Oh! Circe!

[resonant]

I've stopped thinking of this as a practical problem and started thinking of it as a linguistic puzzle.

What would wizards use where we use blasphemy?

The elements? "Fire and water, I could use a drink just now."

Place names important in the history of magic? "Will you stop that awful noise? Salem, it's annoying."

Are there any Latin exclamations? The only one I remember from high school was io, which is pronounced more or less "yo" and thus would add an unfortunate bit of MTVishness to the proceedings.

Comments

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I knew a question like that would draw my fellow language geeks out of the woodwork. A lot of these suggestions are hilarious!

I don't think wizards would use the elements or place names for blasphemy, because the use of magical words *calls* the magic into being

But if that were true, then they'd essentially have to stop using nouns, and maybe verbs, altogether. I don't remember the books specifying how a wizard tells the universe, "This word is just a word, but that word is a spell" (except for the use of wands and Latin), but there has to be something they do that differentiates between "I'd kill for some coffee" and "Accio coffee."

A lot of the comments are talking about a different kind of swearing than what I was struggling with. I tried to break down the idea of "swearing" a little bit, and these are the categories I came up with.

1. Insults. These are easy. Mostly they're either worked out beforehand in an effort to be clever ("You've got the brains of a skrewt but unfortunately not the charm") or stammered out at the spur of the moment ("Yeah? Well ... you're stupid!"). And children, no matter where you are, will call each other "dookie-brain" or the cultural equivalent.

(Side note: You know how kids say, "I know you are but what am I?" I'll bet wizard children have insult-rebounding spells. If you grew up around people who could use magic, you'd probably be very careful about saying things like, "I am rubber, you are glue.")

2. Oaths. These are also fairly easy, mostly because modern people don't tend to use oaths at all unless they're thinking about their words. So it doesn't matter if they sound a little artificial -- they are artificial. "By the four winds ..." "By Merlin's underdrawers ..."

3. Generic profane exclamations, such as "hell" and "damn" and "shit" and "fuck," used when you stub your toe in the dark. For some reason, it sounds perfectly in character to me for wizards to use these just the way we do, even though "hell" and "damn" have a religious history. I'm not sure why this is -- or why I have no problem hearing a wizard saying, "Hell, no," but a lot of problems hearing the same wizard saying, "God, no." How does it sound to the rest of y'all?

And "God, no," is the kind of swearing that started this whole line of thought:

4. Blasphemy as intensifier ("Are you ready for lunch?" "Christ, yes, I'm starved") or as an exclamation to express extreme pain, pleasure, exhaustion, whatever (flopping down on a chair at the end of a long day: "God! Glad that's over!"). This is the category I'm having trouble with.