fantasy characters: “Geez”
me: who the fuck spread Christianity there
this two-years-old shitpost just gained a hundred notes who the snickerdoodles dug it up
W H A T
In moments like this I always fall back on the fact that they also aren’t speaking English because they don’t have England or the many languages and conquering peoples that contributed to the creation of the English language and therefore the work musr be a translation into recognizable terms in our world’s terms. Call that Tolkien Brainrot.
It’s called “Translation Convention” but “Tolkien Brainrot” is funnier.
Curse Words does have Christianity but every time I go to make a character swear I have to be like “okay so how prominent is it as a religion, how much would the vernacular of this half-isolated society be influenced, and would this particular character use ‘hell’ as an expletive?”
Depending on the setting I might resort to things like “spirits”, “rot”, “Oh for the sake of a thunderstorm!” etc etc.
Yeah there are wizard-specific expletives. I know how to invent expletives. That’s not an issue.
Oh for orbs’ sake!
I know this is a half a shitpost but if you guys are interested in reading more about the ‘reefs of dead metaphors’ essentially every language is built on, I would highly recommend Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language. It’s one of my favourite pop linguistics book that takes a closer look at analogy, language evolution and how the distribution of even things like irregular verbs , suppletion and linguistic ‘cycles’ of change (so for example what happens to negatives, or other individual aspects of language) is all tied to meaning, perception, similarity and novelty. A great read!
And if you’re just trying to come up with fantasy swears, sex, excrement, and farm animals are always reliable fall-backs. There are very few languages in which calling someone a shit-eating donkey-fucker is not a recognizeable insult.
