Friday DE: Language!

[bjornwilde]

What are some of your favorite curses or exclamations from your canon(s)? Or are there any phrases or sayings that you like? Have you made up any?

Comments

[a1enzo]

OH BOY. For someone who doesn't even swear IRL, I have put a LOT of thought into this one.

Canon: "Crash" was used several times in the earlier seasons to express frustration or dismissal ("Aw, crash it all." "Crash the plan, just get down here! NOW!"); while it got past BSnP and was mostly uttered by young Enzo, in my estimation it equates most closely to "damn" and Enzo just needs to watch his language. In the later seasons, "ASCII" was used in overtly the same context as "ass" ("See? I told you I had it covered." "Covered, my ASCII!").

Semi-canon: The gamebooks used "tab it" a few times; I feel like that's a minced oath like "darn it."

Headcanon: There is a tendency in the fandom to follow the "ASCII" approach and pick swear-equivalents phonetically, e.g. "spam" for "damn" and "Dell" for "hell". This has led to the use of "FAQ" for "fuck", and this makes me twitch. I prefer the "crash" approach: I came up with "spam" for "shit" (a noxious substance, or the act of producing it), "\dev\null" for "hell", and "frag" for "fuck" (colloquially but certainly not literally).

[i_am_your_host]

Ahahah, I love your headcanon swear words.

[a1enzo]

^_^ Thanks. (All I want is a syntactically correct, semantically appropriate system of swearing! Is that too much to ask? *shakes fist*)

[exiled_heir_of_the_eighth]

As someone who swears A LOT in real life, I haven't put much thought into this. There's a few oaths in 40k I quite like - "Throne in flames", "Gods of the Warp", "Vandire's blood".

The one curse word I really like comes from Sahaal's novel, and that's "warpshit", or "warpshitting". I don't know why, I think it's because if you put a bit of venom behind it, it sounds great.

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka: "Sleemo" is a favorite of hers and means something like slimeball or jerk. She also called Asajj a "bald harpy", once. As to phrases, I think my favorite of hers is either, "Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into, Master." or "Hungry? Careful not to choke on your stupidity."

Sabine: "Karabast" which is something like either damn it or shit, is used a lot by the Ghost crew and is of Lassat origin. In an OOM I'm still working on, I did come up with the Mandalorian phrase, "the final load in the chamber" instead of our "the last straw". I also love, "All helmet, no head", which comes from the Republic Commandos books. They're not official canon any longer, but until they give me more Mandalorian culture to work with, I'm using it.

I'm blanking on if Scrapper/Valkyrie/Brunnhilde used any Sakaar specific curses or not, but it seems like there has to be some there.

Izana's culture is too polite to use curses casually, or at least the censors never let them put them on the page or on the screen. Which makes me realize I should research some that are used in Japan to maybe use sparingly.

Everyone else of mine comes from Earth and US centric cultures, so nothing there.

[sunbaked_baker]

"Shiva wept!" and "Gods and friggin' angels!" are both used as exclamations of frustration, exasperation, or worry in canon. Also the names of various gods make up part of the general slang lexicon:

Thor: something is "totally thor" if it's big, loud, attention-getting, presumably amazing and powerful but ultimately kind of dumb or silly...

Odin: something might get "odin" added to its descriptors if it's large, powerful, potentially overwhelming and deserving of respect and caution.

Kali: a person or thing or situation gets "kali" added to its descriptors if they are powerful, dangerous, toxic, or damaging to people they encounter.

[iprotectyou]

Here's a handy link to a glossary of Star Wars curses!

Autor uses "Stars and garters" and Rae's "Shiva wept!"

[has_it]

"Shiva wept!" is really a lot of fun to use.

[iprotectyou]

It really is. Sacreligious, but a lot of swear words are.

[has_it]

Absolutely! And in keeping with the themes of the god-related slang and references in Rae's world. I like it in particular because weeping would be really out of character for Shiva, which is probably why it makes a good exclamation of extreme exasperation and frustration. Things are so bad that even Shiva would weep.

[iprotectyou]

That's a good point! I hadn't thought of that.

[cook_the_rude]

It is.

[for_everyone]

There's a lot of Star Wars fake slang and expletives, though I know we sometimes just use real world cursing too because... whatever, it's the thought that counts. For Hera in particular I've headcanoned that when she curses, it's more often in Huttese, which I think is pretty common in SW-verse in general, but maybe especially for places that are or were formerly occupied by the Hutts. I also sometimes make things up - like in an OOM we're working on now Hera refers to someone as a 'lelg no krolp' which is supposed to mean 'piece of shit' in Huttese. Which - 'krolp' does come from... some EU thing, I think, and 'no' sort of does, too. I just made up the word for 'piece.'

[i_am_your_host]

My vampires are the most foul-mouthed of my pups in canon. Pam is extremely quoteable with all her insults and expletives, but there's nothing like a general catchphrase (except maybe "Fucking Sookie!").

TV Cassidy would be a lot more sweary if the show were on a premium cable network, so the most he gets away with is British/Irish slang like "bollocks" and "shite," and my favorite one-time exclamation "what the shite?" There's also "plonker" and "gobshite," and I can't remember if he's used "wanker" yet, but I anticipate it in the next season.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion barely swears, because I didn't care to go the R2-D2 route of having the canonically unintelligible robot be foul-mouthed in translation. (It's common to the point of being kind of an overused joke in Overwatch fandom.) They curse occasionally but not much, and if they're speaking a human language they'll probably use the existing swears.

Having said that, the literal meaning of human profanities is generally lacking in impact for them. They don't have the same kind of strong feelings about organic bodily functions. I might borrow 'crash' and 'slag' from the ReBoot and Transformers characters' vocabularies and/or make up some more from digital and mechanical failure states and undesirable substances if something makes Bastion angry enough to warrant profane condemnation in stronger language.

Alternian swears are the same as human ones except for direct references to body parts. (I'm not sure exactly what a troll's 'nook' or 'bulge' corresponds to on a human, but it's definitely something rude and usually assumed to be a reproductive organ.) Aradia swears sparingly, but pretty much the way a human teenager would; I haven't actually checked recently but I assume she occasionally says 'fuck' and/or 'shit'. Karkat, on the other hand, produces some amazing works of metaphor and obscenity.

Thurlow comes from Victorian England and grew up middle to upper middle class, so 'damn' and 'bloody' register as full-fledged coarse language to them rather than mere PG entry-level cursing. (Their canon censors those for period flavour, along with 'bastard'. But not Hell, because that's a place name!) By that standard they curse moderately.

[death_gone_mad]

"GIANT HAIRY CABBAGES!!!"

I don't really know why that sticks in my mind. It was uttered by a totally irrelevant to the story drunken NPC. Well, several. Anyhow, canon doesn't have many memorable exclamations, it tends toward more descriptive language. "Burn in the hell of your abject failure," is one Amascut uses, for example. Semi-canonical material gets to be more creative linguistically. Sacrilegious swearing is probably common even though canon doesn't show it off, with "Saradomin's beard!" and "Zamorak's wings!", and "Goblin filth!" being most common. "Devourer take you!" is likely common in the Kharidian subcontinent or with anyone who knows desert mythology. "Amascut take you!" is more serious since it invokes her name.

By the canon point I have Fairy Fixit coming in from, though, there is another better known Devourer so "Devourer take you!" is a bit ambiguous. However, the corpse of Tuska, Devourer of Worlds, crash landed onto the beach south of the ruins of the Temple of Amascut, Devourer of Souls. So, um. Maybe not so ambiguous and Amascut is the Devourer of God-Bacon by that canon point?

[archmagetrust]

Ahaha, I've slowly been reading through the books again to try and find examples of Azerothian swearing and leveling a new toon to keep an eye out for it, too. It tends to depend on the race. Night elves commonly swear by their goddess: Elune's grace!, by the light of Elune. Members of the Alliance in general, especially dwarves, gnomes, humans and draenei, all tend to swear by the Light: Light damn you, Light blind me, Light preserve us. Worgen, being human based, swear by the Light but as they're also the Victorian England based people they also use bloody, cor, blimey, etc.

While I'm less familiar with how the races of the Horde curse (they're not the faction I tend to play in the game), Thrall's balls is canonical. Bitch has also been used by them, but that may fall under more general use.

General curses also include bastard, cur, son of an ogre (Alliance mostly), hell (usually implies a destructive place like Hellfire Peninsula), fel (eg fel-cursed bastard as fel is a magic, not a place).

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato: Characters in Digimon swear in more or less the standard modern Japanese way, where swearing is less of an isolated word or phrase, and more of a combination of insulting or aggressive language with a particular mode of speaking and tonal variation.

While he doesn't do it so much in tri or even in 02, Yamato swears constantly in 01, including at least one instance where the subs delicately translate him as going "This guy is really annoying and needs to shut up," when what he's actually saying is "[incoherent angry swearing noises]" This habit of his doesn't carry over to the dub, for obvious reasons regarding relative attitudes to children and swearing.

Eden: I'm not sure anyone actually ever curses in the entirety of Kingdom Hearts, whether it be fantasy curses or not. Certainly nobody in Daybreak Town ever curses, and the town is such a controlled, forcibly happy-go-lucky-aren't-things-nice environment that it's difficult to imagine that anybody would.

[thekidfrombrooklyn]

"Language!"

(Even though Steve was a soldier in WWII. Know when terms like "situation normal, all fucked up" and "motherfucker" entered the vernacular? WWII. I can believe he doesn't cuss in public, but warning his teammates about language on a closed channel is pushing it.)

I do like it when he says "Son of a gun," though.