In Defense of Profanity

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”  -Mark Twain

                The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of words and things…

The English language has no shortage of synonyms for just about any word.  Take, for example, a simple word like “blow.”  As a verb, it means the movement of air:  blowing out candles, the wind blowing briskly.  It also has another (subversive) meaning as a verb…  As a noun, it becomes slang for cocaine.  It can also be mutated as a noun to become an insulting way to refer to someone who talks a big game, but doesn’t follow through – blowhard. 

Pick almost any common word in the American lexicon, and you will find that it has multiple meanings.   (The multiple meanings plus the random usage rules and idioms make English one of the hardest languages to learn.)  And as a teacher of writing, I am constantly telling students to carefully consider their diction – to choose a colorful, descriptive word, not just some boring version.  So how can I advocate the use of profanity, when swearing is (arguably) just a lazy way of presenting ideas?  Because cursing is sometimes exactly what you need to express what you feel.

Case and point:  “Shit.”  As Stephen King pointed out in On Writing, you don’t say that a character is excusing him- or herself to defecate, when what you want to say is that he or she is going to take shit.  It’s not the same thing.  I mean, I know, it’s the “same thing,” but it doesn’t send the same message.  If you’re writing in vernacular (common-people language) then you should write like people talk.  Only a certain type of person talks about bodily functions with cute little euphemisms.  They don’t pee, they “tinkle”; you know the type of person I’m talking about. 

And speaking of shit, when you drop the end of the couch on your foot or step on a jagged rock with bare feet, what do you shout?  “Drat!”  “Fiddlesticks!”  “Dang!”  or … “HOLY SHIT!”  ?  It doesn’t matter than the pain is neither holy nor shit.  It just feels good to shout profanity.  Somehow it makes the pain less in control.

And on the subject of things not being holy, when I call something a god damn mess, I don’t mean that I want GOD to DAMN the mess or mean to imply that GOD has (at some point) DAMNED the mess.  It’s just a phrase; no deeper meaning is necessary.  I am not insulting anyone’s god; I’m not trying to be inappropriate.  Sometimes words, like shit, just happen.   

So what’s the big deal with using profanity?  Why are some people so repulsed and offended by certain words?  They are, after all, just WORDS!  Language has power only if we give it power.  My favorite example is the mother of all swear words – the one which functions as every single part of speech.  Why are people so taken aback by a word which permeates society?  I bought a friend of mine a shirt at a Fishbone concert that says “Fuck Racism” on the front of it.  People are more offended by the Fuck than by the fact that Racism is alive and well in America.  Now that’s offensive. 

So you’ll excuse me if my writing or my vocabulary sometimes ventures into the gray area of decency.  Or not.  Because as long as we are more offended by stupid fucking words than we are about civil rights infringements or partisan politics or racial profiling or stupidity in general, there is no hope for humanity anyway.  We should take the time to care about things that really matter, not what adjectives, verbs, and nouns people use to express themselves.