"Sally Manton" smanton@hotmail.com wrote:

Kathryn wrote: <Actually, in B7, the thing that bugged me about the language use was not the slang that the Space Rats used - I thought that was rather good - but the jokes that Vila told in Ultraworld.>

Oh I agree that that was dreadful (and :-( it wasn't even mildly funny either). Sometimes the attempts to 'SF-ize' the language work quite well, other times ... seems to me that imagery-based ideas - like Bayban's 'slimecrawler' and Vila's 'Tarzian warg-strangler' seem to work better than attempts to make up new slang or swearing, which often sounds strained. I *like* the warg-strangler, probably because I tend to imagine his wargs as something like Jabberwocky as done by the Muppets :-)

Perhaps if one assumes that'language then' has been translated into the equivalents of 'language now' a number of the issues are resolved (just as some jokes in one language are replaced by an equivalent in the language being translated into - not an exact 'words' parallel but a 'meaning' parallel.)

Jacqui