Well scut comes Scots and is something you still hear up in the Hebrides of someone who is 24 and still lives at home or someone working a menial job. It basically means loser or good-for-nothing. You can also call objects on things scut. As in "my car is scutted" or "for fuck sake I am not doing your scut work."

Zoyne is Yiddish from the Hebrew for harlot.

I still think that the worst thing I can think of is being a "Le Puta negra"

New for 2070:

TT1C n. abrv. Two Trolls, One Cup Any overtly sexual and/or disgusting ARO a hacker deliberately places in a node. See also Teetee Onsies.
Goatsed adv. A descriptor for any hacker who opens a TT1C ARO by accident.

Slamm-O left behind a little calling card in the security spider's Matrix web and the poor corporate hacker was goatsed by a TT1C.

By the way in case any of you don't know goatse is actually a current internet meme sort of thing. Um. You can look into it if you want.

But it'll result in some TT1C showing up on screen. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

You know the guy who does (or use to do) Fear Factor watched that and was COMPLETELY disgusted by it... and he's seen some sick crap.

I have to say as someone thats been out of SR since SR1 i was a little supprised by the swearing. not offended but supprised.

I know id not let my 12 year old read the book with out a talk first about the swearing.

but then again my daughter thinks crap is a swear word

Crap was worthy of detention when I was in junior high. But, then again, I didn't go to an inner city school.

The problem with saying that "fuck" and "shit" have been used for a long time is that while the words don't dissapear from the lexicon, they lose impact. For example, saying the word "Damn" or "Goddamn" or "Hell" used to be a really big deal. By blaspheming you were showing you were a bad-arse who wasn't afraid of nobody, God included.

Anyone ever watch Deadwood? The writers and producers decided to use contemporary swearwords (a whole lot, "cock sucker" is said roughly 400+ times in the first season alone) to give viewers the feel of just how lawless and morally bankrupt the Black Hills community were.

I think that by 2070, people will still say "fuck", but the kids will say it like they say "damn" today, or even "darn". That's why I like Shadowrun slang. It doesn't feel like censorship, it feels like a whimsical progression, and I can sustain my sense of disbelief. And people do come up with random offensive words in modern times. I remember jokingly bringing a girl to much frustration by suggesting that she was into "snowballing". In an accelerated culture, both in the mainstream and counter-culture, I can see words like "frag" and "drek" becoming offensive, especially if used by a creative and vitriolic pornomancer (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) .

Fuck (earliest writings in 1495 from fokken) and shit (earliest usage 1585 from scitten [which is also linguistically related to the words ski and dissect (thank you Snow Crash)]) have been the exception in swearing. They're centuries old and they've always been socially unacceptable words (or at least words one doesn't use in polite company) despite what hip-hop culture might make one think. Damn (to condemn) and hell (the devil's stomping ground) aren't profane unless screamed in frustration (ie: God damn you!). The f-word and s-word have always been naughty/lower-class.

If I recall, Swearengen was the only user of cock sucker in Deadwood and that, like you said, was to emphasize his moral depravity in conjunction with his sheer intellect. Oh, and Wu, but he was just imitating; "Cooock Sukka!"

If my theoretical children used fuck in my presence they would be looking at a sore bottom. But they wouldn't be playing Shadowrun either. They can play D&D and slay dragons and be happy halflings riding unicorns.

Almost all of them, with the exception of perhaps the newspaper man, used the word cock sucker. Especially Calamity Jane, Swearengen, Cy Tolliver, Trixie, Dan Dority, The Nigger General, Hostetler, Steve, and the list goes on. Even the Sherriff and Doc Cochran used the word.

Funnily enough, Deadwood has been a family activity for me. This was all fine and Dandy, until my mother got carried away and started calling our local video store clerks cocksuckers whenever hiring out the next deadwood disc. The worst of these times was when I had a female friend who had never met my mum and never seen or heard about Deadwood came around. I saw my mum had a pot of tea and I casually remarked 'Gee, why didn't you make me and Jayne some tea, huh?' and my mum shouted back 'Make your own damn tea, cock-sucka!'

Needless to say, I came back into the kitchen and Jayne was standing there wild eyed, thinking my mum actually talked like that.

However, unlike your theoretical children, my parents have always supported me using profanity in the correct circumstance and context.

It struck me as cussing for the sake of cussing, which is just tired and annoying. It also tops my list of Reasons I Don't Like Deadwood. If they wanted shock value, the conclusion of the marshal vs lynch mob scene in the first episode was much more effective, IMO.

-paws

I stand corrected though Swearegen was immediately who popped into my head as he was the greatest abuser. And somehow I don't see your mum calling the cashier at the supermarket a "cocksucker" in casual conversation. Unless she was in the merchant marines. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Though I'm sure the video store clerk got the little joke.

I live in the US. We are arrested for showing our breasts in public. Swearing is considered only a little less worse than that as it's "Un-Christian like" behavior. We are repressed.

You can make up a word, and tell everybody that's it's the worst word you could say to someone, but when you call them one to their face, the player won't really feel it. He could have his player react accordingly, but you really want your fellow players to feel what's going on.

Hearing bad language in the game doesn't really do much to me. But I still know which words are bad (ratfucker!), and which words are not so bad (darn you!). There are a lot of made-up swear words in the present day, (frikkin' frak!), and the Shadowrun curses sound just like them (frag!). So I think we might as well use the real ones.

My group doesn't really get future stuff. Whenever I try to make up some kind of image of the future, they look at me like I'm high. They don't even laugh at me and play along anyway - it really short-circuits the game. The most they can handle is taking something that's a little extreme in the present, and making it more commonplace. So that's one more point against Shadowrun slang.

On the other hand, something that seems to work well, is to work things from teh sixth world into existing profanity. Like "devil rat fucker!" Okay, maybe not that one...

No offense meant at all, but it sounds like your group aren't really made for shadowrun if they act with incredulity at "future stuff".


It's funny that. Here in australia, most of our vulgarity (at least in our urban centres) are complete Americanisms. For example, most people I know say "ass" instead of "arse", we use words like "jerk" that were acculturated through a saturation of American media and programming on all of our commercial television stations. We even use the single finger rude gesture as opposed to the traditionally british two fingered flipping gesture.

It's funny that most of our pop culture is your pop culture, (yet it's amusing to note the cultural stereotype of "stupid americans" being the ones who are uncultured) although you could argue we are less repressed. There's a new feature out called "Not Quite Hollywood", about Australian genre films like Razorback and The Man From Hong Kong which were infamous for their nudity and violence and dangerously low production values and professionalism. Also, I'm pretty sure no-one in any American analogue of our parliament could get away with saying eachother have gone "troppo" and calling fellow parliamentarians "pineapple heads". In fact, a politician here in Australia recently got in a bit of trouble for sniffing a female members seat. Some-one caught a photo of it, I recall, and it was all over the papers.

How about starting a new list of 2070 slang and/or vulgarities. Just post em here.

I tend to switch back and forth between modern swears and shadowslang fairly frequently. Generally I just type whatever 'feels' right, using shadowslang for more everyday stuff and modern cussing for anything with more emotion behind it.

Here's an example from my PBP game from earlier today.

we've always been careful with language
when we started there were parents listening in, now there are children listening in.

Frag and drek still work.

an old favorte "Mother puss bucket!"

big words work only so far- 'you ambulatory pile of rat droppings' after someone's daughter picked up the word 'profalactics' and proudly told it to her mommy. but there are the old fall backs. I liek them. there are classics and I don't mean the '7 words' and we're not doing heck/fudge/shoot but real classics.
and if youdon't like 'em, all I can say is Frak you!

As Wesley Street pointed out, this is completely wrong. Both words have been around for about 500 years, which isn't really that long. There are plenty of words in the English language that are derived from Latin or Greek; they've been around a whole heck of a lot longer.

As for me, I find that the Shadowrun swear words do wonders for reminding people that they're not in Kansas anymore. It's easy to think that because Shadowrun is set in the future of our world, it *is* our world, with a few things added on.

+1. I wouldn't mind seeing some new slang show up, but the game's use of different slang words is one of the things that sets it up that its not just the present day world with magic and different races added in.

While the spelling f-u-c-k may only be datable to just over 500 years ago, its usage is older, and may date to Roman times. The non-written history of shit is equally hard to pin down exactly due to the size of the applicable written record, and that verbal curses are not recorded in writing in the same way as other things (especially before printing). So we know the usage is older than 500, possibly much much older, hence my use of the more general millennium, rather than a more specific claim.

Regardless, these words are not going away anytime soon.

That dating of the words is highly debatable, and the usage of the words is unknown. It's highly possible that the words weren't in common usage until much, much later. People using "f-u-c-k" in Roman times as a common swear word is highly debatable, as even the first usages were nouns. At any event, it's been established that the first use in writing was around 500 years ago, and they weren't considered nearly as vulgar as they are now.

As for rather or not they'll go away: the word "Damn" is much older, and has had higher usage, dating back to Latin and Greek times. When Clark Gable said: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn", the nation was scandalized. Nowadays? You don't hear the word very often, if at all.

Has a nice ring to it. Phonetically similar to "slut", but the (I'm assuming) hard C gives gives it more of an edge and makes it sound more forceful. Even better if it's got ties in an actual word with similar meaning. Borrowing expletives from random other languages is a time-honored cultural phenomenon.

Shadowrun slang never really bothered me, in fact I use Frag quite a bit in real life. I think the biggest problem people have with that word is that it sounds like (and may be) a kitschy replacement for Fuck. Personally, I see it as coming from Frag Grenades, and being a reference to extreme death, violence and destruction.

Frag You
This is really Fragged up
Frag Your Mother
Go Frag Yourself
That fragging drekhead
ect.

Kinda puts a new spin on it, huh?

Phonetics are very important in swear words, because it's not just what the word means, but also the way the sound of it hits your ear. Frag definitely loses a step to Fuck since it lacks the hard consonants, but to anyone in the sixth world I think it would immediately conjure the image of an exploding frag grenade throwing shrapnel around the room--and that imagery's got a lot of punch to it.

Drek's got it's ties with Dreck, and so feels like a gutterpunk's sarcastic parody of the corporate elite.

Honestly, "hoop" is the only SR swear word that still sounds silly to me, but when you consider the possibilities of such terms as "hoopsnake", it might stick around simply because it's a "ninja-swear": Doesn't sound that bad but is hillarious when you know what it means.

There's nothing quite so amusing as cussing someone out using words that don't immediately register as insulting. Great way to mess with the corporate stiffs.

Was it ever bad to use damn regardless of context? My understanding is that it is only a curse in certain usage. Any word that is okay to use in one context, but not another, would be a lot easier to water down through over-exposure. The "F-word", is considered so bad that you could get in trouble even for using it in an academic discussion, hence the widely known euphemism. That puts it in a whole different class than damn.

I think damn was originally more of a genuine verb (ie: Damn you, You damnable fiend, ect) and eventually devolved into a swear word. Bear in mind that most swears are somewhat distanced from their literal meaning--something George Carlin pointed out. Words like damn are also tied to their religious context, and as that religion wanes or becomes taken less seriously, so do the the swear words associated with it. Being damned is a Big Deal to a christian, being fucked is a big deal to everybody.

Also, I just noticed this:



There's a two fingered version? I'm familiar with the Italian full-forearm variety, but hadn't heard of this one. Please describe. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

In my grandmother's time it was the worst cuss word one could use and brought down the wrath of the holy church (long before Oregon became one of the least churched states in the U.S.). The F word was girly giggles partially because it was bad, but mostly just because it was such an odd word to use. There are other words that were forbidden for my parents that they now use regularly. Suck was also a nasty pejorative to my grandmother but has become passe and I was used by my parents to use it. These days you have to stretch it out to "Cock Sucker" to get any reaction but it is already becoming common parlance with the current college crowd thanks to its shock value.

Hollywood has really had a major impact on the way the whole word curses. They're speeding up the cycling of cuss words and making it more universal. In the Middle-East the only two words of English I was sure every arab knew was the F word and Nigar thanks to U.S. movies. They're hardly swear words but more kewl american words to use. It was always amusing to explain in detail exactly what they meant since Qarid and Keleb are harsh swear-insults in Arabic (Ape and Dog).

That is just to solve the realism argument.

But the two biggest reasons to use some form of Shadowslang is simply for storyline continuity and to keep the game family friendly in the game stores that NEED to sell it.

The two fingered version is chiefly British and is popularly thought to date back to English archers waving the fingers used to draw a bow at their French enemies circa 1415.
It is the victory sign but with your palm towards you instead of away.
See V sign as an insult for more details.