Cursing in Fantasy/otherworldly-sci-fi

In my own writing I've been trying to find a way to effectively incorporate my own curse words, because it seems to me like one of those things people may becomes suspicious of even if they actually wouldn't.

But you're right, with the thing about "oh my God" etc. If you don't have anything in your world similar to God or a god, then you might have trouble finding something. I haven't thought about it much, but I'm gonna need one of those eventually.

Ai yai yai.

I might make a stretch to say something like, "holy lord" if in my world there was a belief in a superior being. It's hard to say though.

Just think of what sort of taboos your culture has and craft curses from the taboos.

Or maybe think of something that the people really don't like. If people think tigers are evil or cursed, they could call people, "striped devils", or "fanged fiends". If they were just exclaiming a curse they could use, "cat damn" or "tiger cursed".

It just has to make sense in the context of whatever world you create or are using.

Maybe give it a try in translations from other languages. Take for example, "fuck you", there is no real equivalent of that in Dutch or German as far as I know. However it gets translated so they have their own solutions for it. Now, if you take that German phrase, translate it literally into English, you have an outlandish English cursing phrase.

Be creative. Why do you need a swear-word (which will take up a few letters) when you can have a longer sentence which shows aspects of the world and, kinda reveals the hidden aspects of a character.

i.e. "Of all the monkey-buggering luck." or "You're an abberation of the union between a duck and a tiger."

It's funny to read, and it can be taken as offensive by the characters in your story. Just a suggestion.

What's the things that your culture fears most, as a culture? "God damn you" works in our culture because people fear for their immortal souls, so theologically that's a pretty big thing to wish on someone even though it's become fairly commonplace in our modern society (which says a lot about us also).

Conversely, what does your culture value so much that a slight against it would noticeable?

Curses, originally, were that--a "magical" act intended to bring nasty stuff down on whoever displeased you. Get back to that origin, tweak for your world, and have some fun with it.

If your world has an emperor or king, you could have the subject take their ruler's name in vain. Instead of "God's Blood!" (Or 'Sblood!") you could have them say "[Emperor's name]'s Blood."

If Emperor = Kiron, then "Kiron's Blood!" or "Kiron's Beard!" or even "Kiron's Balls!"

Shazbot!

You have to know what the fundamental values of the culture are. Once you know that, swearing should be obvious.

Void take it! Never mind all that gods ball-rot. Haven't you got any bug-eaten imagination in your cesspool head?

A friend once told me that any good string of cussing needed a color, a race, and animal and...drat, can't remember the full recipe.

Thinking about it, one reason why it's hard is that there's never been an atheistic human society, hence the lack of examples to draw on . . .

Fie! Fie! A pox upon thee! I cry foul! By all that is virtuous, I swear upon the bones of my grandmothers' grave I shall avenge the savages that have brought this disgrace to our family name! May it be dealt with ever so severely with me if I do not bring this calamity to pass upon the lot of thee--you and your kinsmen--upon thy children and thy grandchildren, and thy great-great-grandchildren, to a thousand generations! Surly dog! Undone wretch that you are, Coward! Slime-ridden, maggot-infested, mucous-oozing mutant! I hope you rot in a mold-ridden coffin for all time with all of your entrails spilling out as the vultures and jackels gnaw on your shriveled, mutated heart! Vomitous slug!

I know a couple of people who are atheists, and I know they both avoid using "oh my god" (and I'm fairly sure one of them has an atheist version of that). Maybe see if there is anything out there on the web about what atheists would say to help provide some guidance?

Apsu said:

I'll have to pick that apart later

But I think Euan H. has an interesting point. Has there ever been an atheistic race? How about modern dictatorial nations, like Russia? Of course they come from religious people (and I believe have returned to a religious people), but I wonder if their swearing changed at all.

I suppose "oh my god" could easily change to "oh my lord" in a society with nobility but no deity. OK, now I'm really thinking, "Did all the words people use for deities, such as 'lord', start as honorifics for royalty and get transferred to deities, or did they start as honorifics for deities and get transferred to royalty?

But still, I think I'm going to take the challenge posed by so many here, that if I knew my world well enough this would be an easy thing to do. I'll try not to get defensive about that and rather see if maybe they're right about it.

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The Russian language doesn't really have any swear words. They are all just words. The word for sex means, sex. There isn't a "dirty" counterpart only used in cussing like with english. It's not the word used, it's how you use it.

That being said, my Ukrainian and Russian friends are very proud of their creative cussing. I remember one friend visited a museum in the Ukraine which used to be a prison camp where Nazis kept Russian prisoners. The prisoners left graffiti in Cyrillic all over the walls, calling the guards a lot of colorful names. The only one I can remember is "rat penis", which is a pretty nasty alternative to mother----er.

JK Rowling did a lot of what people are talking about, in Harry Potter. The wizards made reference to various parts of Merlins anatomy.

Someone else was telling me that in parts of India, where the telephone/electrical service can take months to repair, a favorite curse is to wish for people's phones to go out. Small cultural/regional details like that could be taken and twisted into a curse.

Canotila said:

Someone else was telling me that in parts of India, where the telephone/electrical service can take months to repair, a favorite curse is to wish for people's phones to go out. Small cultural/regional details like that could be taken and twisted into a curse.

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Ha! I like that.

A Swedish colleague mentioned to me once that most of his strongest curses were religious in nature whereas American curses tended to be sexual. It underscored what our cultures consider most insulting, and further underscored the American Puritan background.

For me, it all boils down to the fact that a curse is meant to be a curse, and there are varying levels of curses. On a world where insect-borne diseases might be lethal, cursing someone to become infested might be a mortal offense. On a world where cats are regarded as deities, telling someone to have carnal relations with the house feline could lead to blood.

In the end, the cultures you create will determine the types of curses you employ. The tricky part is using them the first time without eliciting too much chuckling from your fracking audience.

Apsu said:

I'll generally be happy to use a real-world curse word, when it's correct in context. For instance: shit, if we're actually talking about poop, Fuck if we're actually talking about sex, ass if we're actually talking about—well, you get the picture.

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Yah, but that's not what we do in English, so why restrict yourself that much?
If we were talking about poop every time someone said shit, there would be a lot more poop discussion in this world.

And let's not even talk about some of the possible combinations.

Generally when you could say "Oh my god" you could also say "Goodness," or "My word", "Oh fuck". Barring that -- any culture has taboos. Any culture has Things Wot Are Big And Scary. It's a good way to slip in information about a culture, if done well.

FWIW, I would find it very hard to believe in a society that has no gods - real or not. As far as I am aware, there are no civilisations on Earth that have not had some sort of belief in a higher power. There seems to be something in human nature that leads to this kind of belief.

JimmyB27 said:

FWIW, I would find it very hard to believe in a society that has no gods - real or not. As far as I am aware, there are no civilisations on Earth that have not had some sort of belief in a higher power. There seems to be something in human nature that leads to this kind of belief.

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Plenty of cognitive basis for religion, yepyep.
Starting with our tendency to anthropomorphize anything (consider times when you've said your computer didn't like something, or was thinking about something) and ability to categorize and think in terms of ideal-examples of categories. There's far more to it than that; that's just the bit I know about

Gosh, this is just the thread I need at the moment. It's got me thinking what is most valuable to my sci fi culture.

Cursing only works because it breaks taboos. 'Shit' is a curse-word in English because it's an intimate/familiar word for excrement -- and excrement is taboo. Likewise with religious cursing.

So what sorts of taboos are there? The range is huge. Anything sacred can have a taboo -- objects (e.g. holy books and relics), holy places, revered persons, revered animals or plants, sacred symbols and words, sacred days, sacred activities, parts of the body, mental states, relationships, historical events... There are also profane/contaminated things that fall into the same range.

A mild oath might be to curse by the sacred e.g. 'By my grandfather's earlobes', 'By my sword and spurs', 'By my lady's honour', 'By my horse's tail'. To use the sacred for mundane purposes is always mildly offensive, and often bowdlerised. Historically words like 'Gadzooks' or 'S'blood' were euphemisms for 'God's Hooks' or 'God's blood'. You can have sacred things without having gods -- consider our attitudes toward mothers or infants, or our birthplace, or our favourite sports-team, or the dead.

A moderately foul curse might be to curse by the profane e.g. 'By a leper's maggotty breech-clout', 'By a troll's fart', 'By a dung-beetle's toothbrush'. Among the moderate profane curses are disasters, e.g. 'Sink me', 'Plague take it'. If you direct them at an object or yourself then they're less offensive than directing them at another.

A very foul curse typically mixes the sacred and profane together. 'By your mother's sagging dugs', 'By the King's catamite's pox-plagued pizzle', 'Wipe my arse with a cassock'. Or, it directs disasters at another. 'Rot you'. 'Plague take you'. 'A giant suck your marrow'. Where mild and moderate curses might simply express emotion, a foul curse is always intended to offend.

English has many words that are themselves taboos, but it's not necessary that your language has taboo words -- it's enough if you use words about taboo things.

The best curses are almost poetry: vivid, well-metred, surprising and imaginative. But they must break taboos. This is why many of the curses used in pulp fiction and Golden Age comic-books ('Great Caesar's Ghost!' 'Suffering Sappho!') become trite cliches from the outset.

A curse is more than just a line of dialogue. It reveals what is sacred or profane to the character, and also how the character deals with strong emotions, agression and defiance. But likewise, the reactions of the characters around the speaker will reveal much of their personalities, relationships with the speaker, social status and the nature of the world.

Hope that helps.

Oh, an afterthought -- many taboo concepts have euphemisms. One can use the euphemism in a good curse to produce some indirect language to make the reader pause and think.

When taken literally, 'Concha de tu madre' means 'Shell of your mother'. But many Spanish-speakers use it as a very foul insult. It can take non-Spanish speakers a moment to realise why.

From ancient Greece through the middle ages, the Sign of the Fig (grasping one's thumb between the index and middle fingers) has been a visual insult meaning either sexual intercourse, or eating a fig from the anus of a donkey (no fooling). So a curse doesn't have to be verbal -- it can be visual too.

Perhaps the culture has evlovled from "Damn your gluttonous sister and her bad knees" to just saying "Fat sister" when you hit your hand with a hammer, etc.

Smack! "Fat sister of Pete!"
Wife: "Watch your language in front of the kids/younglings/larvalings."

Others:
Crotch rot
Anything to do with promiscuity
I think if, given time, I could make up a halfway decent one about property damage. "Broken crock"
Genital ant bites

Well, everyone has pretty much said the obvious.

The other day I was watching "Fifi and the Flowertots" while sitting with my neighbors son. The little plant people say "rotten raspberries" when something deserves a curse. Of course, that sounds cute and it's a kids show. But I was thinking about the idea that if you were a plant then calling something rotten would be a pretty serious matter.

And, while checking out some of the swear-sites that BigWords posted in another thread, I discovered that the Croatian page is full of foulness. Including the curse "Hitler f*cked your mother."

So. Just food for thought.

Aggy B. said:

And, while checking out some of the swear-sites that BigWords posted in another thread, I discovered that the Croatian page is full of foulness. Including the curse "Hitler f*cked your mother."

So. Just food for thought.

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Likewise Romanian is full of incredibly crude curses, but some that sound rather innocuous or quaint in English are deeply, deeply offensive in the mother tongue. And some of them are just pure gold.

What on your mother's dead relatives do you want?
F**k your mother's funeral cake.
Suck my socks.
I'll dry my socks on your mother's tombstone.