I was just watching family guy, and heard brian use the word "Drek"

... anyone else got any places Shadowrun dialect and vocab has been used?

Yeah, because the Shadowrun creators just managed to make up that word all by themselves.

And he says "dreck," not drek (at least, that's how it's spelled on the DVD). The word's been around a lot longer than SR.

Dictionary.com definition of "Dreck"

Enjoy everyone. Until I see sit-coms chucking around chummer or frag I won't consider it mainstreamed.

"Null persp." is a favorite expression of mine, but just as SL James said, the creators of the game did not come up with this stuff. It's mostly part of the cyberpunk genre that influenced them.

I've seen friends use Shadowrun lingo for the purpose it was originally designed for- in other words, as a bowlderization to keep from getting in trouble for using its more-obscene counterpart.

I've never liked shadowrun profanity. It's nothing but childish euphemism. I mean, I can understand that you don't want to put a whole lot of profanity so as to lose readership, I would never in a million years see my players say "fragging drek" while its counterpart is hollered quite frequently.

Some works, some doesn't- with 'drek' being the most satisfying to say (German curses feel like curses), and 'hoop' making me feel perhaps the most silly.

My PCs have shot other PCs for using SR slang before. Yes, really.

Hmmm, my wife doesn't let me say frag or drek or trog in front of the kids....

Arethusa brings up a good point--when the Firefly characters curse, it sounds dirty. When a Shadowrun character says "I'll have your hoop for a hat" I just giggle. I don't think I've ever used "official" SR slang in-game, but my characters use modern curse words quite often, one in fact had the (Cursing) specialization of Spanish.

Hence teh reason that the SR4 book does away with the slang. Still, I'll always miss Frag. Frag isn't just a replacement for fuck, it had such a different connotation. For instance, when something goes wrong, you could be both fragged of fucked, but you there is a world fo difference between going home to fuck your joytoy, or going home to FRAG her.

They use "frag" a lot on Battlestar Gallactica as well (example: Frag this.). There have also been numerous FPS games that use the term Frag.

Uhm, the fuck replacement on BSG is frack, not frag. Which remarkably manages to work most of the time— far more a credit to the cast and directors than the writers.

The word "frag" as a slang term for killing/destroying something has been around a long time. I remember hearing it in Platoon. I'm guessing it comes from the use of "frag" as an abbreviation of "fragmentation grenade".


On the subject of replacement words for "fuck" used on television, here's a few that come to mind off the top of my head:

Battlestar Galactica: "Frack."
Farscape: "Frell." (This show had a complete set of alien swear words, in addition to whatever English swear words were allowed on basic cable.)
Firefly: "Rut." As in, "No ruttin' way."

I work in the oilpatch. Using "frag" would....be odd, and bring social complications with it.

Slitch always struck me as an even worse word that bitch, given the root of the term. ( A reference to female genitalia)

Frag does come fragmentation grenade, and during the Vietnam war, was often a specific reference to using one to kill your commanding officer and yourself with one. Alternatively, it's just blowing someone up, and now thanks to games, just killing someone (especially in really bad movies like Basic).

Frell was always ridiculously stupid.

To rut is an actual word. Like much of Firefly's slang, it's derived from 19th century frontier slang. Rutting is fucking.

Slitch is actually the only bit of SR slang I could ever tolerate. Combining slit and bitch has a certain credible vulgarity that the rest of it manifestly lacks.

Which is why I always thought it was funny that it was used in place of the , IHMO, much less vulgar bitch.

As most of the SR games I've been involved in took place in the AGS I never bothered with the English slang (and most people I know consider it pretty odd how Americans try at all cost to avoid common expressions in books or TV everybody uses in normal talk).

But I have noticed during the last years that SR players can sometimes be identified by using "Hoi" as a greeting.

Yeah, except that frag was used in SR before there was any FPS mass market.

As a GM, I use the silly SR profanity rarely, but I do use it. my players NEVER use it. Really depends on the NPC I'm trying to portray, though. General street trash and one-shot redshirts usually get the whole 'chummer' treatment, while continuing characters tend to talk like real people. A lot of four letter words interspersed with various profanities culled from Latin, German, Japanese and French (depending on the background of the NPC doing the swearing), we've faked some Sperethiel swear words when necessary, though generally it's put into description ('my character swears in sperethiel for a full minute')

That being said, I also find 'slitch' to be a lot more vulgar than 'bitch', and tend to avoid it unless dramatically appropriate.

I use slitch, quite often because it just seems to sting so much more. I've even got my non SR friends using it. One time this girl egged my buddies car and I said "You fucking slitch!" and she replied "WHAT DID YOU SAY?!?!", it's funny how much more offended people get at slitch than at bitch. Though around here Slitch is usually assumed a contraction for "slutty bitch".

As for Hoi, I've been saying that long before I ever heard of Shadowrun. Though I use it habitually preceeding or just following some drek hitting the fan, instead of as a greeting.

I use frag and drek pretty frequently. Omae is one I might pick up. As for saving your "hoop" well, it's not natural for me,but in 50 to 60 years, who knows. Gosh, Darn, Dagnamit all used to be swear words (to my knowledge at least). Bloody is fine in America and a curse word in Britian. I'm not sure where, but in some country, sack is the equivalent of fuck. And in another, the ok sign we make is about the same as flipping someone off in America.
So, don't count these words out. They sound corny and out of place to us, but down the road, our curses might sound like Shakespear's "I bite my thumb at the".
(I work with middle school kids. If they are any indication, slang will be much worse than the SR stuff we find so silly)

I think the closest most Shadowrun vocabulary will come to being mainstream would be back when Mystery Science Theater 3000 was doing that gawd-awful film "Puma Man". There was this Aztec guy in it, and at one point he hands someone a business card, and Mike & the bots quip that he's "a representative of Aztechnology."

Gosh, darn and dagnabit are and were childish euphemisms.

From Wikipedia:

Probably regional, I've always heard Son of a Biscuit (on the very rare occasions it was used).

Zeus is Greek.

1st off, my information came from Wikipedia. I have no way to know if they are correct other than I see them used alot. You decide whether you believe them.
I should have mentioned in my earlier post that I edited out the ones that seemed more obscure. I apologize for the confusion.

I recognize SR view is far from realistic...but not all elements of that view are far fetched. I never thought a 13 year old child would use cheddar and booty to mean something bad and not fair. Nor do I understand why krunk can mean both "it was awesome" and "I'm gonna hurt you".
Point is, hoop and other elements of the slang sound silly to us. I just see that because we don't use them. Society can create words and endow whatever meaning to them it wants. So look at the SR slang as what is supposed to represent: the vernacular of another culture drastically different from ours.
Whether you choose to imitate that culture for your games is up to you.

'Hoop' isn't silly when used in the proper context, when included in a sentence as a subject to the verb 'stretch'. Remember, Hoop isn't just a replacement for "ass" it is a referance to a specific part of that region.

In defence of SR slang, the expression "hoop" wasn't in the original SR1 list of slang IIRC. I'd think it probably came from SR novels, I hadn't really heard the word until I read some books by Findley or such.

Re Firefly, when a character goes off in the Firefly patois it reminds me of when I've heard someone curse in Portuguese. They swear with feeling!
It adds depth to the setting which is what SR slang should aspire to - sort of what I'd imagine Cityspeak could be.

I primarily stick to the present day Brit slang/curses, though an occasional "Frag" does slip in now and then. Where I have real fun is when Leela gets pissed (Brit. usage) and starts cursing in Croatian. Being rather demure in size, only takes one pint o' Scrumpy to do the trick.

Then there's Dr Evil...

"Frickin sharks with frickin laser beams..."