Guest Post: How to Build a Fantasy Language, from Slang to Swearing, by Jon Skovron

On the other hand, I didn’t want to turn it into a Clockwork Orange scenario where the reader is spending a lot of time and energy just trying to figure out what the hell everyone is saying. Don’t get me wrong, I love that book. But I wanted my slang to be less…obtrusive. Different, yet somehow familiar. It would probably be at least the length of a short story to go over my entire process of how I created this slang, but here are some examples on a few different approaches I took, and why I took them.
Some word choices were fairly obvious to me. The book takes place in the Empire of Storms, which is an archipelago. The sea is a huge part of everyone’s life, and the climate is often overcast and damp, particularly in the large, urban island of New Laven. It would make sense, then, when selecting a word to describe something unusually good or pleasing, to have it be the opposite of their dreary daily existence. So if something is great, they say “That’s real sunny.”
As I was writing, I often felt tempted to use the word “guy,” as in “that guy over there.” But I stopped myself, because it seemed like a good opportunity to pick something different. To give the reader a feeling that they are somewhere else. So instead, I chose to use the word “tom,” which reminds me of “tomcat.” As a counterpart, I chose to use “molly” to describe a female in the same way. I can’t remember why, exactly. I think that actually was some archaic usage that described a young woman. Regardless, in my world, “dudes and chicks” or “guys and gals” became “toms and mollies.”
The lower classes of New Laven are very liberal when it comes to gender and sexual orientation, so I wanted a word that could refer to either gender. Sort of like “buddy” or “mate.” But again, I wanted to take the opportunity to give the reader a gentle sense of “otherness”. So instead I picked “wag,” an old-fashioned word for “joker.” Granted, in the 16th Century, it was generally used to refer to people of the male gender, but I thought the usage uncommon enough that it wouldn’t hold a great deal of weight in the minds of reader. And so in New Laven, “your wags” are your buddies, regardless of gender.
That wasn’t the only old fashioned word I used, though. Another one was “crimp house.” These were inns in late 18th and early 19th Century New York City that would drug you and sell you as an indentured servant to a ship’s captain. Typically, you’d pass out in the inn and wake up the next day, many miles out to sea, and told you could either work on the crew or be thrown overboard as a “stowaway”. If this happened to you, it was called being “Shanghaied,” because Shanghai was about as far from New York in the early 1800’s as most people could imagine. Now of course, there is no Shanghai in my fictional Empire of Storms. But there is a cold and inhospitable cluster of islands far to the south. So instead, if you were unlucky enough to unknowingly enter a crimp house in New Laven, you would be “southended.”

I wanted my slang to use more than just one word substitutions, however. I’ve always liked slang phrases, especially the ones that don’t completely make sense when taken literally. Things like “right as rain” or “piece of cake.” I never realized just how many we use until I had to start explaining them all to my autistic son. Anyway, I invented my own idioms, like “true as trouble,” which means that something is likely to be a problem, or “simple as sideways,” which means something will be easy. Why did I use “sideways”? No idea. Why is rain right?
Lastly, I want to lightly touch on one of the most important aspects of any slang: profanity! It’s an area where I felt I had to tread very carefully, even when writing for adults. Not to pull punches, necessarily, but to understand that these words have many layers and meanings to unpack.
My first decision was to completely throw out the F-word. I did this partly because it sounds so contemporary and pedestrian to my ears. But it’s also a word that frequently equates sex with violence, i.e. something one does to someone else, and that’s not the sort of image I wanted to cultivate in my hedonistic (possibly slightly idealistic) urban underworld culture. I wanted sex to always refer to a mutual, consensual activity. And yet, there should be some word for having sex, right? So I chose “toss.” as in “we had a toss.” And if someone isn’t interested in sex, they are “not for tossing.”
There was another handy function that “f***” is often utilized for in our slang that I needed to replace. That is, the all-purpose curse word. Something that can be noun, verb, adjective, and adverb all in the same sentence. I’ve done it. Some of you probably have too. For this function, I chose the word “piss.” It’s a lesser curse word, at least in American slang. But in a culture that is both supported by and threatened by the sea, I thought that a curse word which references a foul and unpleasant liquid might have significantly more impact. It’s never used to describe someone as “pissed off,” because again that sounds a bit too familiar (the closest is saying someone is “pissed and peppered”). But it’s used for pretty much everything else. “You pissing salthead!” or “I don’t give a piss about that” are some popular uses. Also the exclamation “piss’ell!,” which is a contraction of “piss” and “hell.”
Anyway, these were some of the many considerations I made while creating the slang for Hope and Red. But I should mention that I didn’t just sit down one day and come up with a glossary. The vast majority of it came organically as I was writing. Usually, it just seemed like the sort of thing that character would say. Of course once I’d finished the rough draft, I did have to go back and write up a glossary to make sure it was consistent, and that it was doing what I wanted it to do.
And I guess that’s really the trick. To come up with something that sounds and feels natural, but isn’t completely arbitrary. Because words have power, and the ones you choose to implement will subtly influence the characters and world you build.
Hope and Red is available now.