Slang, jargon and technobabble, and it's place in speculative fiction

[Dînadan]

Inspired by one of the comments in the 'eat any goo books' thread (quoted below for reference), I thought I'd start this thread.

What are people's opinions on made-up slang/swearing/etc (and to a lesser extent technobabble) in fiction? Does it have a place or should writers stick to current day sland and swearing (or even not have it at all)?

I like some future slang. Slag from "Beast Wars", Verse in "Firefly", Skin Jobs from "Bladerunner", and Sprawl in "Neuromancer" but good lord does it just have too much.

I'll get the ball rolling and say it depends. As Rocketboy says some made up slang can work. Whether or not to use real-life slang depends on the setting and whether it makes sense for characters to use it.

Let's take Transformers for example. Leaving aside the fact that most Transformers fiction is either targeted at kids or designed to include them in its target demographic, it doesn't make much sense for them to use a lot of our swearing/slang (at least for newly arrived Cybertronians, those who've had extensive contact with humans could be expected to have picked some up), but that doesn't mean their language would thus be devoid of slang. As such it's reasonable for the writers to make stuff up to fill that area, but that doesn't mean it should just be some random words. 'Slag' makes sense both used as a term for killing a cybertonian as it logical follows from that act (killing a machine -> reducing it to slag -> slag). Iirc it's also used it the sense of 'crap' or 'shit' to mean bad, and again this makes some logical sense as slag is a term for waste materials (usually from the rehung process of metals), so it'd make sense for robots to use it as slang for waste in the same way we use crap and shit and thus the other uses we have for those words would thus work for slag for Transformers.

Just making stuff up on the other hand as often happens when shows/films travel to or are set in the future or have aliens as characters (can't recall any examples off hand) or even contemporary set films/shows that include teenagers when the writers aren't familiar with the slang used by real life teenagers just doesn't work and usually sounds outright terrible because it usually makes no sense and tends to be weird for the sake of being weird.

Thoughts?

[Eric]

It depends. In certain circumstances like when the show takes place in a future with several intermixing cultures then having a saying from either other human languages or aliens can make sense. Likewise with technology that doesn't exist today. It's just part of the world. All languages borrow something from another.

That said there's a lot of times it shouldn't be used. Using words to substitute a swear words always just sounded weird to me. Yes a story that takes place 200 years in the future would probably have a culture that uses different swearwords but it draws too much attention to it when you're only substituting swearwords.

Slaying and technobabble is a bit more complicated. To my ear it often sounds weird But robot and android were once such words. There's also many different ways of referring to faster than light travel.

A friend of mine was writing a sci-fi series and it took place in the distant future largely dealing with people who traveled on spaceships for trade. Often the characters would use the word "lady" But I couldn't quite figure out why. I thought it might be referring to some obscure religious thing and that's what my mind fixated on. When I asked her she said it was supposed to be short for lady luck. Without having that explained to me it was a distraction that took me out of the story and give me a puzzle to work on. So it work if you understand intuitively understand the context or have it explained to you

[Fixer]

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/483/

Fictional Slang does have it's place. Obviously if you have completely new factions and technology in general use people will develop their own slang to deal with them in normal conversation. Shortening things long multi-syllable words like "transporter" to something more comfortable like "beam" or "Universe" to "Verse" makes logical sense.

It's actually fun to see this develop naturally in MMOs or fan communities when people create their own slang, sometimes getting it picked up in canon as well. The Imperial slang "pubs" for Republic players was picked up in SWTOR.

Likewise there's no real issue with renaming things that have different real world slang if you don't go overboard. Star Wars uses "slicing" instead of "hacking".

When you use too much it starts to become obnoxious. Especially if the words are overly complicated or hard to pronounce. As per above comic. I think the worst culprits I've hit have been in the old Star Wars EU where they tried to make up a lot of nonsense turns of phrase. Or just Mandalorian in general. http://www.completewermosguide.com/mandalorian.html

Technobabble is something different, it's just nonsense trying to sound technical. Voyager level stuff was characters spouting magical worlds like wizards on the mountain to defeat their problem of the week.

[Nessus]

Two things come to mind for me:

1) Made up slang is made or broken more by the work it's embedded in than by its own merit. By which I mean, if the work is liked, then the slang will be liked by Pavlovian association, even if it sounds silly in isolation. Examples I'd put up would be Farscape, Firefly, and to a lesser extent Battlestar Galactica. All of which have "alien" nonsense word stand-ins for real slang/swearing, which fans will gleefully embrace and even use IRL. Contrast any number of disposable trash films and poorly received shows who's attempts are equally silly in isolation, but are ruthlessly mocked for their silliness.

It helps if the slang/swearing feels aesthetically consistent with the work as well. Firefly tends to use a combo of pidgen corruption of real stuff (like gorram for goddamn), somewhat lyrical faux-old-timeyness, and bad Chinese, all of which lean right into the "space western" style of the show. Farscape uses lots of words that are deliberately retro-silly sounding to go with the kinda nuevo-Flash-Gordon aesthetic of the show. Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, takes pains to make itself look and feel as much like modern western society as is possible in a show about a giant spaceship being chased by killer robots, so it's very much a mixed bag. On the one hand you've got stuff like "frack" and "toaster", which would work just as well in the real world (frack sounds like a very natural dad-bowdlerization of fuck, and "toaster" is a pretty natural insult for robots). On the other hand you've got stuff like "dagget" and "felgercarb" that call attention to themselves by their contrast with the rest of the show's style.

2) Real slang (and ESPECIALLY swearing) favors brevity and rhythm. A good made up swear is brief, and rolls/explodes off the tongue with as little resistance as possible. Good made up slang is more phonetically efficient and has a more lyrical cadence than the "official" language it replaces. A big way that fictional slang/swearing often goes wrong is by sounding overlong or awkward. "Felgercarb" is a bad example here as well, IMO: a syllable longer than "bullshit", and a minor tongue twister, and it ends on a closed-lipped consonant that in the context of a swear feels like the vocal equivalent of tripping on a curb.

I think a good exercise for a writer wanting to make up some alien slang or swears would be to imagine the sounds as scat singing instead of just words. Also: listen to music with lyrics in a language you don't understand, and pay attention to how the sounds tumble and flow.

I also agree with everything Fixer said above.

[Rocketboy1313]

Beyond the cursing there are certain phrases that tie into religious or philosophical concepts in the world. I am reading "Neuromancer" now but I just finished "Stranger in a Strange Land" which featured the word 'Grok' which because of the book's popularity became an actual word.

They explain some of the origin of that word in "Stranger" it literally means 'drink', but has taken on deeper context as a form of super empathy. Understanding something so completely that it becomes part of you. It is an alien word but it became a real word.

Then there is 'Brainiac' which sounds like a silly thing to name a Superman villain. Except the word comes from the villain's name. He is the origins of the insult. Imagine if Einstein stopped being a cultural figure and instead it was just his name being used as an insult for so long that it became synonymous with calling someone stupid, "Thanks, Einstein!"

If you were to set a book in the near future you could actually have part of the opening chapter be by a historian character lamenting the death of certain words in the minds of people, as they have been literally used so often as to divorce themselves from the previous meaning. You know, like how Literally has come to mean emphatically.