“I want to see eight thousand words. Printable words. I still remember that essay you wrote when the Beast got elected. I do not want to see the word ‘fuck’ typed eight thousand times again.”- Warren Ellis,Transmetropilitan.
The law of profanity is one of the most controversial, the most ambiguous and the least understood of the laws affecting freedom of expression. The problem is the difficulty in reaching any sort of consensus about which words are so harmful to society that their production and distribution should be punishable under the criminal law. Attitudes are bound to differ greatly between people of different age, class and creed.
While swearing is primarily meant to convey connotative or emotional meaning, the meanings of the words themselves are primarily construed as connotative. Contradicting literary ethics;swearing is superficially understood, masking its deeper and more complex communicative function.
Swearing in blog doesn’t prove your theory
Swearing in blog post is propositional,else intentional.Propositional swearing is consciously planned and intentional in this case, the speaker controls the content of the utterance. Within instances of propositional swearing, there is much overlap with research on linguistic impoliteness and rudeness. Propositional swearing can be polite or impolite, or potentially neither. It is polite when it promotes social harmony, as in face building .
Propositional swearing confirms the anxiety of the writer;and remains profoundly rude;when used to vent lame emotional rants. Cursing is an emotional element of language that alters the way we view ourselves and others. The aggressive person learns aggressive curse words and uses them to express his/her aggression towards others.
Swearing in blog is literary impotence.
Swearing is influenced by pragmatic variables such as the conversational topic, the speaker-listener relationship, including gender, occupation, and status, and the social-physical setting of the communication with respect to whether the swearing takes place in a public or private location, and the level of formality of the occasion.In the world of blogging,demographic variables may be irrelevant.The complex relationship between how bloggers write and how they feel about writing is a measure in itself;and “the measure itself” is less important than what it uncovers.
Basic writers are conditioned to dislike writing.
Writing is the writer’s form of activism.On the web,your writing is constantly evaluated. Basic writers rarely have a clear sense of intention or direction when they compose. Instead they tend to connect their ideas sentence by sentence, finding their way and correcting their words as they haltingly move toward the end of their article. Successful expository writing depends not only on a control of syntactic structures, but also on seeking out an informing intention;explaining why several writers ,when ideas fail,resort to dead profane words to fill in space.
Swearing is a harmless emotional release which could make you feel stronger.Being weak is your problem;STOP making the world a part of your problem.
Intelligent and well chosen profanity can be communicative.
In 1870 Walt Whitman was dismissed from his government position for writing his famous book Leaves of Grass. The campaign against obscenity at that time was led by an American YMCA member, Anthony Comstock. The Congress in 1871 passed a bill banning possession, printing and selling of obscene literature and posting them by mail. The maximum penalty was a jail term for 10 years or a fine of $5,000 or both. The bill was named after Comstock who was also appointed a special anti-obscenity agent of the State.
Though there was little protest against Comstock’s tactics by the major American press, a relentless struggle slowly gathered momentum under the leadership of a literary outlaw, Samuel Roth. It was Roth who first published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1930. It was only in 1911 that Ulysses was elevated from obscenity to art by the celebrated ruling of Federal Judge John M Woolsey. In 1930 Roth was imprisoned for 60 days for publishing Ulysses. After a series of prosecutions and convictions, it was Roth who challenged the Comstock Act of 1873 in the Supreme Court. Roth lost the case but it was due to the Roth judgment that the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the ban on Lady Chatterlev’s Lover and conceded that D H Lawrence was a man of genius. The ban was also lifted in England in 1960 following the decision of Justice Bryne.
Your reader is not your enemy;but he isn’t your friend either.
Literary Discourse is text and context together; interacting in a way which is perceived as meaningful and unified by participants.
While we need not attempt to bowdlerize all literature and thus rob speech and expression of freedom;a balance should be maintained between freedom of speech and expression. When the latter is substantially transgressed, the former must give way. The problems of agreeing upon what constitutes profanity remain;but that seemingly should not influence the writer.
Treating literature with swear words;and considered likely to pander to lascivious, prurient or sexually precocious minds; MUST determine results.
The internet is not your stage.
American courts have not yet ruled on whether the Internet is a print medium like a newspaper, protected from government censorship, or a broadcast medium like TV whose content is closely regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Perhaps we may not be confronted with such a difficulty because what is guaranteed here is freedom of speech and expression and any mode of expression is subject to restrictions. In agreement with the changing social norms and mores, it is imperative that the concept of profanity should also be redefined.
“It’s a limited vocabulary that makes you swear.”
Knowledge of appropriateness is something fluent language users attain.While you may;with sole discretion of self,fornicate under consent;the world does not do the same.We live in a “FREE” world.Profanity can be an emotional coping mechanism which makes “YOU” feel more resilient,not “US”.The world of blogging has its own rules and the expression of morality or social responsibility is connected with these rules.
Happy fornicating!
