On Writing: Swearing

How do you handle swearing in your constructed (fantasy, sci-fi, etc) settings?

I've run into this more than a few times over the years. Sometimes, I find out something about the setting when I have the characters start swearing.

Gods below... swear men in Tír na Cali, which leads to the question... below what, and why are they below.

Eleven departed gods... people curse in Fae Apoc. Why are there 11? Where did they go?

I'm still trying to decide about curses in Reiassan... Girey blasts things a lot and, coming from a maritime culture, sometimes swears by whirlpools. Rin... doesn't swear much.

How do you handle swearing? What's your favorite and/or least favorite ways you've read other people handling it ?

Self-Care

I am feeling particularly touchy right now about

your protagonists are evil and your setting is evil and this story is evil.

For the next 24 to 48 hours, I will block with impunity people who want to engage in that conversation with me.

Character notes for Steam!Reiassan - Instructor Getalréta

Instructor Getalréta
Female

The Head of the Diplomacy and Law/Counting & Accounting House, Instructor Getalréta is a leonine woman in her late fourties.

She wears her steel-gray hair in a nine-braid strand (http://www.circleworks.org/hairbraiding.htm) with three side braids at each temple; she keeps beads on the side beads which she uses for abaci; the braids reach to mid-back.

She wears the colors of her House (http://artventrix.tumblr.com/post/64238570666/right-so-based-on-this-post-made-a-loose)- purple, teal, and red - prominently in a skirted outfit like thus (http://artventrix.tumblr.com/post/23457416205/i-am-ambivalent-about-these-colors-oh-well-i); generally the overtop and bottom skirt are red and purple, teal, and variations on those three colors feature in the other layers. She is a tall woman by Calenyena standards, at 5'7", and has long chosen to simply be taller and wears heeled boots.

She's gone a bit thick in the waist and a bit thick in the face over the years. Her nose is small and upturned, a classic Calenyena nose, and her mouth is wide and generous.

She teaches Accounting, primarily, although she has taken a hand at teaching all of the classes in her House at once time. She makes a point of teaching the Basics class every year, as well as the Graduating class, and writes all of the exams for all of the Accounting classes.

She's a cheerful woman, often smiling, generally friendly with all of the new students. She's not motherly, but can often find an anecdote or a little quest to cheer up homesick first-years.

She had two children of her own early on; one she lost to the war, and the other married a princeling. Her husband himself was a princeling, so she is connected to the royal family, albeit a bit distantly. In her youth, she worked as an accountant and business manager after graduating from the Aneskan Academy in Ossulund. She worked her way to the top of the House by, as she has often put it, simple addition and subtraction.

Her husband is currently in ill health, which makes Getalréta a little less pleasant than she normally is.