Vulgar language in fantasy

[The Grumpy Celt]

Has anyone here seen Deadwood? The dialog is often vulgar, even very vulgar. And that is genre program (a Western) even if it is not the genre discussed here (fantasy). The use of profanity can be appropriate, depending on the goal of the writer. It would have been out of place coming from Strider in LotR, but works well enough in most FR novels.

 

[PaulKemp]

Has anyone here seen Deadwood? The dialog is often vulgar, even very vulgar. And that is genre program (a Western) even if it is not the genre discussed here (fantasy). The use of profanity can be appropriate, depending on the goal of the writer. It would have been out of place coming from Strider in LotR, but works well enough in most FR novels.

Deadwood's dialogue is like Shakespeare crossed with George Carlin. Love the show. Just started Season 3 on Netflix.

 

[Celtavian]

re

Completely depends on the character as far as I'm concerned. A high brow Aristocrat raised in gentile society shouldn't be tossing out vulgarities like a Viking.

The characters should seem real. There have been various periods where vulgarity was acceptable and those that weren't. So the author should set the table, and then make sure to build a palatable meal for his readers that is easy to digest. If the makes bad characters, that likes bad food that doesn't go down well.

It's the same the thing with vulgar language. Having a church knight raised in a very strict religious household tossing out profanities wouldn't fit in the same way I don't want a nomad barbarian speaking as though he was educated in the finest schools in England.

I find the inclusion of graphic sexual material more abrupt and unnecessary than vulgar language. Some of these authors just throw in graphic sexual material akin to a porno movie without bothering to consider how it disrupts the story. It's like their some geeky, sweaty freak who just finished watching a porn movie and decided to write about a character in their story they've been fantasizing about. That kind of gratuituous and unnecessary sexual material I could do without.

It's one of the reason I stopped reading Ed Greenwood's novels. I've found that Guy Gavriel Kay likes to toss such material into his novel even if it makes the romance in them seem like Days of our Lives.

 

[JustinA]

Yep, that works for me too. Which makes me suspect a significant part of my dislike for vulgarity in novels is based on how I was raised. If the characters don't use our "bad" words, it's somehow easier to overlook. 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.

Swear words, like any other slang, are actually quite fluid and easily dated. The way people swore in 2000 is quite different from how they swore in 1900 or 1800 or 1700.

So when fantasy characters use modern swear words, it's essentially equivalent to using modern slang. Since people attach a specific feeling of time and place to a particular type of slang, this inappropriately connects the fantasy milieu to the modern world.

Similarly, I don't like it when fantasy characters use a faux-Medieval dialect filled with "forsooths" and "thous". The fantasy characters don't live in the Middle Ages and they don't live in the modern world, so it feels jarring to have them connected to those eras.

(There are some exceptions to this. For example, "god" and "damn" and their variants have a long lineage and, thus, have less of a tie to a particular era. But "god" and "damn" are also closely tied to a particular theology, so some consideration must be taken about evoking real world theologies in your fantasy milieu.)

Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[Scribe Ineti]

I have no problem with swear words and other vulgarity in fantasy or sci-fi books and stories. If it fits the setting the author's using, go for it. I'd expect a blacksmith who cuts his finger to belt out something more colorful than "Darn" or the like to save the innocent eyes of the reader.

Screw that. If it's a vulgar world, let's hear it. Someone will be offended, but that's life, innit?

 

[Felon]

Swear words, like any other slang, are actually quite fluid and easily dated. The way people swore in 2000 is quite different from how they swore in 1900 or 1800 or 1700.

So when fantasy characters use modern swear words, it's essentially equivalent to using modern slang. Since people attach a specific feeling of time and place to a particular type of slang, this inappropriately connects the fantasy milieu to the modern world.

???

An entire language changes over the course of 2000 years, not just the slang. Two people from two millenia apart could hardly converse at all if you put them in the same room. The passage I presented from Karl E Wagner's essay already addressed this fallacy. It's quite obvius that when you're reading dialogue that takes place in a place that's on another plane of existence altogether that you're reading a translation, not a transcript. Yet, we feel fine seeing words like "hypnosis" and "mesmerism" in fantasy, even though in the context of the world there had never been a mythological character called Hypnos or Mesmer.

And the actual content of "how" people swear really doesn't change that much. I suspect you'd find that the references remain pretty similar: various taboo body parts, sexual acts, and excrement would be pretty much the basis just about anywhere.

 

[werk]

I'm sorry, but someone upset by that sentence has no business reading.

I think the obvious choice is to burn every copy of that magazine we can get our hands on and send the morality police to apprehend the author, editor, and publishers.

Think of the children...

 

[mmadsen]

Modern fantasy derives from the medieval romance, which was aimed at courtly ladies, so it should come as no surprise that it lacks vulgar language, the language of the common folk.

 

[The Grumpy Celt]

Modern fantasy derives from the medieval romance...

Well, goll dern.

How much cotton pickin' cursun' do yew wont anyhow?

 

[Elephant]

???

An entire language changes over the course of 2000 years, not just the slang. Two people from two millenia apart could hardly converse at all if you put them in the same room. The passage I presented from Karl E Wagner's essay already addressed this fallacy. It's quite obvius that when you're reading dialogue that takes place in a place that's on another plane of existence altogether that you're reading a translation, not a transcript. Yet, we feel fine seeing words like "hypnosis" and "mesmerism" in fantasy, even though in the context of the world there had never been a mythological character called Hypnos or Mesmer.

And the actual content of "how" people swear really doesn't change that much. I suspect you'd find that the references remain pretty similar: various taboo body parts, sexual acts, and excrement would be pretty much the basis just about anywhere.

Actually, as I understand it, it depends on the language. For instance, I recall reading that French cursing from the late 1800s and early 1900s centered around references to Christian symbols, not around copulation and excretion.