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Tweak says, "And your're so smart?"

arbre_rieur (

arbre_rieur) wrote in

scans_daily,
@ 2009-04-20 18:10:00

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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