Thursday 26 September 2013

Public Profanities


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

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