002 || voice

[couldbebeautiful]

Where I'm from, "righteous" means both "morally upright" and "amazing; excellent", but you're not gonna find that last one in a dictionary. A while ago, I talked to someone who understood the word as the first meaning, but not the second.

I've also had to tell people what some of the swear words I'm used to hearing mean. [Nothing like telling your seven-foot-tall robot friend about swearing, right?] And they've got swear words that I don't get either.

I guess the point of this is: what's slang like in your world? What's swearing like in your world? Would you know what I was talking about if I said fuck or asshole, or would we have to have a very awkward talk about that?

[A pause, then:] I'd also love to hear a sample, if you've got some.

Comments

[couldbebeautiful]

It could go either way, if you didn't know them or how to read their tone. But yeah, it's just "how very". [Veronica's tone takes on a slight note of disdain on the phrase, as if to demonstrate how to use it. It goes back to normal as she continues:] Sometimes "how very very".

[devoutish]

How very, very odd.

[couldbebeautiful]

[lightly, with no real bite:] You're doing it wrong. It's just [with that same note of faint disdain honed from hanging around the Heathers] how very very.

[devoutish]

Yeah, but I was making a little joke, see.

[couldbebeautiful]

Oh. Yeah, it is kinda weird, isn't it?

Hey, besides the rhyming thing, what kind of slang did you hear a lot, where you're from? Or—when you're from. When are you from, anyway?

[devoutish]

1922. London, England. Are you interested in stories of slang or lists of words?

[couldbebeautiful]

1989. Sherwood, Ohio.

Stories. I'd like to know the context.

[devoutish]

Well - this one's not slang, but a swearing story. When I was younger, seven or eight or so, my mates and I thought we would be very clever and call people asses in a secret way. So that our parents, teachers, and other adults wouldn't catch on, yeah? We'd learned the Hebrew word for donkey, and so for a summer it was My brother's being an ayir today and Don't be such an ayir, Bill. Problem was, of course, that the way we were using it made it clear how the word was meant, even for the teachers who had no idea what we were on about - and our parents all caught on because they knew the word. My dad thought it was hilarious, and he encouraged it, but some of the others got smacks for their trouble.

[couldbebeautiful]

[Veronica's rapt, eyes bright and curious, and for a moment she looks like the young girl that she is, seventeen years old and stepping out in wonder in this brave new world.

She huffs out a laugh.]

That actually reminds me—so this one time my friend Martha and I were having a sleepover, and we weren't quite old enough to go rent videos by ourselves, so sometimes our parents would come with us, and they'd rent their own videos too, while they were there.

So we'd just watched Cinderella for, uh, I have no idea how many times we'd watched it by then, but it was a lot. And I was a little bored with Cinderella, so I ended up suggesting we get one of the movies our parents had rented. We did, and I don't actually remember much of it? Only that it was pretty wild and we turned it off, but I do remember that the next day I said, "Hell, no," when my parents tried to bring me to the dentist.

[She shakes her head, amused now by herself from a distance of more than ten years.]

I didn't get as lucky as you did.

[devoutish]

The dentist. Was this a horror film?

[couldbebeautiful]

To me when I was six? Yeah, it was. I'm still pretty sure of it even now.

Oh god, were they worse in 1922 England?