Salted pepper bread

20190227

This snippet came in response to the shqpiel

sëhwi [sɯ.xʷi]

• 1) (Pejorative) Lawyer
• 2) A kind of salted pepper bread

Snippet:

Backstory of the bad salt pepper bread = rude word for lawyer thing:

This shoddy salted pepper bread is a basic ingredient in numerous Bep recipes. It tastes like crap but is nutritious, and with some trickery and water it can be made into numerous foods that allow people not to starve and their tastebuds not to perish. Seeing how the Big Nasty Empire (TM) was a big nasty empire, of course they wanted to squeeze the most money possible out of their oppressed provinces. They wound up driving the prices and taxes of/on salty pepper bread sky high, especially for outsourced miners, who worked far from home and really didn't have much of a choice other than to spend most of their livings buying shoddy but nutritious pepper bread. This rendered the stuff an expensive necessity people kind of didn't wanna have to rely on to begin with. Now, what's another expensive necessity people really don't wanna rely on to begin with? Lawyers. Since the Bep literally didn't know what lawyers were before the empire went plop down the drain, they ended up dubbing them after the similarly necessary but not so desired bread, both having a connotation of "forced bullshit". As time went on, the bread became less common and lawyers became more common, leading to the term's meaning of lawyer(slur) becoming dominant, and the original meaning being seldom used.

In Bep culture, lawyers are seen as doing very dirty work, and though it's sometimes necessary (and expensive) to hire them, people don't really want to unless they really must. However, the Bep greatly respect people doing dirty work, holding lawyers in high regard - and hence it's uncommon and unacceptable to speak rudely to them as lawyers. You can still criticize them as people of course. This, combined with the nasty inherited connotations of calling someone a lawyer, has lead to it being unacceptable to call a lawyer a lawyer and common to swear at not-lawyers by calling them lawyers, while lawyers instead take on the title of someone who duels with paper (also has pejorative connotations, but only when applied to or via domestic animals).