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

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Shoot, where was I reading about cursing --

Ah. Here it is. "In almost all cultures, swearing involves one or more of the following: filth, the forbidden (particularly incest), and the sacred, and usually all three. ... English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasurable in its litany of profanities. ... Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbably sentiment than 'Get fucked!'? We might as well snarl, 'Make a lot of money!' or 'Have a nice day!'" (Bill Bryson, in "Mother Tongue")

Of course, now that I've gone and looked it up, I realize you're probably talking specifically about the religious-euphemism type of curses, so I haven't actually addressed the question at all. [hangs head, kicks dirt with toe] Don't we see someone invoking the name of some legendary wizard, in canon? I can't think of chapter and verse, but it seems like one of the big four, who gave the Houses their names, must have been taken in vain, eh?

[silviakundera.livejournal.com]

This is the slang they have listed at the Lexicon --

"Merlin's Beard!" - Amos Diggory (GF6, 25)
"pull a Crouch" - Ron (GF
"Gallopin' Gorgons" - Hagrid (SS4)
"working like house-elves" - Ron (much to Hermione's chagrin) (GF14)
"like some common goblin" (GF8)
"gulping gargoyles" (GF9)
"eat dung" - Ron to Malfoy (GF11)
"eat slugs" - also Ron to Malfoy, shortly before the Slug Curse backfired (CS
"obsolete dingbat" - Rita Skeeter called Dumbledore (GF
"lousy, biased scum-bag" - Ron, about Karkaroff's low score for Harry's performance on the first task (GF20)

[twistedchick]

FWIW, I'm told that Gaelic has no "swear" words or "bad language" in the sense we consider it in English. There are no words that aren't fit to print. As a result, you get situations such as I ran into in Dublin, where it started to rain and someone said, "Oh, well, she's pissing on us again." And everyone nodded solemnly and kept going, and nobody noticed it except me.

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 -- if they called on fire, for instance, it might get a bit hot unexpectedly. However, they could refer to deceased wizards, I think -- "By Merlin's beard!" "Oh, sweet Gaheris!"

Latin exclamations... Ecce! means "hey, look at that" (or , literally, "behold". There are a lot of others -- suggest you check out any of the novels by Lindsey Davis that are set in Rome in about 75 CE and are thoroughly researched (and a lot of fun.)

[rivier.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Verrry interesting...

Thinking about the ones silviakundera listed above reminds me that they're all still kids in the books so far, and kids curse or profane quite a bit with fairly silly, sniggery rude words. "Bogies" or "pants", that sort of thing.

The backfiring slugs could be a way in. Maybe grown-up wizards would swear with things they could afflict on each other. "Boils to him, he shouldn't have walked off in the first place." "Oh pestilence, I've laddered my tights again"...

[rivier.livejournal.com]

Ooo sorry - one last thought. Shakespeare is full of insults which manage to avoid use of the word 'fuck' - "ronyon", "rat-catcher"... and now I can't think of any more. Probably a Google search for Shakespeare swearing or Shakespeare insults might throw a site up. There are a whole slew of English words which also sound rude but aren't (or aren't much) - dastard, pillock, sot, feculent...

Mmmkay, shutting up now!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i have a list of shakespearean insults in my memories.

also, i think 'merlin' is what they tend to use in place of a divinity.

also to some extent they should use 'bollocks' and the like, as they're still concerned with sex.

'muggle' is probably an insult somewhere too, like 'house elf.'

and if you think of janking--amusing things like couldn't light a wand without a match...

[giglet.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the other comments, yet.

The types of swearing that come to my mind involve magical creatures (the mating and excrement, of). So I can imagine a second-year saying something like, "Oh dragon droppings, I forgot my wand!" whereas Filch (in a nasty mood and when children weren't present) might say something like, "Fuck me with a two-headed snark, the staircases need oiling again already!?"

[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.

Whatever else you decide on...

[(Anonymous)]

please not Salem! I'll read this even though HP is not one of my serious fandoms because I've pretty much read everything you put on *in media res*, but if you use Salem, all *I'll* be thinking of is the talking cat from Sabrina. Somewhat mood-shattering, if you're really putting this in a sex scene.

I would have thought Latin would have some good expletives, considering if I remember my language properly it's where Romance languages come from and most of those have some interesting swear words.

Taylor Serenil