: Re: Finding the right insults As a non-native Anglophone, it can be a bit more of a challenge to do creative writing in English. Thesauri have helped me a lot, improving sentences like "Sokka caught

@Pope4766717

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Insults are a tricky part of vernacular to manage since they often vary widely not just by country but by region, the age of the people using them and time period. There's often some overlap but assuming the setting of the story is Earth as we know you'd have to research the specific sort of insults common to the setting.

And err… when the setting is not Earth? Or when it is anywhere outside the Anglosphere, and featuring characters who are never actually speaking English? Having Germans with full English dialogue still say dummkopf feels a bit off. To be honest, the majority of my writing takes place in those settings because I know specific English vernaculars are too easy for me to mess up.

When not on earth - well, at that point you get a great deal of freedom to define your own set of insults. If you're aiming to use one's the reader is familiar with then it becomes more about using the vernacular that your intended audience would share.

The scenario of a German (who is nominally talking in German but in an English text) is slightly more complex - where there is no obvious direct equivalent actually interspersing the odd German word (such as "dummkopf") is not as jarring as you'd expect. In fact it can actually serve as a nice little nudge to the reader to remind them that while they are reading English the character is actually speaking German.

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