Swearing off

N.B.:  Because this post is about bad language, it contains bad language.  If you're sensitive to such things, be thou forewarned.

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It's no real secret that I swear a lot.

I recall my mom trying to shame me out of using expletives when I was a teenager.  It didn't work.  Part of the problem was having a dad and a (maternal) uncle who had an amazing and creative command of swear words.  The fact of not being able to cure either her husband or her brother of swearing should have alerted her to the futility of her efforts, but it never seemed to slow her down any.

One of the things she used to say to me was the old saw, "Using that kind of language just shows you don't have the brains to find better words to use."  With the passage of years I've come to realize that despite my fondness for the f-word, there's nothing in particular wrong with my cognitive abilities.  I just find that -- used judiciously, and with an awareness of appropriate context -- it can liven things up considerably.

I thought the whole idea of swearing in fiction would make an interesting topic for this week's Fiction Friday.  In fictional settings, the "context" thing becomes even more important.  Off-color words should be reflective of the character, time, and place, and shouldn't be used to excess, but in that respect they're no different than any other stylistic feature; like humor, or violence, or sex scenes, or whatnot, it can be used skillfully or clumsily.  Overused, swear words completely lose their emotional punch (the last thing an author wants).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Me, I tend to use swear words in my fiction for one of two reasons; to dial up the emotional intensity, or for humorous effect.  The example of the latter that always comes to mind is the character of the Head Librarian of the Library of Timelines, Fischer (don't remind him that his first name is Archibald unless you want to face his ire), from my time-travel novel Lock & Key.  I wanted to create a character who completely messed around with the stereotype of a librarian, so I made him a long-haired twenty-something who loves 90s grunge music, and has a vocabulary for which the word "salty" is an understatement.  The repartee between him, the meek, soft-spoken main character Darren Ault, and Fischer's unflappable, ultra-competent personal assistant Maggie Carmichael, is some of the most fun I've ever had in writing.  This scene occurs just after Fischer whisks Darren back to the Library from fourteenth-century Norway, just before he was about to get chopped into mincemeat by a guy with a sword:

"God damn!" Darren screamed, and backed into a file cabinet, upsetting a precarious stack of manila folders.  The entire pile slithered to the ground, dumping its contents all over the floor and startling Ivan the tomcat, who gave an annoyed hiss and trotted out of the room, every whisker radiating disapproval.

"Good afternoon to you, too," Fischer said, from his seat behind his desk, and then looked him up and down.  "You’re filthy."

"Oh, don’t even start with me."  Darren glared at Fischer.  He was still clutching the wooden box to his chest as if it were a shield.

"Whoa, you’re a little grumpy.  Who pissed in your cornflakes?"

"I haven’t had any cornflakes.  All I’ve had is tasteless porridge, and dumplings that are like compressed tasteless porridge balls, and dried fish that has too much taste, if you get my drift, and I haven’t even had a decent cup of coffee in days, and a Norwegian guy with a sword just tried to chop my head off, and if you’re planning on getting me to change my clothes and sending me off to Kentucky without having a good night’s sleep in a real bed, then you can go fuck yourself!"

Fischer’s pale eyebrows rose.  "I don’t think I’ve heard you swear before.  I didn’t know you knew how."

He goggled at Fischer for a moment, and then screamed, "Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"

Maggie appeared in the door of the office, and she looked at him, mild surprise registering in her eyes.  "Ah, Mister Ault, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.  I suggest you pay close attention to Fischer’s command of the art of the curse word.  He’s a master."  She paused.  "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

Maybe it's just me, but that scene wouldn't have been nearly as funny if I'd figured out how to write it without swear words.

An amusing aside about Lock & Key.  I was at a book signing a while back, and a woman came up and said, "I read your book Lock & Key, and I liked it, but the character of the Librarian sure does use the f-bomb a lot."

I deadpanned, "I know.  I tried to talk to him about it, and he told me to fuck off."

Well, at least I thought it was hilarious.

So like all other words in the English language, the key is in knowing how to use them.  There's no virtue in avoiding bad words in fiction just because they're bad.  In fact, sometimes not using them is the worse choice.  I know a guy who wrote an (otherwise wonderful) novel about military men in the 1940s, and he is such a prude that he made all of them have squeaky-clean vocabularies -- and there was no mention of sex.  Ever.  The story's good, but the characters come across as artificially sanitized, so the whole thing feels a little off.

As I said earlier, use the vocabulary that is appropriate to that time, place, and character.  Salty language is like actual salt; don't go overboard with it, but used sparingly, it can really improve the flavor of a story.

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As I've mentioned before, I love a good mystery, which is why I'm drawn to periods of history where the records are skimpy and our certainty about what actually happened is tentative at best.  Of course, the most obvious example of this is our prehistory; prior to the spread of written language, something like five thousand years ago, most of what we have to go by is fossils and the remnants of human settlements.

Still, we can make some fascinating inferences about our distant ancestors.  In Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgely, we find out about some of the more controversial ones -- that there are still traces in modern languages of the original language spoken by the earliest humans (Rudgely calls it "proto-Nostratic"), that the advent of farming and domestication of livestock actually had the effect of shortening our average healthy life span, and that the Stone Age civilizations were far more advanced than our image of "Cave Men" suggests, and had a sophisticated ability to make art, understand science, and treat illness.

None of this relies on any wild imaginings of the sort that are the specialty of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin, and Giorgio Tsoukalos; and Rudgely is up front with what is speculative at this point, and what is still flat-out unknown.  His writing is based in archaeological hard evidence, and his conclusions about Paleolithic society are downright fascinating.

If you're curious about what it was like in our distant past, check out Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Honest vulgarity

*Note to the more sensitive members of the studio audience: as the subject of this post is profanity, there's gonna be some profane language herein.  Be thou forewarned.*

My dad had a rather ripe vocabulary, probably largely due to the 29 years he spent in the Marine Corps.  My mother, on the other hand, was strait-laced to the point that even saying the word "sex" in her presence resulted in a raised eyebrow and the Fear-Inducing Stare of Disapproval.  My dad solved this problem by inventing new swear words (such as "crudbug") or repurposing actual words for swearing (such as "fop").  When my mom would get on my dad's case about it, he would respond, completely deadpan,"Those aren't vulgar words, Marguerite," which was true in detail if not in spirit.

It's probably obvious by this juncture that I take after my dad a lot more than my mom.  I tend to have a pretty bad mouth, a habit I have to be careful about because my job involves guiding Tender Young Minds (although I think I could make a pretty good case that most of those Tender Young Minds have a worse vocabulary than I do).  But by this point in my life, my mom's litany of "the only people who need to use vulgar language are the ones who don't have any better words in their vocabulary to say" is ringing pretty hollow.  I may have a lot of faults, but I'm damn sure that a poor vocabulary is not amongst them.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I tend to use swear words on two occasions -- for the humor value, and when I'm mad.  And to me, those are two very valid instances in which to let fly.  I still recall the great jubilation I felt when as a graduate student I first ran across John J. McCarthy's seminal paper on the linguistics of swearing, "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," in which we find out the rules governing inserting the word "fucking" into another word, and thus why it's okay to say "abso-fucking-lutely" but no one says "ab-fucking-solutely."

Even more cheering was the paper I just read yesterday by Gilad Feldman, Huiwen Lian, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell called "Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty" in which we find out that habitual swearers tend to be more honest, and which also should be the winner of the 2017 Clever Academic Paper Title Award.  The authors write:

There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty.  These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes and are often considered to be positively related.  On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty.  In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab, then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook, and finally with profanity and integrity indexes for the aggregate level of U.S. states.  We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and with higher integrity at the society level.

Besides the general finding that profanity is positively correlated with honesty, I thought the variation in profanity use state-by-state was absolutely fascinating.  Connecticut had the highest levels of swearing, followed by Delaware, New Jersey, Nevada, and New York (not too goddamn shabby, fellow New Yorkers, and I'm proud to have done my part in our state's fifth-place finish).  Utah came in dead last, followed by Arkansas, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee.  One has to wonder if religiosity has something to do with this, given the bible-belt status of most of the states at the bottom of the pile, but establishing any sort of causation was beyond the scope of this study.

Okay, so I'm coming across as self-congratulatory here, but I still think this research is awesome.  Given the amount of grief I got from my mom about my inappropriate vocabulary when I was a teenager, I think I'm to be allowed a moment of unalloyed pleasure at finding out that I and other habitual swearers are more likely to be honest.  So while I'll still have to watch my mouth at school, it's nice to know that my turning the air blue at home when I wallop my shin on the coffee table is just my way of honestly expressing that bone bruises hurt like a motherfucker.

&%$#@*&!

Note:  because this post is about swearing, it contains some swear words.  Be thou forewarned.

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I sometimes use some "strong language" in this blog, and every once in a while someone will comment on it.  I try not to make it gratuitous, but there are times when the only intensifier that seems appropriate is one that is... inappropriate.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For example, I ended my post on the people using Robin Williams's suicide to score philosophical points with the phrase "shut the fuck up."  Could I have phrased it another way?  Sure.  But my opinion (and opinion it is) is that writing is an art form, for which language is the tool.  A writer uses his/her words to effect a response in the reader -- curiosity, anger, understanding, sadness, laughter, or any of a thousand other possibilities.  A careful writer therefore has to choose words that have punch and clarity.  And I would argue that there is no phrase that could be substituted for "shut the fuck up" that has the same dagger-like stab at the heartless individuals who were the subject of that post.

It's a fine line, though.  Swearing can become a habit.  When I was at the University of Washington, I fell in amongst a group of graduate students for whom swearing and obscenity peppered every conversation.  Simple statements were laden with all manner of bad language; you didn't "have to go to class," you "fuckin' had to go to class."  It was all too easy to fall in with that habit to fit in, and for a time I hardly uttered a phrase that didn't have some kind of inappropriate word in it.

And in this context, the word "inappropriate" is exactly the right descriptor.  It was gratuitous, unnecessary, used only to show how Tough and Modern and Rebellious the speaker was.  It added nothing, gave no emotional zing to the language.  It was a filler, no more laden with meaning than "uh" and "um" and "know what I mean?"

It's significant, of course, that so many swear words have sexual connotations, because let's face it: Americans have a hangup about sex.  But I think that labeling of words as "appropriate" or "inappropriate," "clean" or "obscene" goes far deeper than that.

The reality is, whether any language use is appropriate or inappropriate is contextual.  I discuss this at length in my Critical Thinking classes, starting with an example a little like my use of the f-bomb in my post two days ago.  I play for the class the song "Some Nights" by the band Fun, in which there is no "bad language" until the very end:

Five minutes in and I'm bored again
Ten years of this, I'm not sure if anybody understands
This one is not for the folks at home;
Sorry to leave, mom, I had to go,
Who the fuck wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?

The song is about war -- something that is not completely apparent unless you watch the music video.  But I would argue that that single use of a swear word turns that last line into a sucker punch, and the lyrics would have less emotional impact by the use of any other word.

As an illustration of how "inappropriateness" is completely contextual, another thing we discuss is the episode from Seinfeld called "The Bet."  In this famous episode, which may be the best-known one in the entire series, Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George make a bet over which of them can go the longest without masturbating.  Throughout the entire show, not once does any character use the word "masturbate" or any of its synonyms.  Although the whole show is about a topic that people like the eminent prude Brent Bozell would find distasteful and obscene, the censors couldn't find any legitimate reason to stop it from airing, or even anything to bleep out.

Was "The Bet," in fact, obscene?  The difficulty of answering that question was summed up in 1964 in the case Jacobellis vs. Ohio, which was about whether the movie The Lovers was obscene and deserved to be banned.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in the majority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

We like everything to fit in neat little boxes with labels.  Words are either appropriate, or they're not; movies, television shows, books, and music are either obscene, or they're not.  Predictably, the reality is much more complex than that.  The impact that any media has on the person consuming it is always contextual, depending on the intent and skill of the person who created the media, and the background, attitudes, intelligence, and sensitivity of the person consuming it.  There are people who have been offended by my occasional use of a "bad word" here on Skeptophilia, and others who have applauded it; only to be expected, when every reader brings a different perspective to a piece of writing.

But I'm not going to apologize for occasionally offending.  As a writer both of essays and fiction, I try to use language with what skill I have, and am careful when choosing words that I know carry a lot of weight.  Sometimes what I intend is for the reader to have a visceral reaction -- whether that reaction is outrage, or a belly laugh from surprise.  If I've achieved that end, I've succeeded, even if I sometimes use a word that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap when I was ten years old.