Sci-Fi Nonce Word Profanity

[Ar-Pharazon]

Red Dwarf: Smeg

Oh, I thought that was an actual British Slang word

Mostly used in "smeg head", I think we can all figure what word was being replaced

They also used the word "twonk" in one episode, I think meaning idiot or dope or something along those lines.

Holly said "steaming pile of hotspur" and "load of totnum (?)", I don't think Google ever came up with anything on those as British slang.

 

[Greg Cox]

I
It stands out in Farscape, but I'll give them a pass because all the language is supposed to be translated telepathically, and the meaning of Frell, like our F-word, is less about a literal definition and more about the way it's said.
So it makes a certain kind of sense.

Aeryn's immortal line--"Merry frelling Christmas!"--justifies the use of the word for all time.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I'm only truly bothered when they do it on the news (where it not "nonce" words but beeped out) because I feel there it is important to present things as they are.

That said, I found especially since watching the series Spartacus I don't care for PG-13 presentations of gritty material. I quit watching that Vikings series because it just felt tame and neutered.

As an occasional swear word on Farscape, Red Dwarf and the like I don't think it hurts anything. In fact, I'd probably be taken out of the material if Lister started swearing like a sailor. BSG is more of an argument but I don't think it really hurt that show myself. It didn't hurt that "frak" sounds a lot more natural than "felgercarb" or whatever it was on the original series.

 

[Mojochi]

It's exposing the silliness of censorship.
Not allowed to say "fucking"? So let's say "frakking". LOL, what a difference.

Isn't that the defining example of taking us out of the story? Now that we've had our little silliness of censorship timeout, we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming

 

[Christopher]

In my novel Only Superhuman, I assumed that "the f-word" would have lost its impact as profanity through overuse by the 22nd century, so the characters use it only as a vernacular term for "to engage in sexual intercourse (with)" rather than as an expletive. And I developed a vocabulary of swear words based on what space-dwellers might find disturbing or unpleasant, e.g. "You vack-sucking, hull-punking hose-clog! Go vack yourself out the nearest lock!"

Honestly, I've never understood how "f--- you" constitutes an insult or a threat. Taken literally, it sounds more like a friendly proposition. Unless it's meant to be a threat of nonconsensual copulation, which carries rather disturbing implications.

 

[Klaus]

That's an old bit from Carlin's seven words sketch -- replacing all the "kills" from an old Western with the f word.

"We're gonna fuck you now sherriff, but we're gonna fuck you slow."

 

[Jan]

Do you find the use of nonce word profanity to be useful or to be distracting?

No more distracting than your use of 'nonce' which I assume is a made-up word for nonsense?

Given that I despise the use of sexual terms for profanity, I'm perfectly content with made up words in their place in fiction.

Jan

 

[Morpheus 02]

I had in mind for a sci-fi series (currently just in my head), an episode where the crew has to engage in a planet which uses swear words for everything. But because it's used for everything, the universal translator can only translate the them into "Noun" and "verb".

So i guess it kinda followed Christopher's book.

So dialogue would be something like this.

"I am verbing sick of this verbing noun. I just want to say Verb this nouny noun. "

Sounds silly, but that's pretty much what swearing is nowadays.


But as those words are losing their impact , other words are kind of taking their place in society. So the word "gay" , as used like a swear word (i.e. negatively), is as horrifying to liberals as "traditional" swear words are to fundementalist Christians. Calling someone a retard is as bad to many people as caling a woman a b**** is to others.

So to me, in human history (or at least American language), there will always be SOME words which are "sacred" or "wrong to use/abuse".


My one last thought -- Samuel L. Jackson is known for making his use of profanity sound cool. But i remember seeing a TV version of Coming to America where he was dubbed calling people Melon Farmers.

I betcha if Samuel L Jackson said it, he could make that word sound cool.

" I'm gonna make you farm those farmin' melons, you melon farmer! It's harvest time melon farmer!

 

[Morpheus 02]

OK..one last thing... a made up word can actually be prophetic and useful in future unknown contexts.

How do you think the opponents of frakking think about the word?

 

[Christopher]

No more distracting than your use of 'nonce' which I assume is a made-up word for nonsense?

Hardly. "The nonce" is an old term meaning the present time or the current instance. Doing something "for the nonce" means doing it for now, at the moment, temporarily. A nonce word is a coinage come up with on the spur of the moment and perhaps only useful for a special occasion.

Of course, that means that invented profanities in fiction are not really nonce words, since they're not meant for temporary usage. They're more accurately called neologisms or pseudowords.

I had in mind for a sci-fi series (currently just in my head), an episode where the crew has to engage in a planet which uses swear words for everything. But because it's used for everything, the universal translator can only translate the them into "Noun" and "verb".

So i guess it kinda followed Christopher's book.

So dialogue would be something like this.

"I am verbing sick of this verbing noun. I just want to say Verb this nouny noun. "

Sounds silly, but that's pretty much what swearing is nowadays.

Repeating the story I always tell when this subject comes up: Once on the bus I overheard a couple of young men having a conversation in which virtually every sentence was peppered with a word I learned as perhaps the worst obscenity ever, but tossed around so casually and elided to the extent that it came out as "m'fug" or "m'fuh," and was essentially being used more as a pronoun than an expletive per se. And when one of these fellows felt the need to convey strong emotion, he said, with feeling, "What the hell?!" Which is pretty much the complete inversion of how I'd always thought of the relative severity of those two words.

OK..one last thing... a made up word can actually be prophetic and useful in future unknown contexts.

How do you think the opponents of frakking think about the word?

If you're talking about the oil drilling practice, it's spelled fracking (or fraccing), and it's short for "hydraulic fracturing." The nickname has been in use since the 1950s, so it's a couple of decades older than Battlestar Galactica. So not prophecy, just coincidence.

 

[vulcan redshirt]

OK..one last thing... a made up word can actually be prophetic and useful in future unknown contexts.

How do you think the opponents of frakking think about the word?

I must admit it did make me chuckle when I first heard Fracking in relation to the drilling technique. We have only had exploratory fracking here for a couple of years, but of course nuBSG was almost 10 years ago.

 

[Chaos Descending]

It's fine in Firefly; They use all kinds of made up words, positive and negative. They also use stylized grammar.
Firefly really earns the right to use made up swear words.

BSG is the opposite. They use regular modern speech with the exception of curse words. Which, to me, makes them stand out and seem silly.

This criticism is only valid for the 21st Century Ron Moore version of Battlestar Galactica.

The original 1970's version of BSG had substitutions for many, many things, besides profanity.

 

[HIjol]

...personally, I love the concept and existence of expletives in general...part of the beauty of English is that there are so many different places it comes from, and to not use the rich pageant and breadth of it would be a shame...however, there are times when it is inappropriate and gratuitous, and I can appreciate all the sentiments above as to those times...


Expletive Times:

In Traffic
Sporting events (in the safety of your very own living room, or holodeck)
Man Time (card games, Boys Night Out, etc.)
When Thinking of Your Own Magnificence

 

[BigJake]

Firefly had the right approach, either mostly using Mandarin cursing -- which I thought was quite ingenious -- or using words that sound like they could be descendants of real contemporary curses. "Gorram" is actually quite brilliant in this regard, because it sounds like a corruption of the Cockney pronunciation of "goddamn," not just like a random made-up parallel.

On that basis I voted yes, but in fact most cases of made-up SF curses suck the sludge out of a space-hippie's bong water. Frak was mostly bearable in the moment -- and mostly ridiculous in retrospect -- but there were times even as one was watching when it stuck out horribly, particularly when anyone used it as a verb. Frell and dren always struck me as unintentionally funny.

 

[Nerys Myk]

According to the Urban Dictionary, Gorram apparently dates back to old western, where "gorrammit" was used in place of god dammit.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

'Judge Dredd': 'Drokk'. Also 'Grud' as substitute for 'God', i.e. 'Oh my grud!'

'Legion of Superheroes' (at least in the Abnett/Lanning-era): 'Sprock'

Also, 'Smurf!'.

 

[Christopher]

Actually I hated Firefly's approach -- they use English exclusively for most things and Chinese exclusively for cursing? Language hybrids don't work that way. Their regular speech and their cursing (assuming those can be treated as separate things) would both be a mix of English and Chinese vocabulary/grammar. (In Only Superhuman I tried to come up with a bit of a "Chinglish" dialect that worked that way, to show how I thought it would more realistically work. E.g. "Dong ma?" for "Do you understand?" becomes "Do you dong me?")

 

[Yanks]

Do you find the use of nonce word profanity to be useful or to be distracting?

Farscape: Frell, Dren, BSG: Frak, Firefly: Gorram. Frankly, even in shows that I truly enjoy, like Firefly I find the practice pulls me out of the moment. It can be a humorously quaint affectation to a beloved show, but it always falls short with me, in the dramatic context. Surely, we have enough scope in the English language that if our intent is to devise expletive language, there's enough vocabulary in the existing lexicon to draw from.

In the case of Frak or Gorram, it's more than just distracting because clearly those words were a deliberate deviation from fuck & goddamn. It's spiteful childishness to do such. "Here's where I'd have them to say fuck, but can't". It's not only childish, but it harkens to the silly practice of people who substitute with words like fudge or shucks. It unavoidably lacks potency

Truth be told, I can manage to be both masterfully vulgar & profane without ever uttering a single thing that even remotely resembles a traditional profanity. I'd note however that I do love how they use Chinese in Firefly. Despite its occasional resemblance to Yosemite Sam mumbling, it's rather creative, & isn't that what language in fiction should be... creative?

Imaginary words are just that, too imagined to be of use in a straight forward context. The imagination is a delicate tool. Wield it like a sledgehammer & you can easily miss the mark

I personally don't have a problem with it at all.

I have fun using those words in real life.

I can immediatley tell who has and who hasn't seen what SCI-FI show after using them

 

[BigJake]

Actually I hated Firefly's approach -- they use English exclusively for most things and Chinese exclusively for cursing?

No, it's not strictly realistic -- and it maybe brings up larger problems, like "why exactly would they use Mandarin just for swearing," and "where are all the Asian people" -- but it wouldn't be realistic to expect the cast to speak in actual Chinglish. But it does nicely address the issue of delivering dialogue with a suitably pungent feel without trying to make up a bunch of variously-inventive parallels to English curses.

 

[Morpheus 02]

Actually I hated Firefly's approach -- they use English exclusively for most things and Chinese exclusively for cursing?

No, it's not strictly realistic -- and it maybe brings up larger problems, like "why exactly would they use Mandarin just for swearing," and "where are all the Asian people" -- but it wouldn't be realistic to expect the cast to speak in actual Chinglish. But it does nicely address the issue of delivering dialogue with a suitably pungent feel without trying to make up a bunch of variously-inventive parallels to English curses.

i agree -- it would be way too hard for a TV series to create a "realisitic" hybrid. it'd feel a lot more American than it should.

A novel with a bilingual writer could create the realistic picture.

I also had an idea of having an alternate history series (either movie, or TV) where America is actually colonized by Chinese , Korean & Japanese, and the expansion goes east instead of west. Whites become the slaves, and Africans are the "model minority".

But there would be a lot of excuses to make it accessible to most of the audience (such as English chosen as the common language, as the Asian cultures aren't willing to submit to another's language).

I appreciate the attempts to make the future more multicultural. Better than TNG, where we had European/western "culture" (like classical EUROPEAN music), and no sense of other cultures having an impact in the future.