Profanity in Errant Story

[Imp-Chan]

Well, since I started a similar discussion on the facebook page, I thought I should probably open up the same conversation here.

So, one of the things that we're paying more attention to as we go through and edit the earlier Errant Story pages for the collector's edition is the use of swear words. Originally, Poe used a lot of random symbols precisely because he didn't want to think about the topic at the time, but he was also hoping to make the comic so that it could be sold to a younger audience. These days, neither of those things is a concern, so the characters use cursewords with impunity in the more recent pages. Going back, this raises some issues, though.

See, a lot of the swears and even interjections that we use in English are specifically Christian in origin. In a fantasy world where Christianity never existed, these words don't work anymore. There are some instances where we've had a lot of fun inventing specifically Luminositan swearwords (my favorite to date being Luminosita's Great Glowing Manberries), but those are so full of character that it doesn't make sense to include them in the dialogue too often. More general terms like hell, god, or damn can still be used by any character raised in the Church of Luminosita (the Veracian Church), but what about characters that weren't? The elves can swear by or plead to Anilis and Senilis, and while they don't particularly have a concept of the afterlife, the ones we see most often have been hanging out with the humans long enough so that they might have adopted a lot of their profanity regardless of actual belief.

Tsuiraku, on the other hand, is an aggressively atheist culture that developed in almost complete isolation from the theist cultures that shaped the rest of mankind. Really, the average Tsuirakuan citizen has almost no contact with the rest of the world, they remain cloistered almost entirely within their own culture. So what do they swear by? Meji uses fuck a lot because it's short and recognizable, but there are instances in the dialogue where that really doesn't work. When the character uses profanity as a form of verbal punctuation, as Meji often does, that presents some unique challenges. What is an appropriate secular substitution for the sacred?

Since we haven't yet come to any permanent conclusions about shaping the profanity of Tsuiraku, we'd welcome your input. What can you picture the citizens of Tsuiraku saying in the heat of the moment?

Go forth, discuss!

^-^'

[Alberich]

I shouldn't worry about it. All the other English words in the story are derived from things that presumably wouldn't exist on the Errant Story planet (to include the rhymes in "Tarragon the Troll"). That includes the charcters' names. "Jon" is a form of "John" whch, I believe, means "Yahweh has blessed."

One thing I came to see while reading this story is that it's a good thing when the author isn't worried about making every little piece original or unique to his world (a writer of Wesnoth scenarios wrote an interesting blog post on that once). Call the elves "elves" rather than renaming them as something else, giving the human characters common earth names like Jon, Chris, and Anita, and we can get used to it and concentrate on what matters -- the characters, their personalities, the situations they're in, and and how they react. Meji's choice of swearwords, like her other dialogue, makes it quick and easy to understand her mentality, in a way strange new alien swearwords would not.

When Ian's being attacked by Ellis and uses "GD" -- where I grew up, that was considered the strongest swear-phrase -- we get the point, which is how intensely he's feeling the rage and frustration rather than where the words come from. (I doubt he's a believer in much of anything. But it didn't bother me.) Change the phrase and you'd somehow have to explain to the reader, and make the reader understand, that whatever phrase he was using was more pungent than his earlier talk of getting fucked in the ass by reality or the elves or whatever it was.

That said - in ER, Argus the Tsuirakuan atheist mage has been swearing by the "weave" for a long time, which we assume is some kind of nontheistic magical thingy. My own ex-battlemage Udo expands it to "fuckin' weave!," but he's a more vulgar character overall, and does a lot of bestiality-based insulting ("Let's get those goat-blowing pirates!...What, we're the pirates?...Let's get those goat-blowing non-pirates!...What, they're pirates too?...Oh, fuckin' weave, let's get 'em anyway!").

[Graybeard]

Alberich beat me to it, particularly as regards the Errant Road cussing, and I don't have a lot to add to what he said. However, one point is worth making, to be followed by a regional/ethnic joke from where I live that I will Spoiler so that people don't have to read it. (It's not offensive in a racist sense, just long.)

The point, which is seen already in Errant Story and is widespread in Errant Road, is that a culture's expletives continue to be expletives long after the context that created them disappears from the culture. This can function in either of two ways. First, things that were originally religion-based profanity come to stand on their own long after the dialect removes religious connotations. Consider the mild English oaths "zounds," "gadzooks," "crikey" (a particular favorite of mine), "bloody" this-and-that, etc. Each originated as a Christian oath, but the tie to Christianity has all but disappeared except in the eyes of those who look at them from a "literary" view. (Drusia? Are you reading this? Do I have this right?) Second, people certainly don't refrain from swearing in the names of deities from other cultures and belief systems. Consider the stereotypically English "by Jove." Not many people in the UK worship the Greco-Roman pantheon any more! "Damn," in the context of Errant Story, would fit perfectly well even in Tsuiraku, as a leftover from times when Tsuirakuans did believe in things that could subject them to eternal damnation.

So all told, I don't think you have to change anything in the story, and it probably doesn't contribute enough "authenticity" to overcome the difficulty that readers will have in understanding Errant-Story-specific cussing. To take Alberich's mention of Argus' "Weave" as an example, we Errant Roadies know exactly what's intended there. (If we don't, Argus' familiar Harker has just spelled it out for us.) But readers of the dead-tree product you're trying to sell generally won't, and it probably isn't worth the effort to indoctrinate them. You might make an exception for the "Luminosita's Great Glowing Manberries" oath, which in Errant Road is usually rendered "Luminosita's Festering Testicles" or "Luminosita's Nethers." In real conversation, nobody would go to the effort of cussing with all those syllables; they'd just say "Nuts!" instead, and the connection to Luminosita's gonads would be understood. "Nuts" also being a (mild) real-world English expletive, that's one you could introduce, maybe with some lampshading. Example: Suppose that in this episode, Jon had been talking to himself out loud rather than thinking, and Ellis was eavesdropping:

Nuts! The damned sights are off...

"Nuts"? Your sights have been knocked off, your gun is all screwed up, you couldn't kill anybody with that piece of crap except by throwing it at them, and all you can think of to say is "Nuts!"?

Look, cat, I wanted to say "Luminosita's Festering Testicles," but I'm a busy man.

So here's the joke...

Spoiler: show

A politician running for office comes to one of the New Mexico Indian pueblos on a campaign trip. The Pueblenos gather for his speech, and he announces, "My Friends, I come to you today as a true Friend of the Indian!"

The crowd starts jumping up and down and yelling, "HOYA! HOYA!!" The politician has no idea what this means, since it's in the pueblo's own language, but they're really getting into it, so he figures, "Hey, they like me! I can get some votes out of this! Time to pile it on thicker!" So he continues with his speech: "If I am elected, I promise you bigger and better tribal services, a chicken in every pot, a TV in every wigwam [hey, this joke has been around for a LONG time, not to mention that the pueblos don't have wigwams, but never mind...]," and so on. Every promise he makes gets the same "HOYA! HOYA!!" shouting, and the guy figures he's scoring points big time.

So the speech finally ends (pol: "So, my dear friends, if you vote for me, I promise to be a Friend of the Indian in Congress!" listeners: "HOYA! HOYA!!"), and the tribal elders take him on a tour of the pueblo for photo opportunities. The first stop is a field where the tribe grazes its prize-winning cattle. "We thought it would be a good idea for you to pose with the bull that won the grand prize at the state fair," the chief tells the politician. "Just be careful, though, and make sure you don't step in the hoya."