Future Slang

…there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which could give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.
- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Basic Information

Slang has changed over time, and will continue to do so in the future. Having some future slang in your setting can add a touch of verisimilitude or just liven things up.

Related Tropes

• Buffy Speak
• Pardon My Klingon
• Unusual Euphemism

Opposed Tropes:

• Eternal English
• Slang Mangling
• Spock Speak
• Totally Radical

Sources

Bibliography

1. TV Tropes Wiki

Game and Story Use

• Most RPGs set Twenty Minutes Into The Future will already have a bit of slang built into them, even if it's just for new tech and character classes. Using this slang for your NPCs, and encouraging the players to use it, can help establish and reinforce the setting.
  • Even better is to extrapolate from it:
    • Add a few new slang words that have a similar sound or feel.
      • These don't need to be new tech or concepts, they can just be new ways of saying things people have always been saying.
    • Head off The Unpronounceable at the pass by finding an easy name for complicated things before your PCs do so.
    • Assign various slang terms to different social castes or circles.
    • Make heavy use of slang a part of your characterization of just one character.
  • Probably best to introduce this gradually. Just a little slang in the first session, and slightly more every week thereafter, so your players get eased into it.
    • And there's no need to go to the lengths that Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange
    • After all, the goal is to evoke the setting, not to make in-character communication nigh-impossible.
• In a Time Travel game, how you use language can be an important indicator of when the characters are, or when a character is from.
  • See also Time Travel Tense Trouble and Language Tropes.