Public Profanities
I’ve touched on the use of language, but how about bad
language? I don’t mean badly spoken English, I mean profanities, words that are
not used often in polite company, but are sometimes used to give emphasis to an
idea or emotion. Until recently, it was considered bad form, and even controversial
to put too many swear words into a book, or TV show.
In this day and age though, it is quite normal to have this
kind of language prevalent in literature, depending on the audience, of course.
You can’t have Roger Red Hat going to see Billy Blue Hat and telling him, “Get
your fxxxing hands off Jennifer Yellow Hat, She’s my fxxxing bxxxh!” can you? Some
teenage novels have started to use this coarse diction as a way to appeal to
their audience. But again most of the time it’s only to emphasise an idea or
emotion. If that’s what the teenage novels are doing, then what are the adult
novels doing? Is it just gratuitous or is there a point to that much of the
vulgar tongue? I admit I have used swear words in my novels on more than one
occasion, but that’s usually to embolden a bad temper, or to emphasise a crass
character. But are we too comfortable with it now? Is it something we should
embrace and allow to grow as an acceptable part of our language, or do we try
to stem the tide as it were? As a child, I was smacked for using the mildest of
swear words, (and without getting into a debate about how to discipline
children) but now I hear kids at ridiculously young ages using words I hadn’t heard
of when I was their age. Is this due to adults like us relaxing our attitude
towards this language and allowing it to flourish? Or is it because they now
have access to much more of it than we did?
What do you think? Were you punished for swearing? Do you
swear a lot? Is it now acceptable to use it in day to day conversation? Or is
there too much, and we now need to do something about it? Let me know what you
think. Read, follow, comment and enjoy. M x
No comments:
Post a Comment