future lingo

Well, from this book I've read, I've heard these two terms that I'm not too sure with:
"Final level"
and
"First level"

I'm guessing final level means deep, and the other means shallow, but I can't tell, because it never went that deep into the meaning of it.

Oh, and for cool, you could try ice.
For crap, try phiz.
Don't know where phiz came from, but it might work

What about lol, rofl, lmao and all that as a spoken and acceptable part of the english language?

Don't get too hung up on the slang, unless that's actually something that you enjoy doing. Ratchet down the present-day words like "cool" and "crap." Then, when you've finished a draft, think about the world you've created and make a SHORT list of words that might be appropriate for that world. And use them sparingly.

Smiling Ted said:

Then, when you've finished a draft, think about the world you've created and make a SHORT list of words that might be appropriate for that world. And use them sparingly.

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I agree with this.

Creating your own slang for a future setting reminds me of an old Disney Channel Original Movie (O.O) Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. The main character would say Zetus lupetus, instead of oh crap!

Anyway, I think if you do come up with slang words, I would use them sparingly as to not distract and become silly. Unless, you want your character to come across that way.

Thinking on this topic more, I don’t recall the practice of creating slang that prevalent. While I haven’t read a ton of Sci-fi, I don’t recall hearing slang words in Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, for example. Maybe I’m just not remembering it. Others might know about more books/shows that had slang created to help you come up with some of your own slang and how to best implement it in your work.

Coming up with slang and cuss words is my favorite part of writing SF. It can tell a lot about society and what it values. I make a list of words: positive slang, negative slang, body parts/functions/drunkeness, and cusses in order from least to most offensive. I don't use them all in my actual manuscript, but it gives me a feel for the world I'm writing about.

Nicole

"...it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms... (than) to invent a long series of wholly (alien) terms. In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying..."

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Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, "To The Reader," Nightfall

Jeremy said:

I agree with this.

Creating your own slang for a future setting reminds me of an old Disney Channel Original Movie (O.O) Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. The main character would say Zetus lupetus, instead of oh crap!

Anyway, I think if you do come up with slang words, I would use them sparingly as to not distract and become silly. Unless, you want your character to come across that way.

Thinking on this topic more, I don’t recall the practice of creating slang that prevalent. While I haven’t read a ton of Sci-fi, I don’t recall hearing slang words in Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, for example. Maybe I’m just not remembering it. Others might know about more books/shows that had slang created to help you come up with some of your own slang and how to best implement it in your work.

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Doesn't Luke say that blasting a (death star reactor port?) is no more difficult than spragallioning wump rats (or wumping wump rats or ratting rat wumps?)...and one odd place to look for future slang's effect on the reader would be to read Huckleberry Finn where you can find spondulix and sugaalion and so on.

Battlestar Galactica does have a couple of slang words. The one I can remember off the top of my head is "frak".

Farscape has several cool slang words: frell, dren, kinked, eema. But they're so integrated into the dialogue that you know what they are without them distracting you too much.

I disagree with all these suggestions. I think you should have them use arcane slang just because it's a fad that caught on. Retro chic, or just plain old weirdness.
neato huh?

The word "cool" seems to be the one and only truly immortal slang word that simply won't die.




Meanwhile, try reading the American edition of A Clockwork Orange and get a feel for how slang was used there. To me that book had an utterly mind-bending take on the whole concept of future slang. Other authors have tried to immitate A Clockwork Orange and fallen short. Dune succeeded. Watership Down was so-so. Few others IMHO that have attempted future slang ever really pulled it off well.

Battlestar Galactica is a good TV example (both the old series AND the new). The new BG also went one step further and included many many bizare and even disturbing rituals that the Viper pilots all engage in for the purpose of bonding and religious observation and even for bringng good luck. ALL those rituals they do are mystical, superstitious and ancient. (And disturbing.)

I do not suggest that you also try to immitate (and also most likely fall short of) the example of A Clockwork Orange (or the other examples I mentioned). Instead I suggest you wrap your brain around what that book did, how it did it, and then after you've digested it a bit to then go ahead and get your bearings as to just how far you intend to take your own made-up slang.

But keep in mind the danger expressed in the following axiom: you can't write a fantasy story that takes place in a make-believe land involving elves and dragons and wizards and evil dark lords without inviting unintentional comparison with Tolkien, and in the same vein you can't write a futuristic novel with made-up slang without inviting unintentional comparison with A Clockwork Orange and Dune, et al.

DWSTXS said:

I disagree with all these suggestions. I think you should have them use arcane slang just because it's a fad that caught on. Retro chic, or just plain old weirdness.
neato huh?

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Actually, that sounds really groovy. The bees knees, daddy-o.

Dune and Clockwork Orange shared one trick in common: All of the slang in each book came from a single real-world source.

Burgess used Russian for his slang, while writing about a "socialist" England.
Herbert used Arabic while writing about a desert world with futuristic bedouins.

Higgins said:

Doesn't Luke say that blasting a (death star reactor port?) is no more difficult than spragallioning wump rats (or wumping wump rats or ratting rat wumps?)...and one odd place to look for future slang's effect on the reader would be to read Huckleberry Finn where you can find spondulix and sugaalion and so on.

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Actually that's not an instance of slang in SW. Unlike, say in ESB when Han tells Luke he looks strong enough to pull the ears off a gundar, or when Leia accuses Han of being a scruffy looking nerf-herder (which, oddly, is the part he doesn't object to). While both of those presumably refer to "real" things, you get the feeling they've entered the SW vernacular as slang expressions.

(Much like our "something the cat dragged in" would do.)

But, when Luke says he used to bulls-eye whomp rats back home, it IS an example of using "alien" terms in a context everyone gets. He's shooting at something, probably the Tatooine equivalent of "plinking varmits" as they might have said many, many years ago.

... yes, I'm a SW geek. No, I do not dress up ... bcs I can't afford the Storm Trooper outfit. Plus I'm a little short.

Smiling Ted said:

Dune and Clockwork Orange shared one trick in common: All of the slang in each book came from a single real-world source.

Burgess used Russian for his slang, while writing about a "socialist" England.
Herbert used Arabic while writing about a desert world with futuristic bedouins.

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Well, something certainly resonated in what they did. It all just rang true. I guess this must be why.

KC36 said:

"Oh my god this school is phiz."
"'Phiz' Miss Alvarez?"
"Well if you want to rewind the past to the beginning of the millenium, it means crap. But if you never even knew that, then I'd have to say you're a bit slow on the lingo."

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I wouldn't explain.

Other people have mentioned Clockwork Orange, which is pretty much the gold standard for this sort of thing. IIRC, Burgess didn't even want to include a glossary in the back. He wanted readers to learn by immersion or not at all. Of course, Clockwork Orange isn't exactly the easiest book to read . . . I have to admit I'm more comfortable with a Watership Down level of "alien"* vocabulary. Although in one of my WIEs (Works in Editing, of course) I've tried for a bit more. I do cheat by putting useful definitions at the head of the chapters, but no explanation in the text itself.

For the most part, though, I think words will explain themselves. When a teenage girl flops back on her bed and says, "My God, my parents are twanks," do you really need a definition? If you had a time machine and a universal translator, you could hear the exact same sentiment in ancient Egyptian. If you wanted to.

Izunya



*Okay, so the characters in Watership Down aren't aliens. They're rabbits. This, plus the fact that it's based on the Aeneid, generally gets you very strange looks—but it's a remarkably worthwhile book, despite the premise sounding completely wonky.

Plot Device said:

Actually, that sounds really groovy. The bees knees, daddy-o.

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Groove-a-licious PD! I was bumming out, worrying that no one would like my idea. That everyone would make fun of it,
and that would have really harshed my mellow!

I think some writers forget the true purpose of devices like 'slang'.

Slang (modern or fictional) is a reflection of the world. It is a symptom and characteristic of the world building and characters. Good slang is only possible with good world building and characterization. The slang that should develop should feel so natural with your worldbuilding and characters that it should not be so difficult to come up with.
Similarly, the slang should be used in the proper context in which event, the reader will have no problem understanding it. If you do it well enough, the reader won't even be aware.

But in all honesty, slang is an afterthought. The really important elements of the story are the characterization and worldbuilding. Do those things right and the 'slang' will naturally fall out of it, like ripe fruit dropping from the tree. It will be easy to collect, harvest, and use how you see fit.

Good luck

Mel...

In the modern context, when people 'correctly' use slang, usually, i know exactly what they are talking about even if that is the first time I heard that word. Really good slang is a semantic 'twist' or modification of an existing word that adds color to the concept.

Someone mentioned

I'd say take the middle road. Keep it modern but use the big bad cuss words we all know and love (and I'm not sure if we can use here) simply, because they are near timeless, the reader knows them and they've been around for a long time. Most slang just dies as an old fad in ten years but in the last 50 years the F-word has always been around, the only difference was that they were more conservative about using it, but in the fields of WW2 it there were no limits.

I'm in agreement with dgiharris. Let the slang develop as a natural extension of the world around it. Language is an organic thing, thus slang also.




-Michelle

I agree with CalGrave. Good ol' fuck has been with us for centuries, and will be for centuries to come. I've never written a future story without at least one completely non-gratuitous use of the f word.

Do you remember 'Clockwork Orange?' the author made up futuristic slang based on russian. For example, the russian word for 'head' is Golobar or something, so the slang for head in the book became 'Gulliver.' That's the only one I can think of offhand, but there were several thus. You might consider that as an approach.

I just based all my slang off the fact that humanity has been living in a literal sewer for the last thousand years.

Sewage = shit
Tubes = hells
Pike = the f-word.

And so on.

I've got fairly good reasons for all of them. The tubes refereed to are the lower level tubes, with the more pungent smells, sewage is fairly obvious. Pikes were semi-phallic shaped animals that tended to bite your ankles if you walked around. So early expeditions would often find their ankles and legs chomped by the pikes. To warn the others, they would shout: "PIKE!"

And it became a curse word later on.

Though these are curse words, not slangs.

Ah well.

One thing nice about ALL generations for the past several centuries is that adults seldom understand the slang of the youth. Use that to your advantage, KC. The example you give in your second post works, but it would work BETTER if the adult asked a colleague instead. For example:

"Oh my god this school is phiz."
Professor Jones turned to Alvin, his student aide for the year, and whispered. "'Phiz'?"
Alvin sighed. "It's retro-speak. Everybody's rewinding to the beginning of the century this term. You probably still call it scat, like my mom does. My granddad calls it crap."

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Then you've introduced TWO new terms and the reader's up to date and perfectly content.