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This is sorta random, so it goes in general, I guess.
As a precursor, I am… well, I’m not an American, but I am a North American, so I really don’t have much of a *realistic* view on British culture. Also, I am really sorry if I swear, I don’t mean to which is the entire point of this post.
I’m writing a fantasy where there are people who speak like Americans, and people who speak like Brits. Essentially, since I have no experience with the UK
besides watching Premier League and Jeeves & WoosterI have no idea which exclamatory words fall into a “oh, dang it!” category and which ones fall into an f word category. I know Americans tend to have a very skewed view of Britain, and a lot of the words I’m writing, I’m comfortable using because I’ve only seen or heard them in a “lol those brits” context.Google only gives me articles containing many actual bad words when I try to research this, so I am turning to you.
So… are words such as “bloody”, “blasted,” etc. actual cuss words? In my mind, “Blast it!” is equivalent to “Darn it!” but seeing as I have no experience with actual Brits talking I have no idea if I’m right.
In conclusion: I want to make my writing clean, and I don’t know if the “exclamations of frustration” I’m using are as not-bad as I think they are, so I’d appreciate some clarification from anyone in the know. If they aren’t, great! If they are, please let me know so I can delete them from this post, and replace the offending words in my WIP with words that are appropriate.
And since we’re on the topic, are there any expressions you guys use I should know about, or perhaps ones you’re stereotyped as using that you really don’t?
To anyone who answers, you have my undying gratitude.
Sure hope I didn’t just litter this post with cuss words, so my apologies if I did. (It’d be great if there was a spoiler-blank-out function on here…)@I-would-tag-people-but-I’m-new-and-have-no-idea-where-anyone-is-from
(So tag people for me if you know someone who can answer this, lol)
I can't think of anything witty at the moment.
@relia I’m not British, so if there’s any Britishers on here, please feel free to tell me I’m an idiot.
Anyway, I’m Australian and we tend to swear a lot and very similarly to British people, for obvious reasons. “Bl**dy” (censoring because I don’t know everyone on here’s personal views on certain words), h**l and d*mn are all pretty “low level” words. There’s also those pseudo cuss words such as bugger, blast, crap, etc. The medium level words are pretty similar to America, you know the ones. The worst ones are the f word (which is still very liberally used, but only in certain contexts) and the c word. I don’t know whether the c word is used in America, but I would say it would be the “worst” swear word here.
In conclusion, “d*mn it” “bl**dy” and “h**l” would be acceptable in certain books with British characters (Harry Potter, for example uses all of those), but if you’re just going with expressions of annoyance or frustration, the ones I mentioned would be the go to.
INFP Queen of the Kingdom commander of an army of origami cranes and a sabre from Babylon.
Thank you so much for helping me accomplish mission writing-british-without-accidentally-swearing!
Honestly, thanks so much. This is a very awkward topic so I’m glad someone took pity on my naïveté, lol.
I can't think of anything witty at the moment.
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