A bit of brilliant comic non-swearing came in the beloved series Quantum and Woody. Christopher Priest wanted to write a story about racism. His editors wouldn’t let him use a common offensive epithet, despite its centrality to the story. Thus, the issue began with Q&W directly addressing the reader, explaining that they can’t use the proper word, so they will use the ridiculous substitution of “noogie.” The forced substitution made the story work a little better than intended.

Well, since “smegma” is sort-of obscenely biological, I never really considered it a made-up swear so much as an obfuscated one. See also The Books of Magic, where John Constantine says, “Felching heck!”

And, um, I’m not going to bother to Google around for the info while at work, but the whole middle finger bit has had its current meaning for a really, really long time. I mean, come on, it’s a ridiculously obvious phallic symbol. You think our benighted ancestors weren’t able to figure that out? They were good at things like that.

(It’s worth picking up the script books to find out exactly what they’re saying, BTW; it’s not just standard “fuck”, “shit” “piss. It’s fluent, inventive insults like, “Sweet barbecued Crap!” and “Holy Mother of Heaven and all her happy infants!”)

But yes, the more serious and intense a situation, the more it bugs me that someone isn’t really swearing. I noticed it most in ‘Serenity’, right after Book dies. Mal uses a swear like “bungers” or something similar, and it totally took me out of the story. It should have just been, “bastards”, because it’s an emotionally wrenching time when swearing is forgiveable. (Which is why I think people don’t complain about the use of the word “bitch” in Harry Potter. Because every parent who reads that scene thinks, “I’d say, ‘Stay away from my daughter, you bitch!’ in that situation, too!”)

And Tommy used “frigging” and “motherloving”. Nat didn’t swear at all. He’d promised his mom he wouldn’t.

Whoa whoa whoa. A society where prostitution is legal, open and respectable is puritan now? Does not compute.

I also liked the Chinese swearing in Firefly. It did make sense. All you need is a puritan society (check out the costumes on the various Zap Brannigans in the Alliance Space Corps or whatever they were called) and it makes good sense that people would obfuscate their expletives using the polite fiction of a “foreign” language (that everyone understands anyway; hence “fiction”).

But as for comics, the best handling of this topic was in the Milestone comics, one of the best products of the 1990s. The characters were gang bangers, white trash, brown trash, beige trash and probably even blue furry trash. They were not polite. They swore a lot. And the swearing was rendered with little angry scribbles within the text. No asterisks, no little skulls-and-crossbones, no f___ing and m_____f___er, just a very well-done indicator that you can fill in the blanks here and you don’t need to use much imagination. Very effective.

Finger trivia!! I know that traditionally, since the ring finger can’t stand up on its own, it was considered the “cleanest” finger, and used for stirring medicines, applying salves, etc. It became used as the “ring finger” because it was thought that there was a blood vessel in that finger that went straight to the heart. Pinkies were always used for earwax, though. Because they just fit.

Back on topic: I agree wholeheartedly about the fake curse words. Like… word for word. They irritate me if I’m reading something and they come up, and make BSG more unwatchable for me. It comes off as patronizing, because I guess I just can’t handle “real” curse words, now? I know it’s a publisher censorship thing, but it’s not cute, or clever.

I took the information from R Lee Ermey from Mailcall. But Wikipedia confirms that the finger gesture predates the phrase “fuck you” by about 1200 years, in which case, it was being used as a general insult outside of the modern context for all that time.

So were the Romans wrong to use the middle finger outside of the modern context, or is my original point about the evolution of language and vulgarity still valid?