Hi,

I need some help with expletives for a culture that is not only vegetarian and atheist but that has lost it's collective memory of animal terms and religion.

What might they call a shrewish, conniving vixen of a woman?

What might be an alternative to damning someone half-way to hell for behaving like an anti-christ?

How might they express frustration of a generalised nature without taking the lord's name in vain?

How might they do the above without swearing?

ANY IDEAS WELCOME!

Cheers,

Gaius

You could change the spellings of well known curse words, or combine a few (the words would remain in the collective memory, even if their origins have been forgotten).
Or use references to pests on their crops, or to inclement weather. Presumably they would still have references to faeces - shit & crap.
Also references to disease - eg, 'a pox on you'. Or to bad smells - 'cheese-breath'.


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You could also be called a fungus, or a worm, or a festering boil.

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If they have no concept of Hell, an afterlife, or a God, then I don't think you can have alternatives.

You could also be called a fungus, or a worm, or a festering boil.

I resent your implication, but I like the way you're thinking.

She's nothing but a pus-filled worm blighting our island with every poisonous word. Her schemes are like a putrescent fungus that eats away at every decent thought. I can no longer suffer her suppurating pestilence and, what is more, I don't like her very much.

G

She oozes decay with the rancid detail of her scheming. Talking to her is like biting into a pomegranate to find the slime of partially degraded compost. The foul odour of her slander is worse even than the smell of a buried breadfruit three months on. Her barren selfishness could wither the seed of the leader himself.

(Oh and... they have no money, so can't call her a "whore"... which was tempting.)



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(To be clear, they have no money as in no monetary system rather than they are poor.)

She smells like a durian gone bad.

She could still be a whore, if she's selling herself for fruit.

"And better still, it counts towards your five a day."

A festering breadfruit, a putrescent pineapple, the naturally occurring cyanide of an inadequately prepared bitter cassava. She is a tangerine whore.

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(Food use processing and toxicity )

Have they just lost animal terminology, or have they lost the animals as well? The following is something I found myself thinking two weeks ago, after discovering that I had been sitting for an hour and a half on a railway seat on which some filthy oik had left chewing gum:

'May the bowels of a thousand incontinent pigeons be emptied upon you'

Atheistic damnation (partly borrowed from a Dilbert cartoon):
'May you be darned halfway to heck for being an anti-vegan'

A-religious generalised frustration:
'Oh, for Marx's sake!' (In response to which someone honks an old-fashioned car horn)

Alex

have they lost the animals as well?

Probably an occasional sea-bird, maybe a fish or two. Nothing kinda, you know, that they could get close enough to touch or eat.

I did try a variation on the Cornish chuff. (Notable for the non-existence of such a bird.) Trouble is, it came across as more than a bit naff and a trusted reader referred me to the Turkey City Lexicon and the technique of "Calling a Rabbit a Smeerp".

'Oh, for Marx's sake!' (In response to which someone honks an old-fashioned car horn)

If only they had a climate more suited to a naffly waxed moustache or a spinning bow-tie. ::sigh::

Maybe the next one I write will be set in a fairly average, middle-class suburban housing estate with all mod-cons and a regular subscription to Watchtower.

G

Can't they just say 'Smeg!' or 'Frack!' or 'Crunt' or other similarly sf-invented expletetive?

And you can still have sexual terms even if you don't have money. Someone can still be a slag or a cunt or a dickhead or a bastard or a cock or a wanker or similar.

Thanks Sally,
I guess the genre is "plausible realism" rather than SF, magical or fantasy so makey-uppey swear words would have to be grounded in the context of what they are going through (my smeerp was an over-use of chicken-related terms as they had previously kept chickens before it all went horribly wrong, with much gnashing of teeth).

I hear you about the conventional swearwords - have used a fair few - but not all my characters swear and, oddly, I find most of those are insults aimed at men even "cunt" as in "you silly cunt", although nominally talking about female genitalia, suggests the insulted is a man.

Slag is an exception, but the nuance is not what I am looking for as it makes her sound easy / low-maintenance / low-self-esteem rather than the high-maintenance, self-interested, devious, manipulative and viciously nasty piece of work that she is perceived as by one male character in particular.

G

I think I'd just call her a hag or a harridan or a witch then.

Sorry, I know I keep moving the goal posts!

Harridan, hag and witch all imply rather old and wrinkly, possibly with an oversized and hairy wart growing out of a grotesquely hooked nose.

The woman I'm trying to insult is young and rather sexy... in that "devil woman" kind of a way that can shrivel an insecure man's penis at thirty paces. It's only marginally less dangerous to be her friend than to be her enemy.

If they had foxes, she would be a vixen. If they had snakes and grass, she would be a viper on the lawn. If they had scorpions, she would be the deadliest with the fastest moving tail.

Think of Paris Hilton's sense of privileged entitlement mixed with Posh Becks self interest, Simon Cowell's subtlety and the power to cause intense suffering of an African dictator. Add to that the very probable and generalised desire to sleep with her from a significant majority of men with pulses, then put yourself at the wrong end of her charms and you'll get the gist of what I am trying to achieve.

G