Cuss like you mean it!
I’ve been watching Firefly, it streams on Netflix. Good show. But, goddamn, say goddamn. This gorram and ruckin nonsense just sounds dumb. That drove me nuts about Battlestar Galactica with the word frakkin.
I know, it’s TeeVee but you could just leave the non-expletives out.
As I said 7 years ago: If you’re going to cuss, do it right.
January 2nd, 2012 at 3:40 pm
I thought that’s what all the chinese was for?
January 2nd, 2012 at 3:46 pm
They do cuss. It’s just in Chinese. Anytime you hear a character start muttering under their breath or are yelling in Chinese, they’re cussing up a storm.
http://www.fireflywiki.org/Firefly/ChinesePhrases
January 2nd, 2012 at 3:48 pm
I agree. Those m##$&*#rs should use proper english.
But, they stole Frakkin. I’ve seen that and used it for years so I don’t cuss in front of my family.
January 2nd, 2012 at 3:54 pm
But he does have a way of interrupting bad guys’ soliloquies with a quick well placed head shot…
January 2nd, 2012 at 3:59 pm
I loved the swearing in Deadwood. They didn’t back away from any profanity. It was, however, anachronistic. In the West in the mid 19th century, they did say some of those things that sound cartoonish to our ears. They didn’t much say things like “motherfucker” or “cocksucker”.
January 2nd, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. The seven dirty words you can’t say on television, according to George Carlin. I’m relatively certain the censors won’t let you get away with “Goddamnit” either.
You can do whatever you want on pay-TV (HBO’s Deadwood, Starz’s Spartacus for example), but Firefly was a Fox broadcast series, thus the idiocy, er, censorship. And I, for one, really liked the Chinese workaround. “Gorram” dind’t bother me.
January 2nd, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Goldarnit, I hit “submit” too soon.
add . . . using correct 19th century swearing would have made Deadwood sound hopelessly corny, so the creators used current swearing to make it seem more realistic while being less so.
January 2nd, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Lol, I clicked your link on cussing and stuff. I am one of those annoying non-cussers. I say heck and dang and if I am really ticked I say heckter-to-all-heckterness:). I am not offended by it though. I don’t know why I don’t cuss, I just don’t. The few times I have tried, people laugh at me, so apparently I don’t do it right.
I never really thought much about it until I joined this lovely gun community and boy oh boy have I been exposed to some lovely little strings of profanity.
I have learned a lot here, so who knows, I might even learn how to say holy crap like I mean it.
January 2nd, 2012 at 4:32 pm
Should hear my 16yo son on Xbox playing combat games. He’d make a Russian sailor blush. Think I’ve brought him up right.
January 2nd, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Actually, it is ruttin, not ruckin, which is a pretty foul one in some parts, like Oz.
January 2nd, 2012 at 6:03 pm
It bothered me at first…but by the time I’d watched all the episodes it had grown on me.
I also didn’t like the various western drawls either. Riding horses on terraformed moons, and wearing dusters and wide-brimmed hats make sense to me…but sounding like you’re from Wyoming or Arizona Circa 1860 when you just climbed out of a gorram spaceship is just dumb.
January 2nd, 2012 at 6:24 pm
The poker movie “Rounders” is a guilty pleasure for me. First, I get to see a bunch of cops beat the crap out of Ed Norton & Matt Damon.
But it’s hilarious to see the film broadcast on TV where they dub in replacements for all the cuss words…….except when John Malkovich repeatedly says “yob tvoyoe maht”, which as any Tom Clancy fan would know, means “fuck your mother” in Russian.
January 2nd, 2012 at 6:30 pm
But the TV edit for Repo Man was so much better with the exchanging the “Flip” for “Fuck”, but of course this is the only time I feel that it is acceptable…
January 2nd, 2012 at 8:42 pm
I can’t stand pseudo cursing, it’s playground-y and annoyingly PC.
January 2nd, 2012 at 9:08 pm
BSG amused me with frak because they made it quite clear what exactly the term meant, something that most “gentler” shows tried to obfuscate.
Afaik, the cuss word on Firefly was rutting, which is a synonym for making the beast with two backs.
You want precise use of language, 1776 managed a G rating despite having Richard Henry Lee “stop off to refresh the missus,” and someone asking Thomas Jefferson to “give her a flourish for me.”
January 2nd, 2012 at 9:42 pm
Well, fuck, man, just fuck it. Pretend cussin is to real cussin as drinking warm dishwater is to ingesting healthy nutritious soup.
January 2nd, 2012 at 11:14 pm
you can swear (some) of FX and A&E’s shows. up to and including “shit”.
January 3rd, 2012 at 3:26 am
The butchered Chinese was pretty funny.
January 3rd, 2012 at 5:02 am
I take it Felgercarb does nothing for you?
January 3rd, 2012 at 9:04 am
It was so ridiculous that the adults watching with me all laughed. Samuel L Jackson’s character in Die Hard yelled at Bruce Willis’ character “mellon farmer”.
January 3rd, 2012 at 12:25 pm
FWIW, the way Firefly handled it seemed to be a pretty reasonable facsimile of the kind of language drift we could expect over 500 years. With video and audio recordings the core of the language would likely stay pretty consistent, but idiom and colloquialism would probably change pretty significantly, especially once you introduce the cultural mixing caused by the likely conditions of the interstellar migration.
January 3rd, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Please, do not speak ill of Battlestar. Its been a few years, and I still miss it badly.
January 3rd, 2012 at 1:59 pm
It’s possible to appreciate fake curses when they are wielded by someone who really does use them, not just dub them in. They’re delivered with full feeling, and practiced intent, among what TV calls “religious communities,” which used to mean about 90% of this nation.
Know who wouldn’t ‘cuss’? Jorge Borges. His editor/translator regaled a literary conclave with a rendition of things he wouldn’t say, as we say, if he had a mouthful. Borges wearily retorted, “He’s finally gotten me to write ‘crapulous.'”
January 3rd, 2012 at 3:14 pm
What, frog-humping sonofab**** isn’t strong enough for you?
January 3rd, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Kevin beat me to it – the multiculturalistic swearing was entirely and exclusively to bypass censors (and, I suppose, play into the whole “Sino-American Alliance” concept), and I do believe Joss owned up to that somewhere. In any case, if you look up what they were actually saying, you will find their vocabulary would make even a sailor sit up and take notice…
January 5th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
The Spanish-language stations around here permit strong language to air pretty regularly. I guess FCC no habla…
January 6th, 2012 at 5:33 am
Part of the swearing on BSG, Firefly/Serenity, and Farscape was to avoid censors.
Part of it is also to establish verisimilitude. “You’re not in Kansas anymore, this is the future and/or far, far away.”
Robert A. Heinlein (pbuh) recommended establishing early in the story that things work different here; he liked to do things like having doors that “irised open”, even though a round door in an environment with stable gravity is a an inefficient use of space, and having it work like an iris a waste of materials.
/Fannish pedantry