Everybody's Doing It

The aforementioned Ray Banks and Jim Winter have put in their two cents on the use of profanity in fiction, and I figured, "What the heck, I'll chime in."

I like profanity--what Spock once called "colorful metaphors"--if used creatively. Anyone can curse just to curse or to give in to peer pressure. I consider myself lucky to be part of a very close family. My favorite thing to do after school was go home. My parents didn't know English-language curses, so they couldn't pass them on to us. In fact, the first time I cursed at my parents--age six, not in any context, just to see what effect the words would have--I washed my own mouth out with soap.

One of my criteria is that profanity has to sound cool. There's a knack to delivering it for full effect: George Carlin has it; Bruce Willis has it; I don't have it on an everday basis, but I have summoned it up in performance.

Mostly I use it with my college students to belie a mild-mannered, academic exterior. And it works; it shocks them; it delivers my message. It wouldn't do any of these if I cursed every day.

So you'll find few curses in my writing; always, I hope, well placed. I often see it as a fun challenge to deliver the intensity and emotion of a curse, using any words but that curse.

And then, as demonstrated in RISKY BUSINESS, there are times you just gotta say, "What the fuck."

My favorite TV bleep job, from TOP GUN:

Iceman: You are still dangerous. You can be my wingman anytime.
Maverick: What? You could be mine.

"What" in this instance is copied-and-pasted from a line not by Tom Cruise, but by Tim Robbins as Maverick's replacement RIO, Merlin:

Maverick: I'm gonna bring him in closer, Merlin.
Merlin: You're gonna do what?