WRITING VULGARITY

By Sam Griffith

For the past couple years, I have experienced a growing fascination with vulgarity. As writers, how should we write coarse language on the printed page? Do we transcribe word for word and censors be, um, darned? Do we skirt the issue by using phrases like, “John cursed loudly…”? Obviously, we each must find our own style, but it seems to me the former strategy is becoming more and more the norm. I wanted to know what that says about us, both as individuals and as a society.

An article I found early in my search by Katy Steinmetz (written for Time) delved into the science of why we swear. She writes that swearing helps us quickly communicate the intensity of our feelings. Not only that, swearing can trigger physical changes in our bodies: increased heart-rate, pores opening, pupils dilating. Swearing, it has been scientifically demonstrated, can help us handle pain. It was interesting reading, but it didn’t speculate on why we appear to be swearing more, or what that might mean.

Digging deeper, I found stories by Simon Worrall (interviewing Emma Byrne for National Geographic) and Matthew J.X. Malady (writing for Slate). Both articles talked about how vulgarity is changing. Historically, our vulgar words have commonly fallen into two categories: bodily functions (and the privacy of those functions) and religion. For centuries, religious vulgarity contained some of the most shocking phrases you could say (that’s why it’s called cursing). Today, we still have those phrases, but fewer people care. Meanwhile, a rise in the concept of personal privacy (which is really not more than a few hundred years old) saw an attendant rise in the power of swear words associated with those things that happen in private. These words took up the slack of our waning religious zeal, but even they are today being supplanted. Both articles mention a new category of vulgarity emerging: the vulgarity of sociological abuse, the language of bigotry.

Imagine two people. One goes around using the F word regularly in public. Another regularly uses racial slurs. Perhaps you feel neither is positive, but which of the two would you feel more comfortable being seen with? And it’s not just racial slurs. Malady’s article points to words like “retarded” or even “fat.” They pack a more powerful punch than they did even 20 years ago. People don’t often say them publicly without at least glancing about to see who may be listening.

So maybe it’s not that our society is more vulgar. Maybe our vulgarity is changing. As a writer, I’m sure I’ll continue to wrestle over what I want the printed page to say and how to best capture the language of our time. I encourage you all to check out these articles yourselves. There is a lot of interesting material I didn’t get the chance to go into at all, like how casual vulgarity among friends builds trust, or how chimpanzees taught themselves to curse.