Love, Hate and Other Four Letter Words

Ridley Scott established that in space, no one can hear you scream. (Alien, 1979) In space, can anyone hear you swear?

In general, I have no objections to any word anywhere. It's along the lines of my own peculiar notion that there's no such thing as evil. There's only energy. What you do with it is good or bad. Words are the same to me. They're only a collection of letters to express an idea. What you do with that idea is what can turn something obscene into a thing of beauty or vice verse.

Given all of that, there are still times when a gal needs to pull all the stops and spew a long and steady stream of filth. Cause if she doesn't, she won't be able to cope with the monster in the hall. Studies have shown that swearing eases pain. Something about bottling up the emotion associated with stubbing the crap out of your toe (or breaking one kicking the door on accident when you meant to kick a cat toy...) increases the perception of pain. If swearing does indeed impact physiology, does that mean that there's a biological basis for having a potty mouth? And if there is, does that negate the cultural and societal disapproval of using profanity?

Regardless. When my mom read my first book, her first comment about the heroine? "She swears a lot." Yes. Yes, she does. I made sure she had reason. But you won't find a single swear word you'd recognize (except bitch which isn't really used as a swear word when it is describing a female animal of a particular species...maybe that's another debate). The nice thing and the hard thing about writing a scifi series wherein the cultures didn't originate on Earth is that these cultures will have developed their own swear words, their own turns of profane phrase. (Remember in your first language class how hard you worked to learn a few of the swear words? If *those* had shown up on tests, how many of us would have aced our high school language requirement?) I say it's a nice thing because I get to make up my own swear words. It's hard because I have to make up swear words that don't all sound the same.

Ultimately, whatever words end up spoken, it's all about emotion isn't it? My sister refuses to let my niece listen to certain musicians because of the 'bad words' in their lyrics. I *like* angry, explicit lyrics because of the stories I hear behind the words and because of the overwhelming emotion that drove those words out of someone in song. I love the sense that there are some things that simply cannot be communicated without the driving beat, the discordant musical line and THOSE specific words. It's something, if I'm going to use recognizable profanity in a story, I want to convey when my characters say the words. At that point in the conflict, I want them driven to swearing in such a way that nothing else could possibly have been done or said. That puts the onus on me to make sure I get the emotional pitch right. And that's damned hard.