Subject: Barking spiders, you're back!
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Posted on: 2016-09-01 04:31:00 UTC

The curse is from Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series, which I mostly read for the sake of seeing people use that curse (and the steampunk animal-dirigibles, of course). Scott Westerfeld's books in general have pretty great slang; he borrows from everywhere. "Barking spiders" used to be a Victorian euphemism for farting, but it fit the setting better as a curse.

Fly By Night, by Frances Hardinge, (as well as the sequel) has some fun stuff: "pixelated" is used to insult someone, saying their senses must have been stolen by the pixies. There's lots of different kinds of slang in that book, because there are lots of dialects, and it's full of competing rulers and gods to swear on.

This is historical fiction, so it's probably based on real curses, but Karen Cushman's Catherine Called Birdie, a book I really loved when I was about ten, has a nice part about curses. It's set in medieval England, and the title character (a girl of mildly noble birth) hears that at court, everyone has their own individual curses, usually along the lines of "G-d's [body part]!" So she spends months going through ideas, trying to find one of her own. The nice-sounding ones like "G-d's beard!" and "G-d's teeth!" are taken, so she's playing with curses like "G-d's elbows!" and driving her family crazy.

--Key

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