Swearing in Science Fiction

One of the administrator emeritus, Dave Swinford, continues to participate in a chat list where science fiction writing is discussed.

"Well, what @$#Q@(!#@ difference does that make to me?" you ask.

Apparently someone commented about a new book, set several hundred years in the future, wherein the author constantly used the f-bomb as a crutch, enough so that it was distracting to her as a reader.

Another published author replied that most obscenities require commentary on sexual function, or if not, "on old bearded gods."

Dave wrote this short interesting essay in response, saying the ...

One might also consider how expletives are employed and why we use them as we do.

We live in a mountain resort community, and a couple of months ago during the ski season, my wife passed two young men, obviously tourists, who were exiting the store as she entered it. One of them said, "Would you look at that, Jack. This place is prettier than shit."

My wife nearly burst out laughing because she had never heard the "S" word used in that fashion. What the young man was trying to express were the feelings engendered by the view, by the tall connifers set against the snow-capped peaks. He wanted to somehow connote the intensity of his emotions, and that is usually why we resort to
expletives in speech and in our writing. To say, "That was damned stupid," somehow connotes more emotional intensity than saying, "That was very stupid" or "That was really stupid."

One of the challenges of building a fictional world that includes new or original expletives would be finding words that connoted for the reader this sense of heightened emotional intensity. Otherwise, you just have an unusual word that fails to evoke an emotional response from the reader. And to make the challenge more difficult, the meaning and emotional connotations must be implicit in the word's use and the context because the author cannot stop the story to define the word for the reader. Thus, most authors simply transfer established expletives to their world even when it's set on a different planet or far in the future.

The Eskimos have a great variety of words for "snow," each connoting a special aspect or condition of the snow. We, on the other hand, lack the words to effectively express the the vast continuum of emotions each of us is capable of feeling. To compensate, we resort to the use of expletives, idioms and slang.

This poses some interesting questions.

• If we had our fictional world include telepathy, would communications between telepaths include expletives, idioms or slang?
• Wouldn't telepaths be able to communicate all the subtleties of meaning, including the emotions with a single thought?
• And, how would an author relying on written words, manage to convey such layered communications to the reader?