"Are Curses Necessary In Literature?" or "Mother-Fucking Swear Words, Yo!"

[Seil]

Now, here's the thing:



And he was created by Stan Lee and martin Goodman and drawn first (I think) by Jack Kirby. So there's that. But anyway, on to racial humor and white guilt.



Now I love comedians. I love, love, love comedians. I really take heart with the idea of making people laugh, leading them in to looking at something from a different point of view, and getting paid to talk. I think that's cool, and I've got mild anthropophobia.

I just think that hanging out and telling people your point of view is cool But it's like Christopher Titus says:

Originally Posted by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvINZZnEJCU

And don't get me wrong, I wanna hear your pain... just, for God's sake, just put it in joke form, that's all.

Here's the topic at hand; swear words. Do they increase the effect of a given statement? Do they emphasize a mother-fucking point? Are they part of the common vernacular? Why the double standard of letting some people use them and others not? Where do we draw the line at swearing? Why do we associate swearing with the lower class? Can swearing be used in "civilized" conversations?

Why do we swear?
Who invented swear words?
Why did they catch on?
Why do we call them 'swear' words?

Time for some mother-fucking research, y'all.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I swear in formal presentations and at weddings. I use it as punctuation. People who are offended by swearing are the types of people who I would be a bad person if I wasn't offending thus they should be used at every occasion.

[Seil]

I need a comment from one that which who doesn't isn't drunk.

[Amake]

If I have kids, I want to teach them they're not allowed to swear unless and until they don't need to. A swear jar with actually noticeable fees should help foster the right mind set: That the more you swear, the less valuable your swear words become. And when you can't just say fuck whenever you feel like it cause half your allowance is at stake, you're forced to develop a more nuanced and varied language to express the degree of intensity of your emotional state and whatnot. Swearing seems like an easy shortcut, but it can so easily become a crutch that limits your linguistic mobility.

Me, I've developed a bad habit of swearing on the Internet, but at least in real life conversation I've only cursed once in the last 14 or 15 years. Might have been over 20 years since my friend had heard me swear until this time a couple of months back. And you can bet your liver she noticed. I don't mean to brag when I say I blew her fucking mind hole with this one word.

And that, in my opinion, is what swearing is for. When I choose to swear I aim for effect. Goosebumps. Widened eyes. Traffic stopping all over the city and time resting like an arrow on a drawn bow. Kind of like when WWI soldiers didn't use the word fuck in a sentence.

[PyrosNine]

In terms of literature, curses aren't entirely neccessary, but to go without them one is deprived of a powerful set of wordtools that have specific, cultural, emphatic meaning.

A bad writer might be crude unnecessarily, but a character who has up to this point been fairly clean mouthed suddenly dropping an F-Bomb? now the reader sees that this is something really, really troubling for the character, without needing a dumb

"He frowned, he didn't like this."

added in.

Some words are lingo, slang, culturally specific: Someone who yells out bollocks is someone a lot different than someone who says motherfucker. And someone who says it as "mutha fucka" is someone else entirely!

It can't be profanity for profanity's sake, but used in the proper time and in the proper way, a swear word is just as useful as any other, if not moreso.

[CABAL49]

Course it is. It irks the Baptists and that's okay with me. Gotta be a rebel yo.

[Flarecobra]

Only when it is approprate.

[Locke cole]

A well-placed profanity can make a sentence really work and convey an emotion quite powerfully. I will admit that I quite often run into situations where I can't really think of how best to say something without a profanity, though I try not to use it when possible.

The key is "well-placed". Profanities can hold a lot of meaning, but if you throw them out all over the place, it cheapens the effect. It's like hat thing where if you say a word over and over again, it stops sounding like a word. It loses its meaning.

[Shyria Dracnoir]

Swear words and other oaths, when carefully used, can be good tools of characterization and add verisimilitude to written language for reasons others have stated above. When used incautiously, you and your characters come off as 13-year olds who've just discovered Youtube comments.

[synkr0nized]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486585/



No, this is actually relevant. Some of those interviewed are all for swearing, and others are very much against it. What it did for me, despite not really making much of a point on its own, was emphasize how silly "fake swears" and the like sound when you are very angry or frustrated or otherwise passionate enough to be forcing a point or yelling / raising your voice. It only, for me, strengthens the usefulness of swear words to emphasize the weight of a situation.

But, at the same time, I use them casually enough that they also don't mean much in regular conversation. So it's really more of a "what is synk's tone" than "oh shit that's a swear word being used", but at the same time taking "that tone" and tossing in a "silly poop face" instead of "fucking asshole" or whatever would just cut its impact in half.