Created Curse Words

Related terms:
See also:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Profanity is the use of certain words that are commonly considered to be rude to use.

Creative Cursing in Canon

Frak (Battlestar Galactica)

"Frak" is a curse word in the Battlestar Galactica universe.

Gorram (Firefly)

"Gorram" is used in Firefly.

Replonza (Star Wars)

"Replonza" is a curse word created by Alan Dean Foster in the official tie-in, and often derided, book, Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

Smeg (Red Dwarf)

"Smeg" is a curse from Red Dwarf.

Sonovabee, Shen (Sime-Gen)

"Sonovabee" and "shen" are created curse words in Sime~Gen, a universe created by Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

Regarding "sonovabee": From a conversation in A Companion in Zeor #4 by Lichtenberg and Octavia Butler in May 1979:

[Octavia Butler addressed Jacqueline Lichtenberg]: One of the things I kept stumbling over as I was reading was your creative cursing (and I suspect it jarred me all the more because I was enjoying the book so). A little of it goes a long way. It's especially irritating when it sounds like an approximation of present-day cursing. I came to equate it with the #$%&+?! marks used by humor magazines intended for younger people—this in spite of your definitions of the new words. I think the topper, though, was not one of your new words, but "sonovabee". Jacqueline, that really is a #!$&f?i word, and it's used in the middle of such a serious situation—when Digen actually fears for Im'ran's life. It would be better to have Digen say nothing at all. (And that is a legitimate alternative. Please don't think I'm trying to talk you into using more present-day swearing. I'm not. It's just that I started to laugh when Digen said sonovabee. Talk about shattering the mood.

[Jacqueline Lichtenberg responded to Octavia Butler]: Interesting reaction to UNTO—since you're the first to mention the degrees-of-shen as distracting. Sonovabee is a word I agonized over quite a bit before letting it stay in that draft. It's a linguistic anachronism there to trace how "English" and Simelan borrow terms from each other. It is far more realistic to me to assume that a semantic blank which stands for a semantically overloaded word will survive where the overloaded word does not survive— and then the blank takes on the connotations of the overloaded word, and in its turn is replaced. It isn't "cursing" in the technical sense. It is profanity—the nailing of that which is too powerful to name. ((I think I cut sonovabee from the paperback because of her objection. JL))

Regarding "shen":

In response to the letter from Octavia Butler in CZ 4; I disagreed with just about everything she said, but especially with her dislike for JL's creative cursing. The definition of shen in the Glossary was the first thing in UNTO (which I encountered prior to HoZ) that really caught my attention. I certainly did not find the occasional use of the varied expressions derived from this basic idea to be distracting. To me it sounded perfectly natural. Simes would curse like that.

After all, the most common nasty words in English are mostly in three general categories: sex, religion, and bodily substances which are considered to be disgusting and distasteful. If this is what our society finds it reasonable to use as swearwords, wouldn't it be eminently reasonable for a Sime to swear about things that can go wrong in transfer? Shen and its derivatives would combine many of the connotations of our ordinary cursewords, adding perhaps the further dimension of rejection by another person into the bargain.

Squit (Splatoon)

Profanity in Splatoon involves puns related to squids and aquatic elements—e.g. "squit" instead of "shit".

Creative Cursing in Fanon

[need examples]

Further Reading

• Smeg and the art of sci-fi swearing, ^{Archived version} ("From Red Dwarf’s ‘smeg’ to Battlestar Galactica’s ‘frak’, made-up swear words are not only stupidly good fun, but a genuinely useful device in keeping sci-fi accessible and happily uncensored…") by Mike Rampton (December 27, 2021)