Curses!

Mark Abley’s THE PRODIGAL TONGUE: Dispatches From the Future of English is a good book about current linguistic trends. It’s also given me some thoughts about language in fantasy settings.
The book is a look at how English is simultaneously becoming a worldwide tongue even as it splinters into mutually incomprehensible dialects, pidgins and Creoles such as Singlish (Singapore street English) and Chinglish (if English and Chinese hybridize as they do in Firefly, it looks like the result will be a lot less comprehensible) while even American English transforms under the pressure of Latino immigration, texting and black dialect. Even though some of it is trite (teenagers speak their own slang incomprehensible to adults!), it’s a good read.
The thought-provoking part is a couple of throwaway lines. Talking to someone who speaks a dialect of Chinese, Abley learns that a standard oath in that dialect is “I take out my genitals and bang them on the table!” Another Southeast Asian (I forget from where) uses the insult “May your child be born with a deformed anus!”
If the real world can have cursing that sounds so exotic to American ears, why not fantasy worlds? Instead of throwing in some variation of the f-word (and even in our own culture, it’s not as if that’s always been such a shocker), why not some insult that sounds harmless enough to us but makes people go white with rage (“I’m thrusting it!” “Your mother couples with frogs!” or whatever).
Heck, even historical fantasy can have different cursing. In the medieval era, the shocking, in-your-face curses were all religious: “By Jesu’s wounds!” or “By our savior’s tears!” It’s something I used to good effect (I think) in Love That Moves the Sun, set in 13th-century Italy.
The downside is, of course, that made-up/archaic insults don’t have the same impact as today’s curses do (but then again, even the f-word isn’t terribly shocking any more). A lot of times they come off as a comical ethnic trait of comical ethnic people, like the Indian or Russian mangling the English language.
Still, I think I’ll try it, the next time I go the imaginary world route.