utopia, 25 july 2026

Too many words about words

This is an expansion (a way-too-long expansion) of some remarks I made on Bluesky earlier today. It occurred to me as I got to the end of the chain that it probably should have been a journal entry, e.g. shunted away into "no one cares" infodump land, so here it is. If you do happen to care, great, but this is the kind of thing that is of interest to very few and they have to have very specific nerderies. So ya been warned.

This came about because John Scalzi and Claire Willett and T. Kingfisher, all of whom are much better at what they do and much more successful at it that I am, were talking about the difficulties of cussin' (and other usage, but mostly cussin') in fantasy and science fiction settings. As I say, I'm not at their level of play, but this is nonetheless something I've been coping with for decades now, with various degrees of success.

As it happens, right now I am in idle time -- very rare for me -- no projects running, bozhemoi, mirabile dictu, etc. I finished the 1 August story (the eighth, and penultimate, Coldpoint) several days back, I am not quite ready to begin advance work on the 1 September story (Sleeper Squad 60), I am officially on vacation until 3 August, and I can only play escape rooms for so many hours a day. So I have time to throw 4800 words in here.

I have two universes where I often have to construct usage (that sounds better than "make words up," but means the same thing). Now, one thing you need to know is that I am kind of a language nerd. (If you are a real long-timer around these parts, you may remember my project for teaching you how to read Chinese menus and restaurant signs.) I have extra respect for an author if they get the constructed languages right. I have any number of issues with Tolkien, but by god, his languages made sense. They were well-derived and properly structured. Anthony Burgess I consider a linguist, musician, and writer in that order; there was no question about the quality of Nadsat.

Myself, I don't have the time or energy to structure entire languages, and I don't need to. The two situations I have in my stories right now are both peculiar and limited, but do carry certain restrictions. And we're going to see that in both cases we have to address the remark on Bluesky which started this whole infodump rolling:

Claire Willett:
boy you really don't notice how often you default to phrases like "what the hell" or "good Lord" in any time period or situation until you are writing a book where absolutely nobody would say them

Quitclaim

The Quitclaim stories (the adventures of the intrepid Randa Guerrero, if you're new here) are set in the far future, in our galaxy or maybe a parallel version of it, where we ("we" meaning "humans") have solved the problem of intersystem travel distances due to the existence of punch drives and Rings, and thus have spread throughout a large swath of the galaxy (and discoverered there are several other sentient species hanging around).

Very little of the "backstory" in Quitclaim is ever explicitly spelled out, and I don't ever say how far in the future these stories are taking place. But my assumption, as author, is that it's been long enough for humanity to have forgotten a great deal of its roots. It may or may not still be in our collective memory that Sol 3, local name Earth, is our planet of origin; it may still be hanging around as mythology.

There's a comment in one story ("The Short Goodbye," if you're curious) where Randa has to go visit the closest thing she has to a boss, the central authority for all quitclaims in humanspace, who is on Leviathan (Tau Ceti 7). Randa says "I don't go into the old systems very often, and Tau Ceti is one of the oldest." This is actually the first time in these stories I used the name of a real star (well, that the reader is likely to have heard of), and I wish I hadn't had to. In my version of the galaxy, Tau Ceti has eight planets, of which 6 and 7 have most of the activity -- yes, I have to keep notes on all this -- which means some astronomy wonk will come along and tell me "Tau Ceti has no planets, you ignoramus" ... which is indicative of why I reserve the possibility that this is a parallel universe, so I can tell people like that to fuck all the way off.

But I had to use an actual system, there ... because the idea is, humans fanned out from Earth and settled systems closest to Earth first, and they still retain the knowledge of which systems are older than others, even if they don't quite retain where the origin point was. And while I can make up systems out of the whole cloth if they're in the boonies, for the older systems, I need to use names you might recognize. (Incidentally, this is not the only reason Randa mostly works out in the fringes -- a large part of that is the nature of her job -- but it sure helps as an incentive for the author.)

This is supposed to be about language. I know. I'm telling you all that as background for a reason. (I didn't say this wouldn't be a ramble. Is this your first time here?)

My assumption, in Quitclaim, is that the primary language for pretty much all humanity is something called Trade. Back when I wrote the novel that was in some ways a precursor to this universe, it was called "Trade English" but I realized the "English" gave the wrong impression, so I dropped it. Trade is a vast amalgam of human language. If you took, say, every language on real-world Earth spoken as a first language by more than fifty million people and somehow melted them all together in one pot, the stew you'd get would be Trade.

I have absolutely no conception what Trade would look like, or sound like, and I neither need nor care to. I am certain, however, that it would be completely incomprehensible to our real-world, present-day ears. We will never hear Trade because there is an assumption -- this is very important, wake up -- that all the Quitclaim stories are invisibly translated from Trade, by some means impossible and unknown, for the benefit of us real-world humans. Once in a while, I do have to refer to "Trade" by name in the stories, and then I usually put a footnote like "What Randa is speaking. Did you think it was English?" or something else snarky.

This gets me around the religion issue, though I tried to hold my ground for a long time. My basic policy -- you may disagree with it if you like, but this is not the place to have the argument about it -- is that The Future Is Post-Religion ... but wait, it's not as simple as that; I don't necessarily mean that humans have evolved past the need for religion, because religions unfortunately serve a lot of community and mental-support functions that are still valid even once we get past the salvationist bullshit. So what I really mean in practice is that religion has ceased to be a major structural factor in these societies. We don't have Christianity or Islam acting as big influences, let alone morality cops, on what people do or think.

We do still have religions, but they're small, and often a lot more overtly cultish. In the Quitclaim universe, for example, we've had the Tanngrevers, who believe that physical conformity -- literally, making everyone look as alike as possible, and concealing gender markers and so forth -- is the secret to mental and social harmony; and we've had the Society of Moon's Influence (AKA the Luna Moths), who are attempting to "pursue serenity." We haven't been told exactly what that entails, but they seem benign (and they help Randa considerably in "The Wages of Sym").

We're getting there! I swear!

Because the Quitclaim universe is basically post-religion, and has been for longer than any of our characters have been alive, we have to assume that religion-based profane concepts have pretty much vanished from the language. That means no "Jesus!" or "Christ!" or "hell" or "damn" or even "oh my god."

And yet. Here's why I needed to explain the situation with Trade. Verbatim from my notes:

Because this is all invisibly translated from Trade, use of present-day human words, particularly profanity (Randa says "get the hell out" in the very first story) is acceptable -- that may not be what they're actually saying. But it's nice to have new words too.

It's worth noting that first story ("The Void Eaters") is the only one I've redone, and I just checked it again to confirm, and sure enough, I changed the line that said "get the hell out." I don't recollect doing so; it was an instinctive change. So the rule in practice seems to be, in Quitclaim: Avoid "hell" and "damn" and such ... but if they slip in, we just say "oops, artifact of translation" and thus maintain Emersonianism.

I'm not saying that humans in this universe don't speak anything but Trade, and that's not even counting the languages of other species. Randa, for example, speaks Trade natively, learned Serajo very well (the reasons why are Yet-Unrevealed Backstory, sorry), speaks Pergati passably ... but also speaks another language, a language that probably is only heard on the planet of her birth. (Which is, I'm afraid, also Yet-Unrevealed Backstory.)

Human communities retain lore a long, long time. As a species, humanspace may have forgotten some things, but I guarantee there are pockets of humans in the Quitclaim galaxy who are still passing down stories thousands of years old, who have not forgotten their origins (even if they kind of get the facts mixed up), and may still be keeping a language alive. Cherniy Medved, a humanspace crime syndicate, has not forgotten its Russian roots (as indeed the name would indicate). They may not consider themselves or call themselves Russian anymore -- the word has ceased to have meaning -- but that doesn't mean they've forgotten.

This is important when constructing slang and new usage of various kinds, because when you do this, you have to consider affiliation and origin. Humanspace is big, and usage is local -- sometimes hyperlocal. I think this is important, as an author. If you introduce a new word or phrase, you need to also consider "Who uses this? Where does it come from? Who would roll their eyes when they hear it?"

For example, in "The Lost Idol," Bet Olear calls Randa "fheb," which is apparently "loser," and in my notes I have "Astra street slang," particularly among people Olear's age (young) ... and it probably wouldn't be used by anyone or anywhere else. On Zeric 5, a planet still in the early stages of human settlement, we hear "scup" for cash or physical valuables, and I note that it's unclear whether that's local usage. If we hear it somewhere else later in the stories, we'll know.

Randa has a whole set of slang that she acquired during her two hitches in the Navy, much of which only gets used when she has to code-switch to interact with Navy personnel. Terms like "CB" (no, not radio -- a contingent berth, e.g. please let me dock because I have urgent need), "bilge" (the infrastructure levels of a ship), "TX" (the focal range of your suit's camera or eyepiece), "sitrep," "DR" (disciplinary report), "APC," "civ," etc all mostly have traceable origins that are obvious to us real-world readers, but are also only ever going to appear in Navy contexts. Which don't happen too often in the stories.

In "The Hot Box," Vadic Ilko, who is with Cherniy Medved, refers to some people he doesn't like as "mudaks." "Mudak" is straight from Russian -- and I used it because it was exactly the kind of word that the Cherniy Medved people would have carried along in their collective usage, but which no one besides them would ever use. And it has the benefit that most readers won't know what it means, which is part of the point; I want you to accept the word for its obvious implications -- I mean, it's clear what Vadic is implying -- without needing to know its real-world meaning. (But if you're desperately curious, you can go look it up.)

One of the things I said in the Bluesky remarks was that the constant use of "frak" in the remake version of "Battlestar Galactica" was a real problem for me, and almost put me off the show entirely. It didn't work because it was obvious that it was only there because the censors wouldn't let them say the word they really wanted to say ... and then, as if reveling in what they'd gotten away with, they used it constantly. It's like, OK, people, you need more than one cuss word. This is why most of my inventions tend to be profanity. I feel we need as wide a variety of ways to cuss, or to say "that person is an asshole," as we possibly can get.

Characters in Quitclaim do use "fuck" and "shit" and "piss" and all the other scatological classics (presumably they're actually using different words and we're getting invisible translation again, but you never know -- perhaps "fuck" has survived intact through the millennia!), but they also use a lot of other words. I brought back "jackass," but the character who first said it in a story was kind of a traditionalist; we've seen it several times since then but now spelled "jakaz." My theory on "jakaz" (or "jackass") is that few people alive in the Quitclaim world remember what it once literally meant. Certainly Randa doesn't. To her, it's just a word to use for someone who's being a jerk.

We have also heard "churk," "scut," "slagger" ... and probably one or two more I forgot to put in my notes, though I try very hard. Yes, I have to keep a usage list/style guide/glossary. I'm not that Emersonian. Besides, if I note a word, I'll remember I have it so I can use it again. It's also sometimes important to note the nuances: in "The Hot Box," Serd Porly refers to the Navy crew as "yonks." The context makes it clear he considers them nuisances, but the term probably means more like "squareheads" -- overly rigid, by-the-book people with sticks up their asses.

Sometimes when I make up a word, it's important for the reader to be able to tell where it came from. Sometimes not. "Hazz" -- the only coinage that appears in both Quitclaim and Sleeper Squad, unless we count the ayo/oyo situation -- has an obvious derivation. When a character says "don't get all hazzed" or "you're hazzing me," a reader needs to be able to intuit what that means. Whether they think it comes from "haze" or "hazard" is not pertinent. On the other hand, when Randa refers to members of a planetary militia or a local police force as "provs," her disdain for them is evident enough that the origin of the term need not be clear.

Sometimes the hardest thing to remember in the Quitclaim universe isn't special words, it's other usage. Another thing I apparently believe about The Future is that titles are going to be obsolete. I try never to have someone use "Mr," Ms," etc in Quitclaim ... and one of the only times I have, the character apologized for using, in his words, "an archaic mode of address." Most people refer to people by last name only unless they're on a first-name basis. This sounds harsh to some people -- even some people in that universe! In Coldpoint, which has exactly the same problem, I have Wendy Barlowe explain to young Cusi that pronoun flexibility (quite a lot of the robots are 'they') is a good reason not to bother using titles of address at all.

I also seem to believe that The Future Is Metric (with the possible exception of temperature, which is a digression for another day), which causes me problems because I do not actually think in metric and thus am constantly having to go to the web to convert numbers. Fortunately, I also like avoiding giving specific measurements as often as I can, for Emersonian reasons. Love to have that wiggle room.

Sleeper Squad

Sleeper Squad has two different problems, depending on whether you're in Sleep or out of it.

Inside Sleep, the massive virtual reality (though they don't think of it that way) where most of our characters live their lives and where ninety-seven percent of the action in these stories takes place, people speak English. Well, in our Sleep instance (A4, sitting under what used to be Chicago) they speak English. Over in A7, which is probably under the former Tokyo, they mostly speak Japanese.

Sleeper Squad is not as far into the future as Quitclaim is -- "only" a couple of hundred years in the future, at most. Maybe a little less. I've kept it vague. There are some clues as to how long it's been since Sleep first came to pass, but no clues at how far in the future (relative to us) they were before that happened -- except for one; there is a passing reference to having sent a generation ship out into the galaxy, so we know they advanced at least far enough for that to be possible.

This means language hasn't done the kind of melting-together implied in Quitclaim, and furthermore, the ascendance of Sleep has both standardized and fragmented usage. That is, because the Sleep centers have very little contact with each other and almost no contact with what's going on aboveground (such as it is), A4 has developed its own dialect of English that doesn't sound quite like A2's, A1 (under London) sounds rather different from either of them, and so on.

Fortunately, we will never directly see what goes on anywhere but A4, so we don't have to care if they say it differently in A1. Mostly our special words in Sleep are used for things that we out here in the real world don't have equivalent concepts for, like data rents, manifests, passives, presets, scenarios, simulations (means something specific in Sleep and not what you think). Not so much the everyday vocabulary, except for a couple of words for specialty drugs. Mostly I just have people in Sleep talk like real-world people, including the same cuss words, and though try to go easy on the religious-derived profanity (I think they, too, are Mostly Past Religion), I'm not nearly as stringent about it as I am in Quitclaim. Besides, there's a whole other category of profanity I probably should avoid even more in Sleep and I haven't.

The real issue in Sleeper Squad isn't usage in Sleep. The real issue is the way the Awake people -- the ones who, for various reasons, are not in Sleep -- talk. And this wouldn't normally be much of a problem, because we've only spent substantial amounts of time Awake twice in the story so far. But we have a character, Jex, who came into Sleep after spending all of her thirty-ish years of life prior to that Awake. And she still talks like she's Awake. In fact, even though she knows how to fake speaking like anybody else in Sleep reasonably well, she deliberately chooses not to.

[From issue 30, where Jex is introduced. She's talking to Ruby, who was born in Sleep but spent several years of her childhood and adolescence Awake for reasons too long to go into here]:
Ruby: If you can do it, it might be better to sound a little more like someone who's been in Sleep a longer time.
Jex: You want me talk like my gramma.
Ruby: No, I want you to use your grammar. Ha, ha.
Seriously, though, it does make a difference. And I know you've learned some, because you don't have any trouble understanding it.
Jex: Effn snots is what.
Ruby: A little of that ... but mostly I'm worried people won't be able to understand you.
Jex: You han't no fuss ...
Ruby: I haven't spent my whole life in Sleep. Most people here have.

The point about "my gramma" is important, because what Jex speaks is street usage, and her grandmother didn't talk that way. Ruby's mother is alive and well and Awake, and she doesn't talk that way. So it's usage that has developed (some would say deteriorated) over time and is only to be heard in Awake people under a certain age. It omits words whenever possible, doesn't use certain grammatical constructions at all, and except in exceedingly rare cases, uses only three contractions: "an't" (aren't, isn't, and sometimes don't or can't), "han't" (haven't, hasn't, hadn't, and sometimes don't, didn't, or can't), and "wan't" (wasn't, weren't, and sometimes won't or wouldn't).

Jex is tricky to write because of this. Her dialogue takes about twice as long to get right as everyone else's. Sometimes I'll have to gloss in-story:

[Issue 35. The villain has been captured and placed into custody]:
Jex: Han't go slide if cho catch skel start off.
Leyna: I ... did not parse that at all. Sorry.
Ruby: She means ... Actually, no. Jex, you do it.
(Ruby already, earlier that issue, asked Jex to "say [something] the Sleep way")
Jex: Uh ...
The whole mess wouldn't have happened if this fool figured out he was the problem before making trouble.
Better?
Ruby: Yes. Thank you.
Jex: Take twice long your way tho.

[Issue 39. Jex and Molly are trying to figure out how to deal with the cyborg army; the ones wearing "funny hats" have the ability to convert others into cyborgs]:
Jex: Might need deal all funny hat folk stop more slide.
Molly: Uh ... sometimes you leave out too many words.
Jex: [muttered] Effn Sleep ...
We might need to deal with all the ones in the funny hats to keep them from making any more.

I do this less and less. Just as the other characters (and, ideally, the long-term readers) are getting to know Jex and are learning things like that "slide" means "commotion, disaster, kerfuffle, mishegoss" -- whatever the latest crisis is, in short -- Jex is gradually adjusting her way of speaking to be more comprehensible to them.

On the other hand, it is certain that we will have to venture Awake at least once more before I bring this whole train to a halt, which is why I have an "Awake Slang" lexicon in my notes that's got about a hundred entries in it, ranging from fine points like "any" (also use it for "anything" and "anyone" instead of the whole word) to outright coinages like "skel" (creep, jerk, asshole, troublemaker) or "rosh" (weird, unusual, strange, crazy).

Some of these terms sorta-kinda have real-world antecedents. "Dore" (lover, girl/boyfriend, significant other) comes from "adore"; the adjective "skelly" preceded "skel" and they apparently come from "skeleton" but we're not sure why; "slide" is from, like, a mudslide or avalanche ("gon slide" meaning "oh, the situation's really going bad now"); "crux" is only a slight shift from what the word means to us; "push" and "throw" the way Jex uses them are more or less used the same way in some real-world circles, and so on.

[Issue 30. Jex and Ruby having an after-it's-all-done discussion]:
Jex: Got push with you.
Ruby: "We gon throw" kind of push or "we need to talk this out" kind?
Jex: An't first kind, hope.

That last is important because a fair bit of Awake "street" is me trying to invoke urban AAVE usage without actually duplicating it. I feel that it's not a great idea for me to just grab a lot of AAVE and use that; it feels appropriative. But I also want it to be clear that Awake usage is the usage of a community which has been basically left for dead by most Sleep folk, scratching to survive in urban wreckage, often quite young because they tend to die young, very few resources, a live-fast-die-hard-party-with-whatever-you-can-find-while-you-can mentality ... and almost entirely not white.

Ninety-five percent of the people in the greater Chicago area packed it up and went off to Sleep and said "fuck you, fend for yourselves" to anyone still aboveground who wouldn't or couldn't. (For most of its history, A4 Sleep had a monetary buy-in.) What did you think the Awake population over A4 would look like? Who has the money and the means and who doesn't? I have only ever shown two white people Awake, and they were both people who left Sleep (or were forced out of it) for various reaons.

So, yeah, street slang is like that. But it's not built out of ignorance. It comes from impatience and danger and a desire by people who don't have much else to claim something of their own.

Anyway, so, that's the thing about making up words. If you need to do it, always keep in mind which mouths you'll be putting the words in; who's using it, how they got it, why they say it that way.

And don't just use 'frak' for all your fucking profanity. Get inventive with that shit. Profanity's what separates us from the animals.

(Except the weasel.)

25 July 2026