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arbre_rieur (arbre_rieur) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-04-20 18:10:00

Entry tags:

creator: alan moore

Alan Moore has fun with wordplay (Tomorrow Stories 4)
When writers try to portray the world of the far future, they realize that, realistically, English would likely have undergone some changes by that point. There are several ways to do this. You could simply write normal English, only peppering it with the occasional made-up future slang word or profanity (e.g. nass, shock, gorram, etc.) This serves the added bonus of allowing the characters to curse while keeping the stories age-appropriate. Or you could be Alan Moore and just go all out, producing something much crazier.

Man, you could spend an age dissecting the future-talk here and still not be done. This is the sort of thing that's probably even more fun for the writer than the readers. I don't know how many times I've gone over the dialogue, and I still can't figure some of the wordplay out. My nominations for best two pieces of wordplay are "Johhny-say-Pa" as a corruption of "je ne sais pas" and the pun "bearing harms". And my nomination for most puzzling is "sesame-aftereffect." No matter how I turn that one around in my head, I can't make sense of it. Seriously, help me out?

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	jkcarrier 2009-04-20 08:57 pm UTC (link)
	I'm guessing "sesame-aftereffect" is a play on "accessory after the fact". (Reply to this) (Thread)

	arbre_rieur 2009-04-20 11:03 pm UTC (link)
	Ah! There we go! Thanks! I admit, wanting to get an answer to that is the primary reason I posted this... (Reply to this) (Parent)

rab62
2009-04-20 09:01 pm UTC (link)

"Johnny say Pa" always stumped me. Thanks for clearing that up!

From context "sesame-afterfact" is "accessory after the fact." Perhaps "accessory" becomes "sesame" in future rhyming slang? Or perhaps it's a play on "open sesame" -- an accessory after the fact facilitates the escape of criminals, and "open sesame" denotes opening a door (through which one might escape). The latter seems a bit farfetched, though.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	arbre_rieur 2009-04-20 11:07 pm UTC (link)
	"From context 'sesame-afterfact' is 'accessory after the fact.'" Looks like it. My mind kept going to "accomplice" and "in cahoots" based on the context, but that particular phrase never occurred to me. Now if I only I could figure out "vo-do." I don't think there's enough context there, though... (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-04-21 06:28 am UTC (link)
	It took me a moment or two to get "gosh drats" ("gauche" for left and "droit" for right so = hands) (Reply to this) (Parent)

besamim
2009-04-20 09:10 pm UTC (link)

One of the things I like most about Moore's writing is his fondness of playing with language. As early as his 1984 Swamp Thing story "Pog," an SF tribute to Pogo, he took the original characters' funny backwater talk and transformed it into a beautiful dialect almost entirely made up of portmanteau words (e.g. Captain "Pog" calls Swamp Thing the planet's "guardiner"). Two years later, for a story where Swampy meets Adam Strange on the planet Rann, Moore created a full-fledged Rannian language (and yes, much of it is understandable from the context).

I know there are at least a few other examples but I'm too tired at the moment to remember them...

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	zhinxy 2009-04-20 10:54 pm UTC (link)
	Word. I've always had my issues with Moore, but his language play has always been UTTERLY beautiful... And I even include the "Plain Aryan worms" from Swamp Thing in that... Puns are the death of wit? Says YOU, Voltaire... ;) (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

besamim
2009-04-20 11:03 pm UTC (link)

Oh yes, the "Plain Aryan worms!" Served, as I recall, with "Holland-aise" sauce.

Grant Morrison's another writer who loves playing with language and is extraordinarily good at it, e.g. his use of cut-up technique in Doom Patrol and in an issue of Animal Man where he repeats the same "secret origin" story three times, the third time with the original text scrambled in absurd but funny ways.

	meatwhichdreams 2009-04-20 11:48 pm UTC (link)
	...Uhm...~settles self-righteous hat firmly on head~ pardon me, but Pogo's "original funny backwater talk" already was a "beautiful dialect almost entirely made up of portmanteau words" before Moore mimicked it in tribute. Moore did a fine job and everything but there's nothing that can top Kelly's original linguistic playground! (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-04-21 06:23 am UTC (link)
	Meh, consider that some dialects DO alter a lot. To take an extreme and very exagerrated example consider "jive" talk. There's a reason the scene in "Airplane!" where the little old lady acts as an interpreter works so well. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	nextian.livejournal.com 2009-04-21 12:34 pm UTC (link)
	What cracks me up is that in the future, they're using Future Words, but they're still saying aw, which was dated in the sixties. Syntactical structure shifts just as much as vocabulary! Or, you know, "tax structs are on the change like the wordbanks, man." (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)