Janie over at
The Write Stuff has written a very strong piece on
The Power of Words and Need for Restraint.
It concerns the use of certain words that some people deem objectionable. Janie did not mention these words directly, and in the comments on the piece all commenters were scrupulous about not mentioning the words directly.
However. This is my blog. It is intended for a mature audience. I am not in favour of tip-toeing around the topic, and therefore if you are offended by strong language I advise you to stop reading now.
I am in disagreement with much of what Janie had to say. Each writer has a style. Each writer writes in a specific way. As such, I find it difficult to accept any argument that attempts to say how a writer "ought" to write.
The "ought" in this case, is the proposition that a writer "ought not" to use vulgar language. The specific word in this case was "cunt". Janie subscribed to a blog that used "cunt" in the title of a post. Now, at this point I do actually agree. It was probably quite tactless to use that word in the title of the post. I've tried to avoid using cunt until I was certain I'd got past my Feedburner preview limit (since my feed appears on Facebook and other places).
To my mind, the call for an author to "know their audience" does not mean pandering to the objections of the masses. If you are trying to target a specific audience then yes, you have to write what that audience will like. But for a writer who writes to express their own personality, the only person they have to know is themselves. They may find that they have a following, but in this case the audience found the author. Therefore the audience doesn't have a right to dictate the author's output. More to the point, a writer who only ever writes to the limited range of what has previously proven popular for them is a writer not stretching themselves.
Nor am I convinced that just because blogs are accessible to a mass audience that they should err on the side of caution and use the most conservative language. Blogs are available to a mass audience. But so are novels. A library is as accessible as the internet, if not
more accessible. I do not see why a blog should have to abide by a rule that a book would not. Certainly if the blog advertises itself as for general consumption, as family friendly, then that sort of language ought not to be acceptable. But you would not find Ian McEwan's
Atonement (whose plot device hinges upon use of the word "cunt") in the children's section of a library.
A skilled writer may be able to convey ideas without swearing. But swear words are a part of our language, available as part of the writer's toolkit. A skilled painter can make do without green paint, but I do not know a single artist who would artificially constrain themselves by refusing to use that particular pigment.
Perhaps the part of Janie's piece I had the most disagreement with was something that
d.challener mentioned in his comment - the concept that the writer, although not from the United States, ought to have been more aware of the cultural sensitivities of the US audience, through checking their site stats. Firstly, the writer was not American, and made no concessions to US sensitivities. If the majority of the readership was from the US, then surely they were attracted to the blog by how refreshingly different it was, how unlike other US blogs it was?
The example was given that feigning ignorance of foreign laws is not an excuse when in that country.
True, but that analogy is inapposite. Had the writer strayed on to someone else's blog and used the word cunt in violation of the personal standards of that blog, then yes, claiming ignorance of those standards would be no defence. But a US visitor to a non-US blog who complains about the content of that blog (content acceptable under the standards of the blogger's own culture), is like a US holiday-maker visiting a foreign country, then complaining that things aren't like they are in the US.
d.challener said it better than I could:
"It is a conceit almost unique to we Americans that people must go out of their way to avoid offending us."Now, I want to move on to a more general thought I have had about words we find offensive. I am thinking of words that are pure "swear words", so I am ignoring racial epithets for these purposes. I would classify "swear words" as words whose very utterance is sufficient to cause shock and offence. Within "swear words" I believe there are three categories:
Profanities - words such as damn, hell, Jesus Christ (when used as an exclamation) etc. These words are profane, in that they profane something sacred. Once they were the worst kind of swearing (as they imperilled the soul). In a more secular society, these words are relatively tame, and some are widely accepted as normal.
Dirty words - for example piss, dick, cock, pussy. These I believe are dirty because they deal with the unclean (piss) or with morally unclean parts of the body (dick, pussy). These are "swear words" because they deal with the unclean in an immature manner. They are the language of the playground.
Vulgarities - for example fuck, shit, bastard and cunt. These are the worst category of swear words, as can be seen by the reaction to them.
The question we have to ask is why? It is their "vulgarity" that makes them offensive, but we forget what is vulgar about them.
"Bastard" is offensive because it was a legal term. It meant you were illegitimate, and therefore unable to inherit property, titles and land. To call someone a bastard was therefore something quite bad; it implied a level of unworthiness. Since those likely to inherit anything several hundred years ago would have been upper class, a claim that they were a bastard made them quite "vulgar".
The other words are an interesting type of vulgarity. Shit, fuck and cunt all come from Anglo-Saxon roots. They were normal, acceptable, every day words. Until the Norman invasion.
The Normans took over England. They became the landed gentry. The "polite" society. Anglo-Saxons, the native population, became the Serf class. Those Saxon earls allowed to keep their lands and titles adapted to the Norman regime. They spoke the Norman language. To slip back into Anglo-Saxon would be a reminder of how "vulgar" they were. As shit, fuck and cunt are words that deal with "dirty" subjects, to mention them in the language of the Serfs was doubly shocking, and very, very vulgar.
"Cunt" and variants are found in English still. There used to be a street in London called Gropecunt Lane, famed for its prostitutes. A variant of "cunt" appears in Chaucer's
Canterbury TalesFor some of these words, their "shocking" nature is due to accidents of history, and reasons commonly forgotten.
"Politeness" represents an invader, an enslaver. That which is "vulgar" belongs to the oppressed, the enslaved. Perhaps it is time to reclaim fuck and cunt. To object to these is akin to Ancient Egyptians objecting to Hebrew, or Antebellum Southerners objecting to Negro Spirituals.
