Re: Piss Off - Klingon

On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> > > YHL, intrigued, who hasn't gotten anywhere near swear words in Chevraqis
> > > because her parents probably wouldn't approve (even if they'd never know)
>
[snip]
> I've never worked out swear words either, but the word _sutaigagudialá_
> (roughly "pervert" or "fornicator") would probably serve in that
> function.  _Sunagagudí_ would probably also be an acceptable variant.
> The first is based on the noun _gagudialá_ (literally "wrongful
> mating"), and the second on the cognate verb _gagudí_ (literally
> "wrongfully mate").
>
> Perhaps _kugaguditlífin!_ ("Fornicate with yourself!") might be an
> appropriate curse.  ;-)
I haven't figured out if "fornicate" is a meaningful tabu-word in the
associated conculture, and I haven't figured that out yet because sex is
one of the issues that gives me the most headaches in designing any
conculture, even in sketch (something I have to do frequently in my
writing, even if no one else will ever know).  There's something about
sex that seems to make people's thinking go screwy, and I'm just
confused on how to work it into a culture.  <wry look>

OTOH, for Chevraqis I have a decent body of sayings and half-poetry
written for the associated story, so I've been using that as the
corpus-to-translate, when I have time!  And most of those sayings deal
with the military or philosophy or ethics rather than sex, which is
probably a failing...I'm sure there *would* be sayings about sex, but I
honestly don't know what they'd be.

YHL