Vulgar language in fantasy

[Felon]

I'm curious. A discussion on another forum prompted this statement:



What do you think? I mean, people swear in real life, and few of them go to the effort to come up with creative but non-vulgar curses, so why is it so rare to see vulgar language in fantasy compared to other genres? Sure, the occasional "By Crom!" is fair, but I think Conan had to have some word in his vocabulary for situations when we would just exclaim, "Holy s***!" or "We are so f***ed."

If you were reading a fantasy novel and someone used the same sorts of swear words we use in our everyday life, what would you think? (Assume that the curses are being used in a reasonable way, and not in some Tarantino-esque marathon of obscenities.)

Karl Edward Wagner--who was waaaay ahead of his time--wrote of this in his essay "The Once and Future Kane". Check it out:

Probably the most noticeable thing about Kane series, if you haven't run into it before, is the dialogue. John Myers did the same thing 35 years ago, also to the confusion of many readers. Dialogue is treated as a free translation into modern idiom, vernacular, measurements, what have you. The words are intended to sound to you, the reader, as they would have sounded to a listener at the time. This bothers a lot of people somehow. I mean, obviously I can't reproduce the exact words---no typeface exists for the characters, and phonetic English equivalents ( as can be done in a crude way, say, with Chinese ) would be meaningless to anyone but Kane or myself.

Obviously trangalation is necessary, right? For some reason there seems to a grand tradition that this means transalating into over-blown pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue --- lots of absurd declaiming, like balloons in Marvel's THOR comics. Well, there are places where the New English Bible is rejected because Jesus, as we all know, spoke English-a-la-King-James, and to hell with accuracy of translation. My own thinking is that a good "translation" must translate meaning and affect from point A to point B. None in the distan t past thought at the time that he was speaking in any way other than the current mode. How'd you like to have your barroom conversation translated 3000 years from now in terms of "thees and thous"'.)

Let's take an example. Footsoldiers are notoriously an uncouth lot. Now here's Sgt. Krunk, slogging around a hot jungle back in Kane's heyday. Guy up front lets a branch fly back in his face. Got it? OK, Krunk says which may be phonetically rendered as "Raklat!". Now that doesn't translate into "Forsooth!", does it. And he didn't shout "Feces!", either, did he. Plainly the jungle echoed with a howl of "!". At least that's what it sounded like to them---and to us. And this is another one of those things that give publishers pause....

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I've never had a problem with obscenity in any venue let alone fiction. When I write fiction I'll use obscenity as appropriate for the character and situation.

Earlier in the thread I think I spotted someone bemoan the fact that English is a poor language for vulgar expression. This is an individual who has never known the company of a drill instructor (the most heinously vulgar person I have ever known was a retired master gunnery sergeant by the way). Masters of vulgarity never need descend to the plebian and unsatisfying use of mere curses like s%&t or f@#$, for them even the most inoffensive word can become an obscenity fit to kill small animals and peel varnish with proper use and attention to detail

 

[Klaus]

Karl Edward Wagner--who was waaaay ahead of his time--wrote of this in his essay "The Once and Future Kane". Check it out:

Very nice, thanks!

 

[danzig138]

All you saying you don't mind the words, just curious, do any of you have kids?

Wow. Whenever I see this question, I chuckle. Whenever I see it, the implication is almost always that if you don't have children, then you don't understand, and those with children will obviously agree with the person asking "Do you have children?".

I'm all for swearing and cursing in fantasy works. I'm all for letting my kids read them (and watch them). Yes I have kids. Three, 1, 11, and 13. And I can pretty much guarantee they will not read anything in a book or hear anything in a movie worse than what they've heard from me, starting with the day they came out (I've found that seeing them come out really inspires the profanity).

Children are only superfragiledelicatesnowflakeflowers if you protect them from everything. Otherwise, they tend to be pretty okay.

 

[DonTadow]

Wow. Whenever I see this question, I chuckle. Whenever I see it, the implication is almost always that if you don't have children, then you don't understand, and those with children will obviously agree with the person asking "Do you have children?".

I'm all for swearing and cursing in fantasy works. I'm all for letting my kids read them (and watch them). Yes I have kids. Three, 1, 11, and 13. And I can pretty much guarantee they will not read anything in a book or hear anything in a movie worse than what they've heard from me, starting with the day they came out (I've found that seeing them come out really inspires the profanity).

Children are only superfragiledelicatesnowflakeflowers if you protect them from everything. Otherwise, they tend to be pretty okay.

He he, I read this last night and had to erase my first response, but it was something like yours but more stern.

I would let my children do anything I did as a child. I read novels, fantasy and other genres, where there was cursing, sex ...yada yada. Nothing bad happened yet.

This isn't a universal everyone who has children does this and everyone who doesn't does this. This is however you structure your household. I know a guy who doesnt allow cursing in his house, he doesnt have any children. But when we play over there we play a more pg game.

 

[Mallus]

Irony?

I had to work from home today, and my sons listened to American Idiot by Green Day about 4 times today. Talk about vulgar language. We've talked about its use in those songs....

Heh... even without kids I can sympathize. On the plus side, it is a good album...

Speaking of irony, I'm seeing a wee bit of irony in my own posts to this thread, where I sound, well, offended that readers might be offended by vulgar language in fantasy fiction. So it goes. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's absurd to be offended by reading a crass term for excrement. I just don't understand how the act of reading literature, of any kind, is possible under those conditions. If common vulgarities are so offensive, what's a reader like that going to do when confronted with ideas that really unsettle them, or depictions of unpleasant people and events.

Mulling it over a little, I think I take offense because I hear a resistance to vulgarity in fantasy as a de facto call for fantasy to be a kind of children's literature. This gets exacerbated when people started bringing up their actual kids. Even when they aren't calling for child-proofing the world.

 

[Felon]

Wow. Whenever I see this question, I chuckle. Whenever I see it, the implication is almost always that if you don't have children, then you don't understand, and those with children will obviously agree with the person asking "Do you have children?".

Right, I get this a lot. It's basically a way of dismissing objective thinking, particularly when a discussion is starting to indicate that the inmates are running that particular parent's asylum.

"Look, you must not have kids becasue you're being all reasonable. If you had kids you might be irrationally overprotective or you might be overly permissive, but you simply wouldn't go being all rational about how to rear them..."

 

[Felon]

Very nice, thanks!

You're welcome. Just wonder who this John Myers he refers to is...

 

[Terraism]

(Having only read half the thread...)

While I generally don't particularly mind obscenities in literature, I still tend to look at it a bit askance in fantasy. Not so much because of the tone or 'vulgarity,' but for a similar reason to Croesus's comment, early on in the discussion:

And to my ear, it's not so jarring - they don't sound like a co-worker at the office, or the guy at the neighborhood convenience store.

I can fully understand - and appreciate - the desire to make characters better-rounded, more realistic individuals, I don't want them to sound quite like us. A translation from 'fantasy-gibberenglish' is one thing, but I like that characters don't sound exactly like my neighbors, co-workers, or other folk I interact with.

 

[Zaukrie]

Did you read my response to this the first time? It was intellectual curiosity about the demographics of those that agreed and disagreed. You can take that statement and not believe it if you want, but that is what I typed, and what I meant.

I have also stated in this thread that I'm not sure either side is "Right". If you read my posts critically, you would see that I value intellectual and critical discussion, so I'm a little offended that you jumped to the conclusion that I didn't honor others' opinions based on this, especially since I posted it was curiosity. Oh well.