"Sally Manton" smanton@hotmail.com wrote:

Neil wrote: <'Bastard' doesn't sound quite right for Vila? I once had Cally screaming 'f***' at the top of her lungs.>

Works all the better, methinks, when it *is* Cally, who has this prim image to maintain :-) and yet is IMO highly-strung enough to fly out under extreme pressure.

A purely personal point - I have no problem hearing Avon use the word as a verb (describing the act) but any stories where he uses it as a swearword jars horribly - possibly because of how precise and careful I see the way he talks. I can hear Vila using 'bastard', and quite a few of the others as well, but probably not in anger (he gets very creatively angry - see City).

Also interesting that Jenna often gets given a rich and varied - and usually unspecified - 'spacer's' vocabulary of expletives etc, though on the face of it she's not all that much more colourful than Cally (and that Tarrant rarely is, though as an ex-military spacer, surely ... though he's very prim too IMO :-)).

I suppose this is due to expectations as to what specific jobs 'ought' to swear like.

Would Par for example swear like the proverbial trooper?

Jacqui