I was just re-reading Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and I came across some dialogue that puzzled me when I thought harder about it:
I understand that we’re talking about an expletive here. Just today, I also ran across the following in the Freakonomics blog (bracketed comments theirs):
In the latter usage, it’s a clear substitution of a real word. In Asimov’s, though, are we as readers supposed to imagine that the editors went through and replaced “fucking” with “unprintable” (i.e., we hear the censor’s “BLEEP!”), or rather that the character, Ebling Mis, is actually speaking the word, “unprintable?”
(PS–If this is more CS, please move, mods. Seems more of a usage and possibly historical question to me rather than a purely literary one.)
The character is speaking the word “unprintable.” If it was supposed to be an editor’s substitution, it would be in brackets, as in the Freakonomics blog example.
Here’s a list of fictional expletives that includes “unprintable” as one used by Asimov in the Foundation series.
At some times, in some countries, there were words that were regarded as literally unprintable, i.e., that you would be committing a crime if you printed and published a work containing those words. For example, until the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover in 1960, the words “cunt” and “fuck” were regarded as unprintable in the UK. The unsuccessful prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing that novel made it clear that those words had become printable in the UK.
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary would obviously have known of the existence of the words “cunt” and “fuck”, though they might have found it difficult to find printed evidence of their existence between the 17th century and the early 20 century. However, they made the decision not to include them in the original OED, though they did get added in the supplement published in 1972.
Neither, I think. It is simply a convention meaning the reader is to mentally substitute the expletive of their choice for the word “unprintable,” much the same as the use of @#$%^&!!! to signify cursing.
This implies that the speakers in a far distant future were intended to be as euphemistic about expletives as those of the mid-Twentieth Century USA. I don’t think that we are supposed to imagine the characters are actually using the word “unprintable” any more than Mailer’s characters are actually saying “fug.”
No, the point is that they’re not being euphemistic, but rather, that “unprintable” has itself become an expletive. Sure, it doesn’t make any literal sense, but then, neither do most other expletives.
Archaic spellings of “cunt”, like “queinte” which I think appears in Chaucer, *were *included in the original OED, though. The definition was given in Latin only, to be on the safe side.
Isaac Asimov wrote a lot. And I’ve read a lot of it. Mostly non-fiction, but I’ve read plenty of his science fiction, too, including some but not all of the Foundation books. “Fuck”, censored or otherwise, simply wasn’t his style.
On the other hand, concocting some clever future slang that makes you think, eventually coming up with an etymological path like DrFidelius did, was right up his alley.
Niven seems to have been particularly enthusiastic about non-expletive expletives. Off the top of my head I remembered “tanj” (from there ain’t no justice) and “bleep” and “censored” from his Gil Hamilton stories. I think he may have used “deleted” too, but that’s not backed up by SpoilerVirgin’s list. He even lampshaded it in one early Gil “the Arm” story I read, by having one of the characters explain the origin of the words to someone who was “too young to remember the old days.” Ugh.
It’s a relic of the time they were writing in. If they wanted to use strong language, they had to make up an equivalent term, but one that didn’t sound very much like the word they really wanted to use.
I guess there’s no frakking way that sa’iks broadcasters would ever have to resort to such gorram transparent dodges around the issue today
It’s indicated by the lack of a bracket. An editorial substitution would always have a bracket. The lack of one indicates that the quotation is taken as verbatim.
The characters were using the word “unprintable” in a satirical way, much like somebody might literally verbalize the word “bleeping” as a substitute for [unprintable].
Somewhat tangential, in his sequel to Myra Breckenridge, titled Myron, Gore Vidal responded to the then-recent Miller v California obscenity decision by substituting the names of the justices in the majority, along with those of anti-porn activists Father Morton Hill and Charles Keating, for the “dirty words” in the book. He substituted:
blackmun for ass;
burger for fuck;
father hills for tits;
keating for shit;
powells for balls;
rehnquist for cock;
whizzer white for cunt.
Leading to such sentences as “He burgered her hard, thrusting his rehnquist deep into her whizzer white.”
