Black Gate

What’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer? One’s an ugly, scum-sucking bottom feeder, and the other is a fish.

An old joke, but a good one. As a joke, it works because of the shock, the unexpected conclusion. As an insult, it works because of a little concept called hierarchy.

Anyone who’s ever studied Shakespeare has read a book called The Elizabethan World Picture. It’s a great book, and essentially describes how people thought about the world back in Shakespeare’s day. I’d highly recommend reading it for yourself, but if I can sum it up quickly for you, it goes like this: up = good, down = bad.

What does that mean? Think it through: everything that’s high in the sky, you know, where the gods live, is good, and the higher the better. So, heaven, the sun, light itself, and so on. Everything that’s lower down is bad, and the lower it is, the worse it is. So, dirt, darkness, etc. Everything, including people, has a place on this scale. There’s a reason it’s the white knight who charges to the rescue, and that Goths dress in black. (I dress in black myself, so no mail please). Even people who’ve never watched a western know what it means to be a white hat.

This hierarchy permeates everything we do and think, everything we write and create – at least here in the western world. And very often without our being aware of it.

Hierarchy is the reason the Greek gods live on Olympus (highest mountain in Greece) and it’s the reason that Zeus (god of sky, thunder, etc.) is the ruler of said gods, and not Poseidon or Hades. It’s why kings had a divine right to rule, (they’re on top of the human hierarchy), and it’s why cleanliness is next to godliness – that is, it’s how we know cleanliness is a good thing.

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And why should they? Most of them don’t live in universes where damnation is a possibility. What? You didn’t think that swearing, cursing, or slang had just as much to do with world-building as how your characters speak in general?

Does everyone know the bi-lingual pun that’s in The Princess Bride? It’s the part in the film where they’re rounding up everyone in the Thieves’ Forest and the guard says to Iñigo, “Ho there!” and Iñigo replies, “Get away with your ‘HO there.'” Now, if you know that the f-word in Spanish is “joder,” pronounced HOthere, this is a pretty funny bit. If you don’t… well, you do now.

Aside from the comedy potential, William Goldman (who wrote both the novel and the screenplay) is underscoring the point that Iñigo is Spanish – which in itself underscores that The Princess Bride is set in a recognizable version of the primary world.

For our purposes, Iñigo’s example illustrates one of the prime sources for swear words: sexual acts. Anyone who pays attention is familiar with the other sources: religion, family relations, body parts, and bodily functions. Yes, sexual acts are bodily functions, at least in part. But eating, for example, doesn’t usually give rise to swear words – unless there’s something taboo involved, which gives you another clue as to the origin of a lot of profanity.

Take a moment to consider the origin of the word profanity (just in case you think religion is no big deal).

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Last week I talked about how Fantasy and SF writers deal with the idea that our characters aren’t speaking English, and I focused for the most part on primary world fantasies (by which I mean fantasies with an obvious connection to our world as we live in it) and on SF works of the near and far future.

I wanted to deal with secondary world fantasies separately, partly because that’s what I primarily write myself and partly because I think that use of language might be even more important here, where language becomes most clearly part of the world-building process. Think about it: you don’t have to be half Spanish and half Polish like me to know that how we express ourselves is all about our cultural backgrounds.

So whether we call them secondary world fantasies, heroic or epic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery, it’s how our characters express themselves – and even how the narrative voice expresses itself – that gives our readers their primary entry into the worlds of our novels and stories. Language has to make these places strange enough that readers understand they’re dealing with a complex imaginary world, while at the same time making those worlds enjoyably accessible.

Some of the same tools we use when trying to add an element of strangeness or “Other” to the primary world (playing around with syntax, avoiding contractions) can make the jump to how we express language in secondary world fantasies as well – but there are some problems that might be unique to those complex imaginary worlds.  And therefore some tools that might be unique as well.

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