Warning: This is a topic about swearing, thus, it contains swearing. You have been warned, thank you.
So, I've been in the summit lately, and, pardon my language, but the only cursewords people seem to use in there are the standard english western ones. Hell, fuck, shit, ass, damn, etc. Now, those don't really make sense at all to use, if you look at the cultures of eve. So then...what does? How do people swear in the Amarr Empire? How do you insult someone in the culture of the Minmatar? What do people exclaim when irritated in the Caldari state? Now sure, we could pick some other scifi's space swears, and use those, but that seems like a bit of a cheat, so lets make our own.
A good swear should be short, preferably monosyllabic, it should be the sort of thing your character shouts when irritated, it can be two or three syllables, but those longer ones should build off the short ones, motherfucker is an extended form of fuck at the end of the day, which is monosyllabic. It should also reflect the culture that creates it. The sort of thing that would be considered both profane and acceptable to use. In english, fuck is pretty well rooted into our language as a word, its used very very broadly, and its accepted as profanity, its profane, but its okay at the same time. Saying nigger has a lot more negative culture stimulus, and has mostly fallen out of conversational use other then in black communities where the word has been reclaimed.
So lets sit down and brainstorm, here are some places I thought to get started.
Amarr Empire
A lot of what we think of as 'mild' swearing in western culture might be grave insults in the Empire, things like 'god damn' would have a large amount of cultural meaning. But what other things would be used? They don't seem the sort to use 'pottymouth' words, maybe some other religious sort of terms?
Minmatar Republic
Here, I think good places to start looking would be in the outcast marks, in offending ones clan or family, name slandering, etc. I'm not sure what words specifically would emerge from this, but it would be a good place to start.
Gallente Federation
Here I could actually see the 'pottymouth' stuff fitting right in and being culturally accepted as such. If any race was to use it, it would be the Gallenteans, but they wouldn't use words like 'damn' because, damn them to where?
Caldari State
I'm really not at all sure about the Caldari, I'm not as familiar with their culture as I'd like to be.
As a final note: The purpose here is not to come up with words in the languages spoken (There's probably already naapaani swearing out there though) but to think of what english words, due to cultural context, would be used as swearing in the given cultures. If we do make up words, it should be in the form of taking longer english concepts, and boiling them down to slang.
Author
Topic: Swearing up a Storm (Read 3925 times)