Today’s topic comes from QSFer Jim Comer: “Profanity from books and conworlds – The swearwords in my made-up worlds tend to be very odd, such as “Puyurh baVasola”, which means “By the Flames of Paradise!”, or “Chochvort ve’amet!”, or “Go fuck a house-ape!” (um, those are in two different made-up languages, but I think you see what I mean).”
So I thought it would be fun to take a look at swearing in theoretical worlds.
I loved when Anne McCaffrey used “shards’ (form the idea of dragon’s eggs) as one of her curse words in the Dragonriders of Pern books.
And similarly, the word “fraking” in the Battlestar Gallactica TV series (2000’s, not 1970’s) always made me smile.
So my questions to you today: What are some of your favorite Fantasy or Sci Fi swear words? And if you are a writer, have you used any of your own, and how did you come up with them?
Caution: post contains “dirty words”. Thank you, George Carlin. I thought hard about swearwords when I wrote the Pendleton’s background material. There are multiple hominid species, so interspecies sex(xx) is a huge taboo, whereas, since very, very few people are weird enough to want to screw a giant rabbit or a bird, zoophilia is simply considered gross and weird, and isn’t a source of ‘fighting words’. And while bird and insect feces (there are no cows or horses, or sheep) don’t spread disease on this planet, hominid feces do, since colonic bacteria mutate easily and cause trouble, so swears such as “monkeyshit!” and “Fuck a manhorse in his shitty ass, you baboon-fucking apefucker!” are common. Monotheists don’t say “dammit”, they say “dark it!” because the opposite of the Sun God is darkness and evil. FaTheyists, followers of a Buddhism-like religion, swear by the revealer of their religion, the Dhai, and so say things such as “Dhaidammit!” reasonably often.