Swearing (dash it all!)

This topic came to me thanks to K. Richardson, whom I encountered on the forum at the Critters critique website. Many of you probably know it, but if you don't, and you're seeking critique for works of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, it's a great place to start. The question K. had was how to get her aliens to swear without using swear words from our own world, yet not have the substituted words sound silly.

I would start by asking, "what is swearing for?" Here are some of its purposes in our world:

1. to express emotion in moments of extreme stress or pain
2. to express dissatisfaction (a less extreme version of #1, I think)
3. to give evidence that one is telling the truth ("I swear by the sword of my father, Domingo Montoya")
4. to get attention (over a wide range - everything from making a word stand out to emotionally injuring someone)
5. to express alignment with particular social groups

Here's an example of how a difference in degree on #4 can cause trouble cross-culturally. I come from a cultural group in which the form of swearing I'd call "ugly words" is used to get attention and injure people emotionally. My husband comes from one where the same words are used to draw attention and even give a certain spice of fun to what is said. So when we first met, and before I figured out the difference, I'd be regularly appalled at what was coming out of the mouth of this otherwise entirely nice (and very interesting) guy.

If you're creating an alien society, you can always go with a model that has your aliens using swearing for similar purposes - but of course, the parameter is available to be played with, so there's no need to hold back!

Next, I'd ask about content. Different cultures use different kinds of swearing content, but these can include religious references, scatological or sexual references, ridicule of others by comparison with animals, etc. Some swear words (like the old fashioned "zounds!") are derived from religious sources but have been euphemized (in this case from the expression, "God's wounds!") to avoid blasphemy.

So back to the aliens. Religion-based swearing is going to depend on what their religion is, whether it has the good vs. evil dichotomy, and how their cosmology works. From the point of view of the hypothetical Gegogian, what would be a fate worse than death? And under what circumstances might someone wish it on someone else? If you're looking for ugly words, then what do these people consider ugly? Are sexual body parts considered taboo in the society, and would they be used for expletive purposes? If someone wants to swear truthfulness, what object or concept do they value so highly that they would not want to sully it by lying under oath?

If you're going to pepper your dialogue with swear words or phrases the way we do in English, it's good to keep them short. But if you want to expand the cultural role of swearing and turn it into a lengthy trash-talking contest, then by all means elaborate them. Personally I would hope such a contest would be relevant to the main conflict of a story, though, and not just there for pyrotechnics!

Tonight I don't have a lot of examples on hand from established fiction - I welcome comments, so tell me if you thought swearing was handled well, or in a funny way, or in a less than optimal way, in any of the books you've read. In my own writing I have one culture where they use wordless sounds for extreme emotion, and insult people by talking about their undesirable physical behaviors. I have another where people are expected to swear by one of a family of deities, and which one to use depends on how the situation aligns with the personality and job of the deity in question.

Exploring swearing and its cultural underpinnings is a great way to give spice and dimension to a world.

A taste of taboo

I think of taboos generally as zones of discomfort. There are lots of them, and they vary depending on the culture. I mentioned them in my earlier post on humor, because a lot of humor centers around taboo borderlines of various kinds, including (but certainly not restricted to) body parts, bodily functions, illness and death, race, religion - the list goes on and on. I think the movie that was the most bipolar ever for me was Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, exactly because it took aim at so many body taboo borderlines. Thus, when I liked the jokes, I loved them - and when I didn't love them, I was appalled by them (stomach upset has never been something funny for me!).

Monty Python's parrot sketch played with death, but managed to avoid any of the gross-out aspects of the topic and instead played with euphemisms. I love euphemisms, so I guess it's no surprise that the line "If he hadn't been nailed to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies!" had me incapacitated with giggles. People think of lots of ways to talk around taboo subjects, and as time passes, they continue to have to find more, because the association of any given euphemism with a taboo topic effectively contaminates it over time. Think of the number of different names that have been given to toilets and the rooms in which they reside. Or think of the number of different names that have been given to former slave and immigrant peoples of the USA, which have then been tossed out and replaced with others as they were judged too derogatory.

When I was living in Japan with my husband a movie came out that portrayed the final days of someone with a terminal condition. The odd thing about this movie for us was that it was a comedy, and one of the main jokes was the fact that the guy was dying and his family couldn't tell him. I'll admit I was a little shocked by this. However, when we asked our friends we learned that in Japan, doctors will not tell patients that they are dying because it would be too upsetting; instead they tell the family so that they will be able to prepare. This is something that makes my gut go "no!" but from an anthropological point of view I can see how it would make sense culturally.

Taboos can result in a lot of cultural self-restriction. The area of technology leaps to mind, where the ethics of cloning and stem cell research play such a large role in determining where money goes, and thus where the technology goes next. Religious restrictions can have a deep influence in many areas of a culture - in Islamic art, for example, where the depiction of living beings (particularly humans) has been historically discouraged as blasphemous.

Taboo is rich territory for world and culture building. The planet of Garini in my story "Let the Word Take Me" had a religious taboo on the use of language. Many religions restrict the utterance of particular phrases or names, but in the Garini case the taboo applied to any free use of the language. Check out the July/August 2008 Analog magazine if you want to see how it worked; I don't want to give too many spoilers here. Frank Herbert (Dune) does a brilliant job of culture building with Arrakis and the treatment of water there, building in taboos on wastage that are treated with respect or disrespect by different power groups. Ursula LeGuin does some fascinating work with taboo in The Left Hand of Darkness when she creates a race of ambi-gendered humans (no time here to explain the exact details; go read it if you haven't) and builds folktales for them which elaborate on the kinds of taboos they might have, including for example incest and childbearing.

I encourage writers to think about the taboos of the cultures they create, because this can be a great way to give a culture extra dimension, to link its social groups in principled ways and to make it feel grounded in a physical environment.