Don’t get me wrong: Fantasy novels are hard. And just because Tolkien, essentially, stole the German national folk tale, twisted it 30 degrees and added some of his own filips doesn’t mean he didn’t work hard. But I have to wonder if he thought about things like this:
- Do these people have the fork?
- In a society where there is no “one true God,” what does someone say when they stub their toe or break a dish? (Quite a bit of our vulgarity is God based if you really think about it; after all, you can’t say “damn it!” because damnation implies hell and hell is a Judeo-Christian construct.)
- Do they have glass? And if not, what do they put in their windows?
- Is it rude to leave your characters mid-grope to go have dinner? (I know Tolkien never had to think about that one).
All that said, it’s going very well. More on that later. We now return you to the promised silence
<insert sound of crickets chirping>
I’m just getting ready to re-read 1984. After I finish the Didion I’m reading. I haven’t read 1984 since 1967 so it will be interesting to read it in 2005.
STB
You can always use Sci-Fi channel approved swear words. Two of the most useful:
Frack (from Battlestar Galactica)
Goram (from Firefly)
There are several other Firefly examples in Chinese. 🙂
Congratulations on being past the halway mark only a third-way into the month!
1984 is a fantastic novel, worth annual readings during the Bush ][ Administration.
Personally, I usually say “ah, shit[e]!”, “bugger!”, “fuck, fuck, fuck!” (with a general rise in tone towards an emphatic third ‘fuck’), or “you bastard”. And, as for the glass thing, why wouldn’t they have glass? Glass, after all, dates back at least three millennia. Also, don’t you hate it when a bunch of smartarses answer your rhetorical questions? [Don’t answer: it’s rhetorical!]
I am sure they have the spoon, rather than the fork.
You could write around the swearing with indirect speech, such as “He swore as he reloaded his gun.” This is similar to the technique for handling foreign language (instead of writing out the other language, for example, you write “She spoke a few words of Hindi”). Personally, I think “Goram” is cool but belongs too clearly to Whedon still. I read one book where the author awkwardly used “He made an oath”, which took me a while to process.
Glass seems OK to me. 🙂