Currently reading Umei no Mai’s Impact. Chapter 23 has a pretty interesting reinterpretation of shab:
“So, you’ve probably only heard ‘shab’ as an insult,” Seire says conversationally, “but it’s a forging term; technically it means a flaw, and ‘shabiir’ means to induce a flaw. Because, in a piece of armour that you have made from scratch, if there’s something wrong with it, it’s because you made it wrong.”
Oh. Ooh, that gives teeth to ‘shabuir’ as an insult.
“More metaphorically, this gets referred to people with ‘shabla’,” Seire continues, “but when it’s a piece of armour, the correct word is ‘shabyc’. It has a flaw; it is flawed. Unreliable. Untrustworthy. Likely to break at exactly the wrong moment and get the person depending on it killed.”
And oh wow, I rather like that. Like that a lot, actually. I love the look into “what might this term mean in a language and culture that is Mandalorian, not Anglophone” and that’s very much along the same tracks I’ve attempted to take with Mando’a myself.
Only. Now what to do with all the (many and varied) Fando’a words I’ve previously collected that have interpreted shab as “fuck,” also with the sexual sense? Back to the forge it is, I guess…
