You better believe it, that and Jaynetown of course.

Heretic!

Vlad, who created, runs and moderates a BtVS/Angel/Firefly/Whedon website and message board since 2003. Hell, it's how I met my very soon to be wife years ago. That's the bad thing about dating on the intrenet. Eventually one of ya has to move... and it ain't just across town. *goes and packs another box*

You didn't have to post all that, you have a Laubenstein avatar.


Perhaps it was "damn time" for a change, but it was pretty sudden. So It's been 5 or 6 years, and suddenly the curses everyone uses change. The one's that they've been using since the 50's and before.

It was clumsy, just dropping it in with no forethought or prelude. Sure, it's trivial, but they even explained the change from the "sleeping tiger" line to the "steampunk" line, so why couldn't they do a little to cover a big language change. It's a little like Horizon corp, there was no prelude. There seemed to just be a bang, and suddenly there's a new Triple A? I don't hate Horizon as much as some other dumpshockers, but I certainly think their introduction was clumsy. Wuxing for example had some rumblings, Dunkelzahns will explained the sudden rise, as well as other corporate events such as the PPG. But horizon? Maybe there was a bunch of stockbrokers running around under the big screens in the Boston (it's boston now, right?) stock exchange, and then suddenly Wuxing Corp jumped a trillion points, and one stockmarketeer shouts "FUCK!" and the guy next to him says "Shit, I haven't heard that in a while!"

No, they have been used for centuries, just the context has changed a bit. Expletives and insults come and go out of fashion but there is an underlying continuity of some words and "fuck" has been in use with the same meaning since sometime before 1500 and is probably descended from a much older word (hints of it go back to at least 1278) but due to it's inappropriateness and the lack of widespread literacy it's quite difficult to know for sure. "Damn," despite having considerably more cultural capital in a society that had widespread belief in a Christian afterlife and the literal existence of a hell to be damned to, has existed in expletive form with it's current meaning since somewhere around 1300. "Shit" is more recent but has still been in use since the 1500s. The origin of "modern english" is usually traced to sometime around 1550 so you'll note that every single one of these words predates it by a fairly significant margin. Usage rates will differ and other insults may be more popular in different social milieus but these are all very old, very simple, very widespread, and very ingrained words that have existed in more or less the same form for centuries and the chances that linguistic drift will cause all of them to be replaced by different, "softer" sounding expletives with the exact same meaning within the next 50-70 years is vanishingly small. It'd be perfectly reasonable to expect new insults to emerge based on the vast social changes that separate the SR universe from our own but those would seem far more likely to have to do with something like the emergence of magic, the new races, or cybertechnology than just replacing "fuck" with "frag." "Trog" is a stellar example of how this can be done right but much of the fake slang is just miserable.

Do not forget though that we're also always inventing new words. Just like "google" has been come to be used as a verb for "look it up on the internet", there's the possibility that between now and 2070, something else caught the networked collective mind of society and became a staple.

And some terms do crop up quickly, and vanish again, especially in slang. Fads, in other words.

Frag *certainly* doesn't have the "exact same meaning" as "fuck". As has been said before, "Frag" connotes most of the bad applications of "fuck", and doesn't cover the carnal ones. When in the naughties we say "I'm going to fuck you up," it doesn't mean there's going to be any sexual congress; you mean you're going to damage them. In the same way, "I'm going to frag you up," does. The dialogue in Elf Pornos doesn't (IMO) go: "Frag me baby, ooh yeah, harder, yeah, frag me harder!" they still say "fuck", when the meaning is purely sexual. "Not suckee fraggee, fi'dollar".

I can see the violent connotations of "fuck" dropping away, possibly, as people become less hung up about sex. See how the usage of the word "gay" has changed in 50 years: from "happy" to "homosexual" to (inevitably - you can't, unfortunately, stop teenagers drifting the language; homosexual men are either going to have to find a new tag-label or get militant) "rubbish". As English becomes more and more shared amongst all cultures, its evolution is only going to accelerate.

Slitch. Now that, chummers, is a good future-slang word. Sounds like dirty female genitalia.

"Chummer" can seem a bit corny but it reminds me of a multi-lingual non-profane street version of "buddy" (which only white people say), "pardner", "homey/homie" or "pal" (hey there, hows about a shoe-shine pally!).

Let me correct myself, then. They haven't been in common usage that whole time. "Damn" has been, though.



Gah! Dude, look up "paragraph breaks" and "run-on sentences"! Especially when you're discussing the English language!
Back on topic: no one is certain where "fuck" came from. The oldest know usage of the word is, IIRC, in the late 1500's; like you pointed out, that and "shit" come after the origin of modern English. The 1278 reference is highly apocryphal.

And many words are descended from older ones; that's huge news.


There's probably a dozen or more words for excrement in common usage nowadays. Several of them have held the top position for longer that "shit" has. "Dreck", for example, dates back to the 1100's. I've seen nothing indicating that the current swear words were in vogue any more than a few centuries ago.


"Softer" is a matter of opinion. Currently, "fuck" and "shit" have less punch than ever before. They've gone into everyday language, with hardly more shock value than other, non-swear words. New harsher swear words are due to come into fashion shortly.

About a century ago, Clark Gable scandalized the nation by saying "damn" on film. Nowadays, you might hear it on Sesame Street. All that happened in less than 50 years. "Fuck" and "shit" might be downgraded to mild expletives in that time. They're already headed that way now.

No, I said they predated modern english. The "modern english" of the late 1500s was still pretty different from what we speak now and I really doubt that foul swear words made it into surviving print so very shortly after their origin that we can say with certainty that the word was created during that era with any confidence. The fact that it was used in print indicates that it wasn't exactly unknown to the educated classes of that era, let alone the great unwashed masses of society at large. Frankly we don't really know what expletives were in commonest usage during that period. I guess we'll just agree to disagree about how language is likely to change over the course of the next 50 years. I tend to think that words that have been in usage for "only" a few centuries (i.e. the entire lifetime of anything we could point to as modern english) are still highly likely to remain in common usage over the next few decades. I'd be highly surprised if "fuck," "damn" and "shit" weren't still in common usage and even more surprised if "drek" or similar came into common use since the last time that word had any real cache was in the 1920s among speakers of Yiddish. Words imported and/or corrupted from Chinese I'd be perfectly willing to believe (or in the Shadowrun setting Japanese), but that isn't what we've been presented with so I don't think I'm totally off base when I say that much of the SR slang is lame and improbable.

I guess when I think about it, that it's really "drek" and "frag" that I have the biggest issues with though because they're very transparent 1:1 replacements of offensive modern words with similar sounding substitutes that for different reasons strike me as fairly unlikely to actually ever be taken up as slang with those meanings. They sound like the non-offensive expletives children use, and strike me as silly. Frankly it wouldn't even matter if I was wrong and those words do somehow come into common usage by 2070 because of how weak and absurd they sound to the modern ear. I know you love SR slang but go ahead and give a sci-fi story using those words to a few dozen people who have no knowledge of the setting and see what they think- I'd be willing to be the majority opinion isn't that they're a wonderfully engaging little touch that really brings the setting to life. Something like "Slitch" I have fewer issues with since it actually seems to be a reasonable term that could come into usage over the next few decades as something to one-up "cunt" once that loses its shock value via overuse.

Also: 1939 was not a century ago and "damn" was actually in common usage in film before 1930. The production code really changed the perception of the history of early film, the sanitized fare of the 1930s through the 1960s was not really representative of what came before. Most people actually have a pretty distorted view of what social standards have been like throughout history because much of what we know about the past has a pretty big selection bias in terms of perspectives and society tends to go through periods of greater or lesser expectations of social conformity and decorum.

Lots of words predate modern English. Just look at Latin for a few examples.


It actually indicates nothing. The literate uses of English around that period were wildly different than the spoken vernacular language.


That's exactly it, though. "Damn" has dropped out of common usage as a swear word. The other two are just as likely to go the same path shortly. Harsher swear words are due come into play before long.

Way back when I was a little kid, saying "fuck" would scandalize the whole neighborhood. Ever seen "A Christmas Story"? That's more or less exactly what would have happened. Nowadays? Hardly anything would happen.


"Frag" has no sexual connotations, meaning it cannot be a 1:1 replacement. Drek, as pointed out, has been in use since the 1100s.

Already have. Years ago, in fact. You are wrong. Many successful Sci-fi franchises have future slang running through them.

Also, as pointed out, fifteen years ago the term "to google" didn't exist. Now it's a common usage word. A "bug" in a program is a reference to an extremely obscure event in early computing history. Words can come out of the blue, and vanish just as quickly. "Carriage", for example, was in use for centuries as well. But the term "Horseless Carriage" didn't stay in vogue, so it was replaced. Now, the term is hardly ever used. And if you want to get technical on dates, that *was* about a century ago.


Got some examples? I only have personal experience.

Additionally, if you're going to be pedantic about the dates, that just means the word "Damn" dropped out of use even faster than I indicated.

I never really had a problem with the old use of 'frag'; I generally used it when someone bought it, instead of as the curseword.

However, I noticed that I am increasingly suffering from "slang-creep." A couple years ago, when I still was in a RPing group, I would often slip into Farscape, Firefly, and Planescape slang. About two months ago, a non-scifi friend noticed I'd also begun unconsciously incorporating a lot of slang from the new BSG into my vocab as well. Augh!

If this keeps up, I'm afraid that eventually everyone I bump into will need to make rolls to comprehend what the hell I'm rambling about.

Yes, sure. You aren't saying anything worthwhile here and are missing the point. To clarify: I'm arguing based on the length of time most modern expletives have been in common usage amongst English speakers (or at least widely understood), not on the how old the word itself is.


Yes. Exactly. They didn't usually incorporate vulgarity, but it being used there certainly indicates that the author expected that it would be understood. If you're arguing that coded writings talking about clergy misbehaving by "fucking" the women of a town were an exercise in highly literate English rather than a relatively rare intrusion of the vernacular into an area where it usually wasn't seen then you're totally crazy. But that's what you seem to be implying?


Yes, I never hear people saying "God damn it" or "that damn son-of-a-bitch" or similar phrases any more. Or exclaiming "damn!" when they stub their toe. Or maybe I do all the time? The word has lost some of it's edge but is still around, and if society still had the same widespread belief in hell and blessings/curses it would almost certainly remain as effective. Even today you'll get religious people who are far more offended by "damn" and appeals to God and Jesus than by other expletives. We may get harsher swear words, or we may blunder along more or less as we are for quite a while, or we may get another round of tightened social norms and have some of the older terms regain some of their cultural capital. We aren't "due" for anything.


Yes let's take idealized versions of childhood memories of the 1950s in a family film as indicators of exactly how slang has been used throughout history. Should I start using Deadwood to argue that people were using fuck and shit all the time during the mid 1800s? Because that's about the level of credibility you're displaying here. And your own memories of swearing during your childhood? I was born in 1985 and I still know plenty of kids who got in huge trouble for even saying "shit," let alone "fuck" but that doesn't mean people weren't using those words all the time as expletives during this period. Some kids get away with that sort of thing now, some kids did when you were a child, and some kids got away with that kind of thing in the middle of Victorian London. It just depends on social class and environment. Even with the increased vulgarity of modern society I assure you that a child that habitually swears will be looked down upon as a product of poor parenting. You're accusing me of being blinded by the current era but it's really you who isn't getting the proper perspective.


Frag is pretty much always used in situations where a modern speaker would use "fuck" and for all intents and purposes it reads like a 1:1 replacement. I know how old "drec" is but I really don't care because it is also used as a direct stand in for a different word a modern English speaker would use, it has never seen anything approaching widespread use among English speakers and there is no conceivable reason it would be adopted in the next couple of decades given demographic and linguistic patterns. It rings false.


Yes they do. Sometimes this works well and is thought through to its logical conclusions and sometimes the majority of people reading it see it for the thinly veiled stand-in that it is. If you really think Firefly had all the swearing in Chinese solely because Whedon wanted to portray the linguistic and cultural unification of humanity in the future I'm not even going to bother talking to you further because it wouldn't be worth my time. Constructed language can be done well or poorly, it isn't all the same. Compare Tolkien to some generic fantasy horseshit that strings random syllables together with apostrophes. In the case of Shadowrun, some of it is reasonably executed and some of it is entirely risible.


Sure, but basic concepts and words tend to remain fairly stable over time and through a fair bit of linguistic shift. "Good beer and good cheese is good English and good Fries." Here we're talking about expletives, which as a category are short, punchy words people often use without thinking about, and which also as a category have retained their general meanings over vast periods of time (as languages go). Insults do change, as obviously a "jive turkey" isn't a relevant insult to us now or to someone living in the 1930's, but I guarantee that with the proper intonation I could insult any native English speaker today, yesterday, 10, 15, 50 or 200 years ago by calling them a "motherfucker."


You were alive in 1939 to be scandalized by Gone With The Wind? This is basic stuff that anyone with a knowledge of film history and the production code knows but Wikipedia helpfully provides a few suggested titles:

"In the silent era, John Gilbert even shouted "Goddamn you!" to the enemy during battle in The Big Parade (1925). The Production Code was ratified on March 31, 1930, and was effective for motion pictures whose filming began afterward. Thus, talkies that used "damn" include Glorifying the American Girl (1929), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Hell's Angels (1930), The Big Trail (1930), The Dawn Patrol (1930), and The Green Goddess (1930)."

Pre-code movies also dealt explicitly with subjects like adultery, had nudity or kissing, and all sorts of other things that were restricted under the code.


No, it actually doesn't mean that at all because "damn" is still in common use despite your entirely unsupported assertions.

A weak premise. Words that have been around even longer have fallen out of usage.


I don't. I hear people my age saying "Shit!" instead.


I have a child. Do you? I'd love to see your standards of parenting. Kids swearing up a storm is a mild behavior; major punishments aren't really handed out for it anymore.

Sometimes stories work, and sometimes the majority of people reading it see it for what it is. You're just saying that the quality of writing varies. Which is a valid point; but is also a matter of opinion. If you want to claim that the writing of pre-SR4 material is bad, you're more than welcome to your opinion. You're going to have fun on a Shadowrun board, though.

Some basic concepts aren't even staying the same across the current spectrum of English usage. Look at how many different words there are for "food", for example. That's a basic concept, essential to survival, and yet there's probably over a hundred different words referring to basic food. As for stability goes, plop someone from London into the deep south, they would be lucky to understand a fraction of what the other was saying.


With proper intonation, I could insult any native English speaker by making any of a hundred comments about his mother. Heck, I can do that in just about any language. Your point? That doesn't mean the swear word was in common use, or even has to be a real word.

Wow, facts from Wikipedia. How inarguable.

Just because it is from Wikipedia does not automatically make it false. He gave you all the relevant details, and if you really wanted to argue your case properly you could do some research into those specific movies and the 'code' and try to prove him wrong.

I think I'd have more than 1/32 of a second worth of confusion and horror if someone reminded me in a genital way that I should be thinking like someone else.

Unfortunately, I can't find those movies on Ebay; and the Academy didn't exist then. There's no way of proving or disproving any of his statements, and Wikipedia is about as unreliable as it gets. In some cases, complete copies of the movie don't even exist. He's making an unprovable statement with unreliable sources backing him up. Take it as you will, but add a large salt shaker to it.

At any event, that doesn't change the fact that Clark Gable scandalized the nation by saying "damn" in Gone With The Wind. He's not even arguing against that point. However, now it's an everyday term. "Fuck" and "Shit" are rapidly headed that way. Within my lifetime, a humongous expletive has become a word acceptable to genteel old ladies. For when people really need to swear, they're going to have to find new words.

...awww Smeg!

I'm with Vladski on the matter of the old SR lingo & curses. It's not whether it's "clean" or not as I felt it helped personify the world a bit more then just hearing the same old dren you hear in RL.

OK for those who may caught it I threw in a couple of those "soft" Sci-Fi curses from two of my favourite series, Red Dwarf and Farscape. I feel the made up slang and curses gave these shows more character just as the RL cursing in the Sopranos was appropriate to that series (BTW you should play the Sopranos Pinball game sometime, it has a mode called Fuck Mode where it reiterates the expletive on every bumper hit, almost becomes annoying after a while).

In 2070, who actually knows what kind of colloquial terms, and as Spock called them, "colourful metaphors" will be in vogue. For example if you said the word Blog a dozen years ago you most likely were referring to some horrible highly alcoholic concoction you would find at a Sci Fi convention room party and not an online journal. In the 50s, if something was good, it was "cool". This gave way in the 60s to "Groovy" followed by"Far Out" in the 70s, "Bad" in the 80's, and "Pimpin" or "the Bomb" in the 90s. All these terms are now looked on as bafflegab (sorry, just had to slip another one in there ).

I think that the writers of the previous editions did a good job of speculating about slang and curses of the mid 21st century.

And Spug it all, I happen to like Frag.

I am not going to argue the merits of the rest of this response. Somethings I agree with to a degree, some I don't to a degree. But the portion I left...

I have one kid of my own, 16 and two soon to be step-children, 11 and 6, that I have been helping raise for over two years. And if any of them were "swearing up a storm" you'd better believe it's not "mild behavior." The occasional word that pops out in an unexpected exclamation? Sure, it's enough to give the look and to remind them that "that's not acceptable language." If that happens with any frequency, then it's gonna be a big lecture. If they persist, especially defiantly, yeah, we are talking major punishment. A grounding, loss of computer/console game for a significant period of time, loss of other appropriate privilages that will "hurt.". Foul language is not a trivial thing. To swear like the proverbial sailor, no way, not my kids. It is a stigma to their social skills and a real remark upon my parenting skills. If I was told by a teacher or another parent that my kid had been swearing, enough to elicit a comment to me, yeah, they are going to be scolded and punished. And I would be horribly embarrassed.

I am not a prude. I swear. I bash my thumb with a hammer, I say "shit!," or "son of a bitch" or "damn it!" If it hurts bad enough, I may let out with one of those litanies of "Oh jesusmotherfucking christ, godammitthathurts!" If I am with other adults that are familiar to me and they use swearing while BBQing and the kids are off playing, I may let out with some of my own while telling a story or anecdote. It's used for emphasis and we are all adults. It's "appropriate" to the setting and the age of the participants.

Sure cursing and swear words change and evolve over time. The hierarchy of harshness increases or diminishes. Currently, on the low end of the scale we have things like "damn," "crap," and "bastard", in the middle we have things like "shit, "bitch" (in the swearing vernacular) and then we have what are still the king and queen of them all: "fuck" and "cunt." In American English I know of no two fouler words, dripping with raw emotion or, in the case of the latter, more likely to draw the ire of any woman I know. In no family household of mine (nor of any decent family, in my opinion) should those two words ever be uttered by children, nor should they ever be said "around" children, barring an uncontrolled utterance due to high duress.

If your child is over at my house, playing with my children and he swears mildly, I may ignore it for a time or two. If he is using more than "damn" or "crap," I may say something to him along the lines, "We don't use that type of language in my house." If he is consistently swearing and doesn't have the learning to keep it out of my ear range after I reprimand him, he won't be playing at my house, nor will my kids be playing at his. And, I will be letting his parents know exactly why. It's not so much the actual words, it's the act of defiance. The rules of society are "that's not polite language." If you can't get the rules, then you don't belong in my society. Now, I am not an idiot. Kids swear. They all do. We all did. The point is to learn to behave in society. Just like I will swear with close company, I expect the kids to swear "privately," out of adults earshot. It's all about learning a sense of propriety; that there's a time and place for everything.

Vlad

I'm likely not going to bother with this any more after this post. Cain is arguing from personal bias and what is essentially the age old "those goddamn kids and their music" sentiment. Wikipedia is hardly a perfect arbiter of truth but it's reasonably good for this sort of thing and this is basic Film History 101 stuff that he's disputing simply because he doesn't actually know what he's talking about. Note also that he doesn't address several of the points because he can't effectively argue against them- i.e. he drops the ludicrous insinuation he made that the oldest historical records of the word "fuck" didn't imply an origin and use in the English vernacular of the era without comment.



Care to give examples? Specifically examples of widespread English language expletives?



Fascinating, because I hear them both on a fairly regular basis and I'm younger than you. Shit does appear to be more common but I rather suspect that references to excrement have been a hallmark of profanity for about the entire duration of human existence and "shit" isn't exactly a "recent" word as such things go. I could chalk it up to regional differences but a less charitable interpretation also springs to mind.


My parents managed to raise three children who didn't swear very often at all until their late teens without any sort of religious infrastructure, punishments, etc. It really can be done, although the often caustic level of modern discourse obviously makes this harder. I can't vouch for my own abilities as a parent, but I take issue with the implication that you've somehow gained superior insight about society simply because you've managed to fulfill the most basic biological imperative of our species. It's essentially an irrelevant appeal to authority that doesn't advance your case whatsoever.


Most game fiction is fucking awful and people with any degree of taste will tell you so. I rather enjoy the overall setting of the rather silly Shadowrun universe (the metaplot is weak though) and I really like the gameplay of the RPG. I don't think I'm saying anything particularly controversial if I assert that most of the SR game fiction isn't exactly high art. This is a dodge on your part however, because even if the writing was all of good quality it wouldn't change the fact that "frag" and "drek" are obvious, unnecessary and implausible direct substitutions of modern expletives that don't actually add anything to the setting. They don't illustrate anything about the speakers, social conditions, etc. They exist merely so that Shadowrun writers can have characters swear without actually swearing and the overall effect comes off as a transparent and juvenile. This is the vulgar equivalent of terrible old sci-fi shows that have "space-this" and "astro-that." It adds nothing other than a thin veneer of faux-flavor and it actually detracts from the quality of the writing.


Accent is one thing, but if both the Englishman and the Southerner were literate they'd be able to understand each other with ease and after some small period of exposure they'd be fine. And obviously words can proliferate around concepts but the "food" example is an appropriate one because the word has been in the English vernacular in pretty much the same form since before 1000 AD and hasn't changed meaning during that time. It's been in use since before English was really English and is likely to continue for a very long time because its such a basic concept. Expletives are a fairly specific category of words and they really don't change in meaning. Perceived offensiveness and preferred word choice does vary over time, but it has much more to do with social conditions than it does with any cycling of different words with equivalent meanings. To clarify: calling someone a bastard is much more offensive in a society where parentage actually has large social consequences, damning someone is much more offensive in a society concerned with the afterlife and the divine, insulting someone's sexual orientation is more offensive in a social environment that values stereotypically masculine behavior, sexual innuendo is more offensive in a society governed by Puritan or Victorian morals, etc. I think you actually can see something of this in the resurgence of racial slurs ('ironic' or no) online since they're one of the few ways left to really offend. If the profanity used in SR fiction actually reflected this by having the in-game swearing violate whatever social norms are left in the SR universe for shock effect then I wouldn't have any issues with it, no matter how silly they sounded. But instead we get highly artificial-sounding replacements for words that are and have been in widespread use for a very long time and it just doesn't ring true. People object that "frag" doesn't have the exact same meaning as "fuck" but it's used in exactly the same way and there is no plausible reason given for abandoning the old standby for a context-free imprecation.


Ok. That doesn't change the fact that "fuck" would have been considered an offensive profanity in polite society during each and every one of those time periods.


They were first at hand and at least I have something beyond personal bias backing me up. If you want to argue with them then you can go right ahead, but I used Wikipedia because I'm not lying when I say this stuff isn't some totally obscure knowledge and I didn't think that would actually be controversial. I might be persuaded to actually go to the trouble to dig up something more substantial if you could be bothered to do the same for anything you were saying. If you actually want to know more about the history of film censorship then you might consider checking out Mark A. Vieira's Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood. And I'm not going to even bother discussing the Gone With the Wind thing because you clearly don't understand the difference between a film's moderate profanity causing a stir because it offended the extra-delicate sensibilities of the depression and World War II-era audiences and it causing a stir because it represented a relaxation in the extremely tight standards of censorship the Hays office had been enforcing since 1934 and which caused offense in a small minority of the viewing public. The book has the same phrase for heaven's sake (although without the frankly) and didn't cause any particular controversy.

Yeah, I guess I just never liked frag because I already had a pretty solid connection to what I felt it means. I never had a problem with other bizarre sci-fi lingo because they typically used words that were completely made up or hard bastardizations of actual curse words. Take Farscape, totally ridiculous curse words but I loved them and used them despite the confusion they caused. I can accept frell as a far flung fuck because frell didn't mean a damn thing to me until someone on the TV slammed their fist on a table and exclaimed it loudly and angrily.

Of course the word for an inocuous bundle of sticks got repurposed as a derogatory term for homosexuals so I suppose anything is possible.

And yet, there are people who actively raise their kids to use curse words, and don't punish them at all. As you pointed out, it'd take some extreme swearing to get a major response out of you; and even then, it's more the act of defiance than the actual words used. Certainly, the response for a single curse word that was common when I was a child isn't anywhere near what happens nowadays.


Actually, you're the one who dropped the silly 1278 reference, in the face of halfhearted proof. The fact is that the first reference to the word "fuck" occurred right about the same time you claim modern English began. It certainly doesn't imply an origin that dates back thousands of years, as is the case of words with a Latin or Greek origin. There's nothing to indicate that the word is anything but modern in origin.

There's lots of them; but I've already given you "Carriage". "Subtlety" used to refer to pastries, but you don't hear it tossed around by pastry chefs anymore. and "terrific" has not only come into and out of fashion multiple times, it's meaning has totally changed. It used to refer to Terror.

As far as expletives go, you know as well as I do that it's very hard to tell what expletives were common when. "Dreck", however, does predate modern English, was in common usage by Yiddish speakers *and* is borrowed by the English language, and isn't in common use anymore. "Damn" and "Hell" and "Darn" have fallen out of their position as top swear words; they're now mild expletives at best. If I buy a pop record, odds are that I'll hear "shit" and "fuck" many times more often than I'll hear: "Damn".

Have you even *read* most game fiction? It's now got its own special category in bookstores. I sincerely doubt that you've read even the majority of that, let alone the huge array of paperbacks that have all pertained to game fiction.

I somehow doubt the literary criticism abilities of someone who foolishly tries to attack an entire subgenre.

You haven't traveled much, have you?

There are people who have relocated within this country, who still need local speakers to repeat themselves or alter their word choices. Way back when, I was dating a girl from Tennessee; even after all our time together, I still occasionally needed help understanding what she was saying. And that accent isn't even all that bad! In other languages, such as Chinese, it's even worse. I've seen native Mandarin speakers confess to near-helplessness just 40 miles out of Beijing. Regional dialects can render a language almost completely incomprehensible, all within a small radius.


Ah, but how many terms for food are there? Chow, grub, feed, fare, vittles... the list goes on and on. And there are many regional variations, to boot. And that's not including words recently borrowed from other languages. The words have indeed changed, although the concept remains the same.


Really? "Frag the mage first" just doesn't work the same way, I'm afraid.

Except we don't know how offensive it was. I do know that the word doesn't appear with any frequency in Jacobean Theater; and that was designed for as much shock value as they could get. There are many offensive profanities used in Jacobean plays, but I don't recall "fuck" being used at all.

The rest of LSD's response is comprised of so many run-on sentences with no paragraph break, I'm having trouble *reading* it. Quoting meaningful sections is virtually impossible. I think he's complaining because he doesn't have any usable sources, plus opinoning that I'm wrong about Gone with the Wind. And his only reference seems to pertain to Film History in general, not the topic at hand. No links even hinted at, either. He could have gone to the Academy website, and referenced the list of Oscar winners; or gone to a reputable film criticism site, such as Leonard Maltin.

Muddled facts are not better than no facts at all.

He might not have, but I definitely have traveled extensively. As in multiple trips to every single English-speaking country (including most regions of said countries), and most of those that aren't. I have rarely had even a slight problem, and have never personally experienced, seen, or even heard about a situation such as you describe here ...



Now, you water down your statement to ...



Which is not at all the same stance as the statement you first made. Asking for clarification for the occasional word and 'lucky to understand a fraction' are two different things.

This I find hard to believe. Just google "Emma Chisit" for a ton of stories on the differences between English and English.

Some of that does depend on how close your accent is to baseline. "Hollywood English" is pretty much the standard, so if you speak that, you've get less to go when trying to listen through other accents. But if you have one person with an extreme accent, meeting a person with another extreme accent, you have problems.

Since my longwindedness offends I'll try to keep this short and as respectful as someone of your... "historical insight" deserves.


500 years old isn't very recent in linguistic terms. This isn't a "which curse word is the oldest?" pissing match, this is me stating the obvious fact that there have been a number of profanities that have been in reasonably common usage by English speakers for as long as English has been English and you contradicting something that is plain historical fact.


You aren't saying anything I don't know, I asked for examples of expletives. It is an important distinction because the usage of expletives and other words differs.


Irrelevant, because we're talking about English expletives in common use by English speakers, not Yiddish curse words that have attained some minor crossover penetration and subsequently have all-but died out. And if you want me to believe "damn" is completely vanishing from modern speech please provide some evidence beyond "I said so." I already acknowledged that the afterlife-related biblical curse words have lost cultural capital, but there is a big difference between admitting that and positing that they've lost all current and future capacity to offend and serve a purpose as expletives.


I haven't read "most" of any genre. Have you? Bookstores also have separate sections for serial romance novels. I've read enough of gaming fiction in my youth to be reasonably familiar with the average quality of writing and make that judgment. Obviously not all of it is bad and some rises above the pack but you're seriously arguing for licensed gaming fiction as a whole as high art. I suspect that if I asked for an opinion of the quality of writing from just about any literary authority I'd be told my assessment was right and you're completely full of shit. Of course that's also obvious to anyone who reads what you write so it'd be wasted effort.


Let me respond to this with the well reasoned refutation it deserves: lulz


Sure, but food has always meant food and always been in common usage during that period so far as we can tell. And again, profanities are a very specific category of word, one that people use quite differently from others.


Results of a quick google for you, oh illustrious master of Shadowrun slang:

Personalized Results 1 - 3 of 3 for "frag the mage first". (0.11 seconds)
Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about 267 for "geek the mage first". (0.11 seconds)


You mean the centuries-old form of theater that never bothered to publish anything remotely like the majority of it's dramatic works? But you're still wrong. I'll do this one Jeopardy Style: Who was Ben Jonson? Although he rendered it as "fack" in his writing so you could use that as a fallback position I guess.


What the unholy fuck are you talking about? You are so wrong it is mindblowing. You cite nothing yourself (this is because there is nothing to cite) and were apparently completely ignorant of the Hays Code before I brought it up. But maybe I am making it all up! Whoops, maybe I'm not. That's "just" cartoons but since they're more easily available via YouTube than some of the early talkie films it's worth pointing out so you can go verify this stuff for yourself. The "fuck" in the Bosko cartoon is somewhat debatable but the various "damn"s are not. I also already gave you a book that covers this stuff in detail in my previous post so you really have no basis for this. If you still doubt me then go look up the silent 1925 film The Big Parade which had "damn" on it's dialogue cards (which you can easily find online) multiple times, including an emphatic "GOD DAMN THEIR SOULS".

You've provided nothing beyond personal anecdote (which has been contradicted by others in this thread) to back up your positions and your grasp of history has been tenuous at best.

Are you really serious? Linguistics goes back to the start of recorded human history! You clearly haven't studied that much, either.


I already gave you evidence. Heck, let's download a Dennis Leary show, or any one of a lot of shock comic performances. You won't hear "damn" or "hell" as words to shock and insult. That's more than enough evidence.


Given the strength of your arguments so far, that's debatable. I'm certainly not defending the genre, but I'm not about to make sweeping generalizations about it, either. As far as the high art point goes: you can't know if it's art if you don't examine it. I can say that certain pieces of game fiction might stand up alongside some pieces of modern art, but then we start getting into the highly subjective realm of art criticism. Let's just say that I consider certain pieces of game fiction to be better than some pieces of "high art" fiction, and leave it at that.

Thank you for finally acknowleging my superiority!

But seriously, "frag" and "fuck" are not 1:1 replacements. "Frack" from Battlestar Galatica, *is* a direct 1:1 replacement, in meaning and usage. See the difference?

Really? You've got one writer who *maybe* used the word once in one work, which you don't even bother citing for verification. Now show that it was a common word used to shock and offend people, using Jacobean manuscripts. (And yes, I'd actually like to see that script, since I study literature.)

Now you've gone completely off course. All I said was that the "damn" in Gone With The Wind shocked and scandalized the nation. You're trying to prove that profanity was in use, which somehow proves that "Fuck" is impossible to replace in modern English. Yeah, you're really providing us with a firm argument, here.

"Look at that lay-up folks! Look at him go! He has successfully leapt to a new conclusion!"

Off topic: LSD, Than you for cleaning up your run-on sentences and using paragraph breaks. It makes things much clearer.

Yes it does. Language also continually evolves. "Linguistic terms" probably wasn't the best choice of words here, but you've been arguing that it's passing slang which it most certainly is not. I'll cop to poor word choice which is more honesty than you've been able to muster.


"Because I said so" isn't evidence. Shall I demand a peer reviewed study on linguistic patterns? And assert you're entirely without credibility if you can't produce one?


Or we could not drop it because from such a "scholar" of literature, I really want to know what licensed gaming fiction you think compares favorably to other good writing. Then again, given my assessment of the general quality of your reasoning and knowledge of the world I'll agree that it's a subject we probably should drop before I drive myself to distraction.


Durr. I can spell out the "hidden" insult if you like but I think if you work on it a little longer you might be able to figure it out.


It's use in the written fiction is entirely as a tissue-thin figleaf for "fuck." The fact that the glossary meaning isn't identical doesn't make it any better than "Frak" in my opinion, especially since SR writers never had things like potential FCC interventions hanging over their heads.


Haha... no I'm not doing any more research for you. Especially since you don't even know who Ben Jonson was but decided talking smack about Jacobean theater was a good idea. I suspect your "study" is confined to reading some Shakespeare a couple of times. Also note that a single author is one more than you've ever cited to support yourself during this little discussion, unsourced or no. But to use another example you might be familiar with- take a look at common interpretations of Shakespeare's use of "firk."


The fact that you're missing the point is hardly surprising given your track record in this conversation thus far. You asserted Gone With the Wind scandalized the nation for the purpose of proving that words that are considered mild nowadays were treated as completely beyond the pale. I was pointing out that the scandalization was the result of an artificial system of censorship imposed on film and that the things that apparently shocked the conscience of the nation were routinely accepted by urban audiences over a decade earlier. You forced a digression because you needed precise citations for things that are actually relatively common knowledge. The implication was that the past has not always had the same stringent social standards that you seem to be asserting were always the norm, and also that the same set of basic expletives has been in use for centuries which has included "fuck," "shit," and "damn." Expletives are not entirely the same as "bad" language and while I freely admit that the preferred mode of insult changes from era to era it's not just a pointless cycling of synonyms. The entire style of insult changes based on social context but there is an underlying lexicon that remains fairly consistent. Fuck is hardly impossible to replace as the most common insult but it isn't likely to just be up and overwritten by a word that is used identically and is more offensive "just 'cause."

I also don't really have to "prove" anything- I'm saying that the curse words that have survived for as many centuries of common usage as English has been around to be commonly used aren't likely to be up and replaced simply because the current social conditions give them less taboo-breaking power than they've had in the past. You're the one arguing that they're likely to get replaced in the next 50 years because this moment of lax social standards is a truly new thing that requires deeply ingrained language to adapt in a specific way. Additionally you're arguing that words that have excellent historical evidence of common use (despite an incomplete record and good reasons for them not to be widely recorded) weren't actually commonly used. I'm not the one making the radical claims here, but I'm the only one who is actually getting backing from the historical record.


The fact that you think the LSD thing would get a rise out of me and was clever enough to use twice says more about you than anything I could. It's pure childishness.

For us international players, there's also the language barrier to take into consideration. It can both help and hinder use of SR-specific slang.

"Drek" sounds as "Dreck", which is a common german word for dirt, and occasionally used in swearing when compared with the german word for manure, but not by itself. So using "Drek" always felt like using "darn" or "dang", something a proper citizen who generally does not swear might use in extremis, not something a hard street punk would use.

Other words like "Frag" fare better, since even though we use Fuck often as a curse ourselves, it is just another exotic word. (That was before FPS games, of course.)

Generally, cursing and swearing is no big deal over here, so we probably miss the finer nuances of what american writers meant to convey by specific word choices.

I'm with Vlad here. I think making a game (US) PG-13 should be important for little brothers, sisters, and kids. I know I could never have played as a kid if "the F word" was in the book. My parents would have checked it out and vetoed it. I believe that it's important to encourage and enable younger players both for sales and egalitarian reasons. I was never hindered by the earlier editions' minced oaths. I role played cursing like a sailor when it fit the character (and when I could get away with it). Besides, I like a lot of the flavor language as well.

Re: Americans and swearing. The attitude I was raised with (northern Minnesota, US) was that there was nothing particularly horrible about swearing if you didn't mind sounding like uncultured swine. Mind you, we were never allowed to sound like uncultured swine in Dad's house. Only Dad could cuss, and only if he was talking to old Air Force buddies. Now that I'm no longer a rebellious youth, I curse less than Mom. Mom got worse; I got better; Dad hasn't sworn since some time before he passed away. Taking the Lord's name in vain was a different thing. If I said God or Jesus, I had better have been praying! When Christians only get 10 really important rules, it made it easy for Mom and Dad to make enforcement decisions.

@Fuchs: I had a schoolmate whose name was Fuchs. She was often embarrassed and angry when people pronounced her name as Fucks. "Fyooks!" she'd yell.
/anecdotal ramblings

PS I've never seen a tie before! 46 apiece!

Frag 4th edition, it is all drek written by some slottin chipheads. Get back to the wiz 3rd edition stuff that has attitude and a sense of style omae. 4th edition is like Rifts without the munchkinism.