Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Smutty Mouthed Characters

Smutty Mouthed Characters.

Many writers have a sense that since smutty language is more or less the norm among many young people that, in order to portray realism, it needs to be used in prose to give a truthful ring to their character’s speech. No doubt there are some exchanges in dialogue where words like “shit” and the “F” word are realistic figures of speech…but it takes a skillful writer indeed to make them resonate, usually swimming in a context of dialogue with ethnic or young people’s speak/rap. In other words they have to be awash in the context that surrounds them. When this is not the case they tend to make the reader wince, shake their head and want to lay aside the piece.

When this is pointed out to a young writer they sometimes become defensive and think to themselves…who is this old cummudgeon, who is hopelessly out of touch with the everyday speech patterns of the younger generation?. As a consequence I generally refrain from commenting when I think a young writer would do well to tone down their verbiage.
Part of this I suppose is to avoid being called a Hypocrite….. Who is this old “flatulator,” criticizing me when he is writing a story about two people “fornicating” in the back of a farm cart….Give me a break…get real….He’s urinating prose, and doesn’t even have the decency to turn away from the road…and he objects to my use of the “F… Word” suggesting I substitute the word “Frack”…how lame is that?

I think you get the drift….As a matter of fact the word “frack” was used as a substitute for the “F” word in the Battle Star Galactica series and the woman that spoke it, over and over again got away with it….It was part of her character and used it repetitiously and after a while the listener (reader) tuned it out as an aspect of her character….that if you wanted to hear the story you had to accept the term as part of her speech patter. The writers to convey this used word “Frack” as a work around. It worked for me…and I could effortlessly make the mental substitution without the shrillness of a smutty word that did not fit the context…. However when coarse language springs suddenly out of left field it resonates poorly because it is outside the context of what is otherwise being written….think about it when you use obscene words and decide if it’s worth “discomforting” ninety-percent of the readers on the planet.

The same can be said about ethnic slurs…The “N” word is a classic example…Even though blacks often refer to one another by using it, unless you are a black writer, don’t go there. One of the great poets of all time Rudyard Kipling, used the N word in some of his Barrack room ballads. Rudyard was bi-racial. In his poem Gunga Din and in others he uses the N word and he has all but disappeared and faded away. Can you believe it…? In the poem I mentioned a crusty NCO is describing a water boy from the lowest caste in India and winds up bestowing on him the highest compliment on male can give to another….”…You’re a better man than I am Gunga Din.” Yet he is today seen as racist because he used the N word in some of his writings….When as a substitute teacher in a middle school, reading aloud some of his work, I had to take some editorial liberties on the fly…(Imagine the nerve of me, editing the work of Kipling) in showing them how the greatest poet of our times made the resonance of words trip from the lips and dance across a page….And now his work is stricken from the text book and he is all but forgotten….In his day it was not the word it is today…but it evolved into a term that epitomized political incorrectness…Ironic isn’t it? If there was ever a man who was racially tolerant to the core it was Kipling…and to be branded Racist for the use of a modern day pejorative term is heart breaking…gut wrenching is a better word….but I use this example to prove a point…some words are better left unspoken or unwritten