Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Gorram

The American Dialect Society has not yet announced their Word of the Year for 2004 yet, but they do list three different people's lists of nominees. List number 3 is from Grant Barnett, the editor of Double Tongued, "a growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English" nominates this:

gorram, interj., a euphemistic oath, used in place of an actual curse word. From Joss Whedon's space cowboy television series Firefly.

I think the only way that Firefly has affected my use of language is the occasional use of shortening universe to 'verse, but then I've only watched it once. However, since I got it on DVD for Christmas that should soon change. Hopefully one day, I'll get to the point where I only insult people in Chinese though.

2 Comments:

Blogger JP said...

This is awesome. I didn't really pick up any chinese cursing or 'gorram' from Firefly probably because the run was too short (even with watching most of the episodes 4 times). I did start picking up the psuedo-cursewords from Farscape after three full seasons watched over the course of a couple months ('Frelling Dren!')

It looks like someone has been cataloging some the chinese from Firefly in this handy reference: http://fireflychinese.home.att.net/ [this is good stuff]

1:50 PM  
Blogger JP said...

And another link to more translations at browncoats.com

1:58 PM  

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