. That's part of everyday life. Heck, I've heard preteen children on the playground cursing like sailors. It's always been normal, but the media have pretended it wasn't, because there was a time when it was considered inappropriate in polite contexts.

But there was probably a classist element to that. Indeed, most profanities in English come from Anglo-Saxon roots, while their Latin-derived synonyms are considered perfectly acceptable. That's entirely rooted in the elitism of the 11th-century Norman conquerors of England and their descendants in the noblility and gentry.

 

[Daddy Todd]

they use them since they know it will get them attention

Yeah, no. They use them because fake cursing sounds fake. "Great Caesar's Ghost!" just sounds ridiculous to me.

 

[Victoria]

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.

Personally, I don't like the use of profanity. I don't like it being used casually in real life and I have no desire to listen to it on screen. It sounds puerile and I'd refer to be watching adults.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Trek, however, has always used contemporary language instead of trying to postulate linguistic evolution.

It would be nova if they did.

 

[Bynar0110]

Didn't McCoy say Damn it in the TOS?