I was wondering. (Again) Why is all the BS slang kind of weird? Like oomay, yelda, or jeesh? Yes, I know I'm signing this "Jeesh" but still. It's kind of weird and sometimes a little hard to understand...
Posted by Hank (Member # 8916) on :
If I recall correctly (which it is entirely possible I don't) the source of most of the slang is Portuguese. It says somewhere in one of the books something about Brazilian slang being popular in Battle School, and Bonzo uses a Portuguese word when talking to Bean, and then Bean notes that Bonzo "feels no need to assert the purity of his spanish" or something like that.
Posted by Princess Leah (Member # 6026) on :
Well, most slang is "weird" until it's widely used and accepted, by which point there is usually a new wave of weird slang. Plus if all the BS slang was in common use now (or back when it was written) it wouldn't emphasize the fact that Ender's Earth is several hundred years later and in a totally different situation.
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
I have a friend nicknamed Yelda. What does that translate into English?
Posted by Jeesh (Member # 9163) on :
I see what you guys are saying. But (I'm not trying to argue) how are we supposed to know what the slang words mean? Jeesh is obivois- they tell you it- but some isn't. You can tell some are insults, but I still think it's a little confusing if you happen to speak English as your pretty much only language.
Posted by Pinky (Member # 9161) on :
Either the meaning of a word becomes clear in the context or it is not important enough to be understood. This method does not work out everytime, but is pretty useful.
Posted by Princess Leah (Member # 6026) on :
Obviously you've never read A Clockwork Orange, my dear droog. Posted by Jeesh (Member # 9163) on :
I haven't read that book. I haven't even heard of it either.
Posted by Princess Leah (Member # 6026) on :
Has a lot of slang. Is very good. Had a better (IMO) movie made of it by Stanley Kubrick, the soundtrack of which includes technoBeethoven. Check it out and have your mind blown to bits.
Posted by Pinky (Member # 9161) on :
quote:Obviously you've never read A Clockwork Orange, my dear droog.
Right. And I don't think I'm going to read it, ever. Not my world. I've seen the film in 9th grade English class. I think I remember the language being quite strange.
Back to the Slang: I admit, that unknown (slang) words are probably more irritating when one reads a book in his mothertongue. It's harder to ignore them.
Posted by Pinky (Member # 9161) on :
Can anybody tell me why so many people consider Kubrick's movies to be soooo good? I think he is much too focused on symbolism. Like "Look at me, I'm an ARTIST!"
I really prefer M. Night Shyamalan.
Posted by Princess Leah (Member # 6026) on :
You think *Kubrick* is all "Ooooo artistic"? What about Unbreakable? The very first scene where the it was all arty with the mirror and the camera movement... O M G can you say pretentious? Wow. I loved Sixth Sense, but it all went downhill from there. Signs was little more than a monster movie, and if you search this forum you'll hear enough about The Village.
re: Kubrick: The adaptation of the Shining paled in comparison with the book, but Clockwork Orange is actually one of my favorite films. I'm trying to think of where you might be seeing the excess symbolism and I can't think of anything. Can you give me some specifics?
Posted by Pinky (Member # 9161) on :
quote:Can anybody tell me why so many people consider Kubrick's movies to be soooo good? I think he is much too focused on symbolism. Like "Look at me, I'm an ARTIST!"
Hi, Princess Leah! Sorry, it probably sounds a little bit gruffer(?) than it was intendend. And I don't know exactly how to give examples, I've seen most of his movies only once, years ago. If I had to critisise his movies objectively, I would say that one can see, that Kubrick knew what he did. Thoughtful, well-constructed, meaningful classics. But I don't think, that they are entertaining, rather than stressing, sometimes even boring. And most of his characters are not sympathetic enough that I could care about their fate. His movies make me feel uncomfortable, not because Kubricks wants me to, but because the hard work and the will to be perfect seem to be too obvious. I expect movies to be entertaining, too, in addition to whatever the director wants to show the audience. When I see a ballet, I don't want to think of bleeding feet either.
Jeesh, "A Clockwork Orange" is impressing and intense. But a little warning, it is also pretty brutal.
Princess Leah, don't ask me why, but I really like the movies of M. Night Shyamalan. Although "The Village" was dissapointing. Especially the end. *big sigh* Do you know, where in this forum I can read about your opinions?
However, we don't have to agree. Whenever I like a movie, my parents think it's booooring (for example "Forrest Gump"). They are I even less patient than I am.
Liebe Grüße, Pinky
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
Jeesh, as for your original question, it's my understanding that OSC had a version of EG where the battle school kids cursed (because they actually would if the school were real - kids know those words from a young age, and in an environment like that they'd most likely use them a lot). But for one reason or another he (or his editor, or the publishing company) decided to remove the curse words. He replaced them with made up insult words, whose meanings were pretty clear from the context.
Posted by MidnightBlue (Member # 6146) on :
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that he would flip through dictionaries and slang dictionaries of other languages and pick out words that he liked, sometimes keeping the original meanings and sometimes not. I think it's in one of the links at the top ofo the page.
Posted by Princess Leah (Member # 6026) on :
Pinky:
No worries, man! *I* liked Forrest Gump, too! (Liked the book better, but that's another story).
I probably haven't seen enough Kubrick to really argue that he's not overly artsy. I didn't think he was in what I've seen of him, but of course that's just my opinion. It's just that I love Clockwork Orange too much to let Kubrick-bashing go unchecked .
Sixth Sense was quite good, ranked up near Clockwork Orange in my book, but unlike Kubrick, Shyamalan doesn't have other works that impressed me a lot. Of the rest of his stuff, I thought Signs and Unbreakable both had elements of coolness, but both also fell short in key areas. I thought The Village was pretty much predictable crap, so there you go.
Posted by accio (Member # 3040) on :
quote:I have a library of dictionaries in many languages sitting within arm's reach of my chair when I write. I especially collect slang dictionaries. I used crude words from other languages so my books would be PG rated in English. I will not provide translations <grin>.
There were three waves of slang creation. I had my made-up slang when I wrote the story and novel Ender's Game, which included neh, eh, ho ... the basics (this was before "ho" entered general American slang as a word for prostitute or loose woman).
Then I worked on a futuristic computer game and invented a lot of underworld slang using Arabic, Russian, and Japanese slang dictionaries and transliterating and altering the words into ones that Americans could pronounce and spelled as we would spell them (thus: imo becomes eemo).
Since I still had this glossary of crude underworld terms on my computer, when I was writing ender's Shadow I dipped into that glossary and used the appropriate ones.
appropriate in my opinion.
I also used the russian slang dictionary (along with a regular Russian dictionary) to create names for characters in the Homecoming series. Unfortunately, I named the baboon with a crude word that, unbeknownst to me, was the crudest word in the Russian language (or so a couple of russians have told me).
It's dangerous to play around in other people's languages ...
Posted by vonk (Member # 9027) on :
Princess Leah: is Ender's Earth really supposed to be several hundred years in the future? i never got that, it seemed like the technology was pretty up to date.
also, my 2 cents on Kubrick... A Clockwork Orange was an excellent movie, but it did not, IMO, accurately portray the novel, by Anthony Burgess. The movie was "Americanized," leaving out the last chapter, which was pivotal to the theme. As for Kubrick being overly symbolic and leaving entertainment on the back burner, i felt that to be much more the case in Eyes Wide Shut. And Dr. Strangelove had a lot of that too, but was a phenominal movie none the less. ok, that was probably more like 5 or 6 cents.
[ February 16, 2006, 09:39 AM: Message edited by: vonk ]
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
Ender's earth is supposed to be near future, like 50 - 100 years from when it was published, I'd guess.
Posted by formic rising (Member # 9172) on :
quote:Originally posted by Princess Leah: Obviously you've never read A Clockwork Orange, my dear droog.
i'm pretty sure they named the slang "nadsat" or something like that.
coincidently, i watched this last week for the first time in, maybe, years. i might add that this is probably my favorite film ever made. it's quite amazing how easy it is to understand still. i still wish they left the books ending in.. it would involve more movie time, but hey.. you cant win them all.
for those of you who haven't seen it, i give my little bit of suggestion to do so. viddie well.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
Too much slang can make something unreadable. I do try to follow precisely the method Pinky described: Either it's clear in context, or the meaning doesn't matter.
Having a madeup slang that seems (to me) plausible in origin and use is better than euphemism or dashes or simply using today's slang. Slang changes over time, and often quite quickly. It is unbelievable that Battle School would use present-day American slang.
Also, Battle School is international, and slang would be picked up from many different languages. It would then persist within Battle School as an in-group marker (a shibboleth) to distinguish Battle Schoolers from people outside the group. (This is how WE talk ...).
The actual idiom of Battle School would probably be far LESS intelligible to readers today if I made a serious effort to extrapolate the way Common would have evolved once it became an international language. It would be substantially creolized and you'd pretty much have to learn a new dialect in order to read the novel. What's the point of THAT? So I use just enough slang to give the flavor of speech in Battle School, without (I hope) sacrificing intelligibilty or overly taxing my readers' patience.
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
You didn't get rid of the word "ho" just cause of its modern connotations, I hope? I know you got rid of the "n" word, and I havn't read Ender's Game in years, but I don't think it would be the same without "ho" somehow.
As for, "Either it's clear in context, or the meaning doesn't matter", I find myself quite capable of what toddlers are trying to say, despite their lack of understanding of context when they try to explain some things to us older kids and adults.
Posted by Hamson (Member # 7808) on :
I'll say ho to my friends sometimes- picking that up from Enders Game.
Posted by oolung (Member # 8995) on :
I think I remember some slang words sounding like English transcription of Russian... cool
As for making up slang (or any kind of vocabulary): it's amazing how sometimes writers think of something that would be a possible word in future, and then readers start to use it, and then it becomes true. Like 'ho': Hamson uses it, and maybe his friends will pick that up, and so on, and so on... the power of literature over the real language Amazing.
Posted by vonk (Member # 9027) on :
correct me if i'm wrong, but i could have sworn i've seen "ho" used in place of "hi" in other SF novels as well.
also, when i say ho to my friends, they don't take it well.
Posted by camus (Member # 8052) on :
In one of his books (possibly Breakfast of Champions), Vonnegut kept using the phrase "Hi ho."
Regarding A Clockwork Orange, I think it took a couple of weeks for me to quit mentally substituting words like "viddy" and "rookers" and "glazzies" when coming across the English translation in other material that I would be reading.
Posted by Jeesh (Member # 9163) on :
OK, it was confusing at first but I've read all but one book with the slang. The meanings were just a little hard to get...
Posted by vonk (Member # 9027) on :
I just finished reading "Dogwalker" in Flux. I found the slang in that story a little difficult to figure out. I didn't get the meaning of most of it until i finished the story, at which point i had to re-read it in order to figure out what the story was about. but it was very good none-the-less. i'm enjoying reading all of these short stories.
ps. would "The Originist" be considered fan fiction?
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:Too much slang can make something unreadable.
:mutters something about elephants and mice:
I had no trouble at all following the slang in Dogwalker.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Blushing]](graemlins/blushing.gif)
And I don't think I'm going to read it, ever. Not my world. I've seen the film in 9th grade English class. I think I remember the language being quite strange. ![[Wave]](graemlins/wave.gif)
![[Angst]](graemlins/angst.gif)
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
(for example "Forrest Gump"). They are I even less patient than I am.