6 October 2006
There was a mention above of the show Battlestar Galactica, which has competed with The Wire for the honorific of the best show currently on television. For those who remember the cheesy 1970s television series of that name starring Lorne Greene, this current incarnation of the show is very different from the original. While it retains the basic premise of the original (a fleet of ships, led by the battlestar Galactica, carries the remnants of the human race in search of the mythical planet known as Earth) and many of the characters have the same names as in the original, the show is a superbly written and acted drama.
But of linguistic interest is the word frak. It is an expletive with the same meanings and emphasis as the morphologically similar English expletive. It is one of group of fictional expletives that is used in science fiction tales to simulate linguistic change (and get past the real-world censors). The crew of the Galactica use frak in exactly the same ways that the English word is used, including in combinations like motherfraker and as verb meaning to copulate.
Joss Whedon’s short-lived science fiction show Firefly and the subsequent feature film Serenity brought us gorram, a future dialectical version of god damn. Whedon also has his characters lapse into Chinese when they go into a fit of cursing, a hint of the demographics of the future.
Veteran writer Robert Heinlein used many such invented curses in his science fiction books. Frimp, meaning the sex act, and kark, meaning excrement, in I Will Fear No Evil; the word kink is a swear word of ambiguous meaning in The Door Into Summer; and slitch, a blend of slut and bitch, appears in Friday.
The Star Trek series used their share of invented swear words. There is the Klingon epithet p’tahk, meaning lowly being, jerk. Andorians refer to humans as pinkskins. And in one particularly absurd episode of the original series, space hippies refer to Captain Kirk as Herbert, meaning square or nerd.
In Richard Adams’s Watership Down, which is not science fiction but an enchanting tale of the secret lives of rabbits set in 20th century England, the lapines use hraka, their word for excrement, as an expletive.
It’s common for science fiction writers to take such liberties with swearing to both make their material more acceptable to a wider audience while adding a bit of linguistic flavor to their future worlds.
Finally, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the ultimate swear word was Belgium, described as “the concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the galaxy except one, where they don’t know what it means.”
