I hear you. I’m no prude, but I don’t become more enamored with a work because it includes swearing. I find the swearing to get in the way of the meaning. You are right that it can provide emphasis and tone-context where some is needed. But remember when Pulp Fiction came out? All the swearing was considered hip and cool and part of the big Tarantino storytime that we all seemed to like. Then it got tired.
Same with the kids’ book Go the Fuck to Sleep. Cool, at first. But who is going to read that story to their kids? Only people who want to have those words repeated back to them by the toddler, that’s who, which is nobody on the planet. So the swearing, while soooooometimes cool and useful in literary works, often is just detritus that you have to kick out of the way so you can get to the heart of matters.
For these books? I haven’t read them and probably won’t. I do agree with the sentiment to take a longer range view and not place too much emphasis on the feelings of the moment. That message has been around for a long time; how do you think we got Buddhism?
This is quite a, middle-class? perspective. I know people, men and women, who include cuss words in almost every sentence, and so do the people they talk to. It’s not considered at all jarring or offensive. And they’re certainly not at all doing it to seem cool or whatever. It’s just part of the everyday vocabulary.
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How bourgeois. I was talking about lit-ri-chure and cultcha. But more to the point, what you are talking about is speech. I’m talking about movies and books and the effect of trying to capture casual speech in those media. It can work. It can also not work, for reasons I outlined. I have a whole side of the family who’d go, wtf? if I mentioned the book from the OP. Or if I mentioned that I post stuff online on BB. When I tell them about what I do for a living, they go, “mmm allllright.” LOL.
Swearing sometimes has a way of cutting right to the truth of things:
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Thanks. That is fucking fantastic.
Everything is better when done in a British accent!
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I’m not really sure how to interpret this anecdote as a response to my post. Are you saying ADD isn’t real and my symptoms are imaginary?
I’m saying that there is very little structure “add” as a monolithic disorder, and on top of that, someone with a teaching certificate is making medical diagnoses on my child which is terrifying considering what she had planned for my child.
I empathize with your state by the way, and hope you find recourse.
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