Quote:
Originally Posted by Acolyte
The point that the APG makes a little better than the core rules is that Seraphim find any kind of doubletalk, nonliteralness, and belief in the fictitious (like reality TV) distasteful, even if none of those are actual lies. Engaging in those behaviors comes so close to skirting the dissonance line that Seraphim don't like to do even that (although they can and do when the need arises). This thread is about how close profanity falls to that line in our own perceptions of the way the gameworld works.
Put another way, a Seraph actually lying is playing Russian Roulette, priming himself for a Fall if he keeps playing. Doubletalk and metaphorical speech aren't as directly dangerous, but they are like constantly handling and moving and walking around with loaded guns with the safeties off. Seraphim (and angels in general when it comes to even risking dissonance, poor Ofanim aside) sensibly prefer not to store their guns unloaded, if that makes sense.
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I feel like profanity is probably one of the safest forms of nonliteral speech, actually, because it has an anti-euphemistic quality; it's what people say when they're not censoring themselves - when they're acting like Seraphim, you might say. Generally speaking, "John's an a******" is a more honest statement than "John can be bad at first impressions sometimes," even though the latter is literally true and the former isn't.
But then my presumption is that when you say "well, Grandma's very old-fashioned" when you're thinking
Grandma is a racist, a Seraph knows and disapproves, even though, hey, being racist certainly is a way of being old-fashioned. This is at odds with canon to some extent, which says that Seraphim tend to be inclined towards technically-true dissembling, but. So on this level, I'd actually say that the Most Holy answer "How are you doing?" literally, even if social practice is to treat it as "Hello," because "How are you doing?" can also function as a literal question, and the "Hello" version relies on the illusion that the asked party can, if she likes, detail how she's doing. Likewise, "thank you" can be read as a non-doxastic statement, but it doesn't function unless people can believe that it
means that the speaker actually does, subjectively, feel gratitude.
By contrast, it's unclear what "my name is Isabel" would
mean other than "people call me Isabel," and certainly there are languages that don't make the distinction ("me llamo Isabel.") Classifying one as a lie and one as a truth seems to be like saying that you aren't a professional boxer, just someone whose main source of income is fighting in public boxing matches for entertainment. You could define "name" to mean "what's on file at the government offices," but not all societies have such things and we don't label the phoneme strings members of such societies use to refer to each other as something other than names.
Of course it could be that Seraphim
are weirdo prescriptivists who, because they don't have a natural facility with human language, are basically assigning a private meaning to each English (or whatever) word according to its closest Angelic equivalent, rather than according to the idiosyncratic actual practice of native speakers. So maybe, say, Angelic has concepts corresponding very closely to
eros,
philia,
agape, and so on, and none to the broad range of meanings we'd call "love," and Seraphim learning English assign the word "love" to just one of them, and when you say "I sure do love chicken soup," the Seraph (its Resonance not up) does a double-take and says "surely you mean you
like chicken soup?" But Seraphim actually seem like the angels least likely to do this - they're the ones who can observe human language use the most directly.