Friday, September 30, 2011

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.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting what you said about song lyrics. I've been that mother,I'm afraid, but I've moved past it. My step son - all grown up now - once played me a song in which the entire chorus just goes "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck". He claims it saved his life during a hard stretch of his adolescence.

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  2. I love the way your characters swear. It's real and it flows - even if they aren't using words we'd consider cursing.

    I totally get you on the song lyrics. It's like the Pink song 'F**kin' Perfect'. On the radio, they've candied it up by taking out the key word and without the 'fuckin' in front of perfect, it loses the something. You're not just perfect, you're fuckin' perfect and don't ever let anyone tell you differently. So there. =o)

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  3. Ha, B.E., I was about to comment with a Pink song, too. One of my all-time favorite lines:
    "No, you can't pop into my shower. All I ask for is one fucking hour."
    She is the queen of the well-placed "Fuck!"

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  4. "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 is one of the things that makes you a great author! No, seriously. Unlike a song or a soundtrack, a written scene doesn't have the support of music to convey that "no other option." So mad props when you nail that emotional explosion.

    Now, B.E. and Jeffe have me thinking of lyrical uses of Fuck. Pink's more of a "fuck you" gal where Steven Tyler is a "let's fuck" sort of guy. A ROAR vs RAWR kind of comparison, I reckon.

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  5. You know, Kerry, I'm not a mom, so I totally got to dodge that bullet. :D My folks never tried to edit what my sister and I saw, read or heard. They were pretty up front 'look, people swear. Don't let us hear it coming out of your mouth'. They held that sex was a natural part of life (and that no one got to touch us without our permission, ever) but if we saw or read or heard something that made us uncomfortable, we should ask them about it. This worked beautifully until I turned 9 and my 7 year old sister and I walked in to ask my dad how babies are made. I can still see the oh shit expression on his face. It also meant I probably had more than my fair share of movie induced nightmares until I learned what I probably shouldn't watch...

    KAK - Oh, thank you! I am trying to be judicious in the whole swearing thing...but I'm with you. I have song lyrics running through my head now - all prominently featuring 'fuck' in one form or another.

    B.E. and Jeffe - How it's okay to bleep out 'fuck' in a song, but then turn around and play a hip hop song about all the blowjobs the singer gets is kinda odd. Our society is so weird. As for lyrics: NIN - 'Without you on my side, I haven't got fucking anything.' Yeah.

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  6. I would love to see your writer's notes on swearing - it's gotta be too much fun to make up your own!

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  7. YOU SAID: 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.

    YESSSSSSSS!

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