(11-17-2015, 03:00 PM)Aysun Wrote: Used to bother me to see the f-bomb IC. I preferred people who tried to be creative and come up with swears similar to those the NPCs used (whoresons, Thal's balls, Matron's teat [tit? can't remember], Seven Hells! etc). I still prefer when people use shite or bloody over the more real-world swears, but it doesn't bother me anymore to see the latter used.
For the record, the NPCs have given us a word to use instead of fuck.
swive
swīv/
verbarchaichumorous
- have sexual intercourse with.
![[Image: tumblr_nswc2xHnCY1rquw0uo1_1280.png]](https://40.media.tumblr.com/65df5bb691f0a380ed0bcf3f0499ad20/tumblr_nswc2xHnCY1rquw0uo1_1280.png)
It's worth noting that Swive is contemporary with Fuck. The 1907Â Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present, Volume 7Â has the earliest citation of Swive (on page 52) being 1383, which roughly lines up with what we found out about Fuck earlier. If we go back to the idea of what we type being turned into "Eorzean" when we press enter, then Fuck and Swive either end up being the same word, or two contemporary words that mean the same thing, so it really comes down to personal flavoring; although one could make the argument that since one appears in the game and the other doesn't, then that one has more of a backing, the argument that the reason why the other does not appear is because it is still considered in poor taste in current society could also be made.
It's interesting to note that by the time Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present, Volume 3 is published in 1893, we already have (from pages 80 to 81) "Fuck," "Fuckable," "Fucker," "Fuck-finger," "Fuck-fist," "Fuck-hole," "Fucking," (with the oldest citation being 1568, curiously), "Fuckish," "Fuckster," and "Fuckstress." I'm sure that's plenty more about that word than anyone really wanted to know.
(11-17-2015, 03:24 PM)Â Kage Wrote: From what I can tell (in a very very cursory glance), 'shite' is actually a modern maybe early modern English variant for 'shit' in British English or Irish English.
Take Wikipedia with a grain of salt if you're so inclined.
Old English: scite (dung) and scitte (diarrhoea), and the verb scītan (to defecate, attested only in bescītan, to cover with excrement)
Middle English: schītte (excrement), schyt (diarrhoea) and shiten (to defecate)
So what is it that we consider "modern or real world"? What separates that from those that are considered Eorzean appropriate? Why is 'shite' or 'bloody' lesser real world? As far as I know, they're used in modern speech quite often. We see it in game. That's why we accept it. But I already posed why fuck wouldn't be used quite often in the game.
Would you consider "Uh... I think I'll pass..." out of place?
If they mean actual Early-Modern English, that's still pretty dated, as that variation of English was in practice from roughly the 1400s to the 1600s, which would still place it as being Really Old.
In a university research project over the summer, myself and about seven or eight other people worked towards making a program that found and corrected missing letters or variant EME spellings, and perhaps surprisingly, out of the thousands of words from various texts that we went through daily for 40 days, not once did we come across "fuck," "swive," or "shit."
Since we already know that those words existed during that time, even in print, it's likely that they were still seen as relatively obscene in that time, since they weren't being printed all over the place. Of course, this example is anecdotal in terms of presentation, but there doesn't seem to be an abundance of citations for use of these words anywhere else either.
