Profanity in science fiction (SF) shares all of the issues of profanity in fiction in general, but has several unique aspects of its own, including the use of alien profanities (such as the alien expletive "shazbot!" from Mork & Mindy , a word that briefly enjoyed popular usage outside of that television show [1] ).
In his advice to other SF writers, Orson Scott Card states that there are no hard-and-fast rules for the use of profanity in SF stories, despite what may have been expected of writers in the past. The onus is squarely on the writer to determine how much profanity to use, to enquire as to each publisher's limits, and to think about the effect that the use of profanity will have on the reader, both in perceiving the characters and in possibly being offended by the story as a whole. [2] [3]
Card urges those writers who do decide to omit profanity from their stories to omit it completely. He regards the coinage of tanj ("There Ain't No Justice") by Larry Niven as a "noble experiment" that "proved that euphemisms are often worse than the crudities that they replace", because they make the story look silly. In Card's opinion, such nonce words simply do not work. [2] [3]
Ruth Wajnryb shares this opinion, stating that tanj or flarn do not work as profanities because they are not real, and are "just a futile attempt to give clean-cut stories some foul-mouthed action". [4]
Jes Battis observes, in contrast, that the use of frell and dren in Farscape allowed the television series to get away with dialogue that would normally never have made it past broadcasting and network censorship. The words are respectively equivalent to fuck and shit and are used as both interjections and nouns in the series. In the episode "Suns and Lovers", for example, Aeryn Sun says "frell me dead!" as an exclamation of surprise, much as a real-world person would utter "well, fuck me!" [frell] or, indeed, "fuck me dead!" Battis also notes that Firefly used a similar strategy, by using Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese for all profanities, also using the word gorram as a replacement for god damn, a phrase usually considered blasphemous. [5] Likewise, dialogue in Battlestar Galactica is liberally peppered with the word frak ('fuck'). [6]
Similarly, invented expletives are used throughout the Star Wars expanded universe. For example, the Alderaanian expletive stang was introduced in the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye and subsequently used in Star Wars novels, comic books, and games. Also, Star Wars authors commonly use the Huttese curse fierfek, first introduced in a short story published in the 1996 anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace , and the Corelian curse sithspawn , first introduced in the 1994/1995 comic book series Dark Empire II .
Parke Godwin opines that excessive profanity, as a part of naturalistic dialogue, "dulls much modern fiction and too many films" and states it to be a pitfall for novice writers, or for writers who never grow up, to fall into. He states that it is a "lazy copout that no longer frightens horses in the street, merely annoys and ultimately bores an intelligent reader". He advises writers that "less is more", and that if it really is the right thing for a character to be "salty", it should be made clear to the reader why, observing as an example that in his science fiction novel Limbo Search the profanity used by character Janice Tyne is a symptom of her fear and tension, caused by being burned out at age 27 and afraid of the future. [7]
Wanda Raiford observes that the use of the nonce word frak in both Battlestar Galactica series is "an indispensable part of the naturalistic tone that show strives to achieve", noting that it, and toaster (a racial epithet for Cylons), allow the show to use obscene and racialist dialogue that no real-life educated American adult would consider using the real-life equivalents of in polite company. She compares the racial hatred associated with the use of nigger (an utterance of which she states to have preceded and accompanied "every lynching of a black person in America") to the racial hatred of the Cylons, by the humans, that the use of such phrases as frakking toasters indicates in the series. She also observes that several of the characters, including Gaius Baltar, are frakking toaster lovers. [8]
In the series of Star Trek: New Frontier novels by Peter David, the principal protagonist, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun, frequently utters the word grozit, a curse from his home world of Xenex. It is understood to be the equivalent to shit.
The 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando also used fierfek, the expletive popular in the Star Wars franchise. This word is described in-universe as being an alien loan-word originally meaning 'poison', but has been adopted by the game's special forces protagonists as a curse word to make the illusion of playing as commandos more believable.
Profanity in SF also encompasses the idea of things that alien cultures might find profane, and the notion that what non-humans and humans find to be profane may differ markedly. Card observes that human profanity encompasses words dealing with sexual intercourse and states that that tells one something about human beings. He proceeds to suggest that what aliens might find to be profane can be a useful tool for suggesting the alienness of a culture. The first example of this that he gives are alien cultures that have no trouble with words about sexual intercourse, but that find words to do with eating to be profane. [2] Star Trek: Enterprise made use of this concept in the episode "Vox Sola". [9] The second example Card provides is that of alien cultures where the idea of property ownership is considered to be as obscene as pederasty. [2] Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at one point mentions that the word Belgium is the worst profanity in the galaxy.
As mentioned above, shazbot briefly enjoyed popular usage outside of its television show. [1] Battlestar Galactica's frak, a word that Lee Goldberg characterizes as "something truly amazing and subversive" and that Scott Adams calls "pure genius", has also escaped its original context. Originally spelled frack, it along with felgercarb were coined by writer Glen A. Larson for the 1978 Battlestar Galactica , for much the same reasons that frell and dren were coined for Farscape: the ability to use profane dialogue, with words that would be immediately understood as synonymous with the real profanities that they stood in for, without falling foul of network censorship and broadcasting restrictions accompanying its original Sunday evening broadcast timeslot. [10]
The producers re-spelled the word frak for the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series, in order to make it, literally, a four-letter word; [10] the word appears in several Black Library novels before then, most notably the Ciaphas Cain series.[ citation needed ] It has escaped, in both forms, from the series to a whole variety of other contexts, from a Dilbert cartoon strip where Dilbert mutters it, through other television shows including The Office , Gossip Girl , Veronica Mars , 30 Rock , The Big Bang Theory , and Scrubs , and Robert Crais' Elvis Cole novel Chasing Darkness, to everyday spoken use. [10]
The BBC Two science fiction television series Red Dwarf replaces most of its characters' profanities with invented terms, mainly smeg (possibly a truncation of smegma [ citation needed ]) and its compound smeg-head. Other common insults are goit and gimboid.
The 2016 comedic TV series The Good Place introduces multiple euphemistic wordplays on the real-world profanities. Since the show is set in the afterlife-analogue of heaven, the people cannot directly curse there and any swear word is automatically being replaced with a similarly pronounced English word, whenever a person is trying to say it. Some of the most notable substitutions are: fuck → fork, shit → shirt, bitch → bench, asshole → ashhole, and the derivatives motherfucker → motherforker and bullshit → bullshirt. Such automatic replacement was also compared with the real-world iPhone's autocorrect feature. [11] [12]
Profanity, also called cursing, cussing, dirty words, swearing, obscenelanguage, strong language, foul language, obscenity, expletives, vulgarism, vulgarity, or simply strongwords involves the use of notionally offensive words for a variety of purposes, including to demonstrate disrespect or negativity, to relieve pain, to express a strong emotion, as a grammatical intensifier or emphasis, or to express informality or conversational intimacy. In many formal or polite social situations, it is considered effrontery, and in some religious groups it is considered a sin. Profanity includes slurs, but there are many insults that do not use swear words.
Farscape is an Australian-American science fiction television series, produced originally for the Nine Network. It premiered in the US on Sci-Fi Channel's SciFi Friday, 19 March 1999, at 8:00 pm EST as their anchor series. The series was conceived by Rockne S. O'Bannon and produced by The Jim Henson Company and Hallmark Entertainment. The Jim Henson Company was responsible for the various alien make-up and prosthetics, and two regular characters are entirely Creature Shop creations.
Quebec French profanities, known as sacres, are words and expressions related to Catholicism and its liturgy that are used as strong profanities in Quebec French and in Acadian French. Sacres are considered stronger in Québec than the foul expressions common to other varieties of French, which centre on sex and excrement.
Encyclopedia Galactica is the name of a number of fictional or hypothetical encyclopedias containing all the knowledge accumulated by a galaxy-spanning civilization, most notably in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The concept of a "future encyclopedia" has become "something iconic among many lovers of the science fiction", and has been reused by numerous other writers.
The seven dirty words are seven English-language curse words that American comedian George Carlin first listed in his 1972 "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue. The words, in the order Carlin listed them, are: "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits".
Speculative and science fiction writers have often addressed the social, political, technological, and biological consequences of pregnancy and reproduction through the exploration of possible futures or alternative realities.
Glen Albert Larson was an American television producer, writer, musician, and director. His best known work in television was as the creator of the television series Alias Smith and Jones, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, Quincy, M.E., The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, B. J. and the Bear, The Fall Guy, Magnum, P.I. and Knight Rider. In addition to his television work, Larson also was a member of the folk revival/satire group The Four Preps.
A bleep censor is the replacement of offensive language or classified information with a beep sound, used in television and radio.
A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. An example is "gosh" for "God".
Richard Lawrence Hatch was an American actor, writer, and producer. Hatch began his career as a stage actor before moving on to television work in the 1970s. Hatch is best known for his role as Captain Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica television series. He is also widely known for his role as Tom Zarek in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.
Profanity in Finnish is used in the form of intensifiers, adjectives, adverbs and particles. There is also an aggressive mood that involves omission of the negative verb ei while implying its meaning with a swear word.
Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction television series created by Glen A. Larson that aired on the ABC network from September 17, 1978, to April 29, 1979. It stars an ensemble cast led by Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch, and Dirk Benedict. The series follows a group of humans fleeing the destruction of their homeworlds aboard the titular spacecraft, searching for a new home as they are pursued by the Cylons.
Robert Thurston was a science fiction author well known for his works in popular shared world settings.
Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is an American military science fiction television series, and part of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. The show was developed by Ronald D. Moore and executive produced by Moore and David Eick as a re-imagining of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series created by Glen A. Larson. The pilot for the series first aired as a three-hour miniseries in December 2003 on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was then followed by four regular seasons, ending its run on March 20, 2009. The cast includes Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer, and Grace Park.
Sherman Cottle is a fictional character in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series. Played by Donnelly Rhodes, Cottle is the Battlestar Galactica's Chief Medical Officer.
"The Farm" is the fifth episode of the second season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series. It aired originally on the Sci Fi Channel on August 12, 2005. It is the first episode of the series in which the plot is set on Caprica.
Space warfare is a main theme and central setting of science fiction that can trace its roots back to classical times, and to the "future war" novels of the 19th century. With the Modern Age, directly with franchises as Star Wars and Star Trek, it is considered one of the most popular general sub-genres and themes of science fiction. An interplanetary, or more often an interstellar or intergalactic war, has become a staple plot device. Space warfare, represented in science fiction, has a predominant role, it is a central theme and at the same time it is considered parent, overlapping genre of space opera, military science fiction and Space Western.
Like natural languages, the constructed language Esperanto contains profane words and indecent vocabulary. Some of this was formulated out of the established core vocabulary, or by giving specific profane or indecent senses to regularly formed Esperanto words. Other instances represent informal neologisms that remain technically outside the defined vocabulary of the language, but have become established by usage.
It is common to find minced oaths in literature and media. Writers often include minced oaths instead of profanity in their writing, to avoid offending their audience or incurring censorship.
Tagalog profanity can refer to a wide range of offensive, blasphemous, and taboo words or expressions in the Tagalog language of the Philippines. Due to Filipino culture, expressions which may sound benign when translated back to English can cause great offense; while some expressions English speakers might take great offense to can sound benign to a Tagalog speaker. Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, is the standard register of Tagalog, so as such the terms Filipino profanity and Filipino swear words are sometimes also employed.
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