A fifteen year old boy has done something that inspired thousands around the world to send him vicious hate mail and death threats. Did he kill someone? Rape someone? Rape and kill someone? Kill and rape someone?
No. He stopped swearing. And he created a club for kids who wanted to stop swearing and were having a hard time of it.
Shit! Sometimes I think the world has gone completely insane. With all the serious stuff going on in the world, why would anyone take the time because some kid exercises his freedom of speech by choosing not to swear?
The current custom of most everybody using the formerly most forbidden profanity all the time is something that has come forward in my lifetime, and I believe it is mostly generated by the relaxing of standards of the media.
When I was a girl, back when dinosaurs such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson roamed the Earth, my parents never swore in front of us. I literally believed that my mother didn't know the meaning of 'the S word'. And in a Star Trek episode in which Capt. Kirk had to let his girlfriend die so that history would not be changed, I was shocked silly when the Captain said 'Let's get the hell out of here.' I didn't think swearing was allowed in Starfleet, not even in emergencies.
Back in those good old days, swearing meant something. When you finally let loose with one of them words, you were sure to attract shocked attention--- unless you were in the Navy or something. Now, if a nun were to say to you 'pass me the damn peas', you would have passed her the peas before you even noticed she was swearing if you noticed at all.
Those of us who are writers have to accept that our profession is part of the problem of the profanity explosion. To preserve swearing for future generations, we have to create some personal policies about swearing, particularly casual swearing, in our work.
In my own case, because of a personal reason which I have mentioned on this blog before, I probably am condemned to be published by secular publishers if at all. So that means swearing in my work is a possibility, though possibly not a requirement.
My current decision is to allow one swear-word per novel, max, and it will be in the first chapter or so. This will establish me as not-a-goody-two-shoes. Then I can write the rest of the book as clean as I want it to be, and no one will notice. Sneaky, eh?
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2 comments:
Sneaky indeed.
In my novels, if someone swears, it's usually for a reason: the hero's girl is kidnapped and the bad guy calls to gloat and threaten and hero calls him a bad word--then apologizes to the people around him after he's hung up. And, I confess, I have used puns of swear words, like when I had Hel, daughter of Loki, for a villainess.
Ah, crud. I already passed your limit of one in my last short story--they let me get away with three, if I remember, and it was a Christian publisher, too.
The protagonist of my current work doesn't swear except for a frequent "Ah, crud" when things go wrong. Others around her aren't so careful with their speech, though, I admit.
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