Bonus 82: Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction - Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer (Patreon)

The words that a culture considers taboo or obscene can tell us things about what that culture considers important or profane. For example, many swear words in present-day English relate to sex and body functions, while historically in English we've also had more religious swears, like "God's blood" and "God's teeth". In fiction, authors can use invented swear words to get around censorship, like "frak" in Battlestar Gallactica and "frell" in Farscape, as well as to create a sense of a particular culture, such as "smeg" in Red Dwarf, which then sometimes take on new lives of their own among fans.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we've ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about fictional substitutes for the F word, expletive infixations like abso-bloody-lutely, sweary lexical gaps (why don't we swear with "toe jam!") and old fashioned swears in English. We also talk about learning real-life swear words without full awareness of their emotional valence by reading fiction (such as how Gretchen and Ada don't find "bloody" as taboo as Jo does), cultural differences in taboo gestures such as pointing with the middle finger in real life and teeth-baring smiles in Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, and an extra bonusy bit about recording emotional punctuation in the audiobook of Because Internet.

Content note: Lingthusiasm episodes about swearing contain real swears! If you typically play this podcast around kids, for example, it's up to you whether you want to have that conversation with them.

Also note that this conversation was first recorded as an interview with Gretchen for Ada and Jo's podcast, Ex Urbe Ad Astra, where it will one day appear in longer form, but they've kindly let us share some of Lauren's favourite snippets from it in advance (plus a few comments from her at the end!).

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We're able to keep doing what we do thanks to the support of you, our patrons, and we appreciate it so much. It was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share.

If you’d like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 Listener Survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Ex Urbe Ad Astra, Jo and Ada's podcast
• Ada Palmer
• Jo Walton
• Terra Ignota book series by Ada Palmer
• The Just City by Jo Walton
• Linguistics Roadshow - for more on blood nose and other Aussie slang
• 'Fictional gestures in scifi and fantasy' post by Superlinguo

Relevant Lingthusiasm Episodes:

• Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

Swearing:

• Bonus episode 'Real swear words vs pseudo swears' (for discussion of 'Tabarnak/Tabernacle')
• Bonus episode 'The grammar of swearing'
• Bonus episode 'What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow'

LingFic:

• Bonus Episode 'Reading fiction like a linguist'
• Bonus Episode 'Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication'
• How translators approach a text

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.