Good writers don’t say bad words
I read somewhere that good writers don’t need bad words, and it got me thinking.
I grew up with few to no bad words. It just wasn’t something we heard at home. My dad, very occasionally, might say one when he drove; when somebody aggressively cut in front of him on the road or slammed the brakes for no visible reason. That was all. And if we heard one as kids do and brought it home, it was quickly shown the door.
We moved abroad when I was around ten. We spoke Spanish at home and English everywhere else. I remember one day on the school bus; this girl from my class said a bad word. I obviously didn’t know it (I didn’t know the equivalent in Spanish, much less in my second language) and when I asked what it meant, she proceeded to mock me. Never explaining what it was but showering me with a lot of other bad words and laughing that I didn’t know any of them. I took home a bunch of them like a bucket of strangely shaped objects to hide under the bed.
I didn’t know what they meant, but I didn’t need to know the definition to understand that they were bad words. There was a seemingly inherent sentiment to them. There was something about the way they were said, the micro-expressions of the people who heard them, the tone or the inflection, or the combination of all those things.
Something told me: this is a bad word.
As I started learning English, and English bad words, I tried them on and got told off at home, and at school. At the time, I had some English as a second language classes with a teacher who was quite a character. She suggested that we substitute the bad words. She could understand the sentiment but could not condone the language. Shit became sugar, fuck became fudge (which I’d later change to firetruck: big, red, loud, it felt like a closer approximation).
It kind of goes to show how arbitrary “bad words” are. In Argentina, there’s a word that started out as a bad word and is now mostly used as “dude”, unless the inflection (and volume) indicate otherwise.
Anything can be a bad word, we’re the ones that make it so. That said, I do sometimes say the actual words.
Eventually, a few bad words made their way into my vocabulary. I don’t use them a lot and when I hang out with people who do say a lot of bad words, I still get that wide-eyed, eyebrows-up, childish “oh” look on my face. When a person swears a lot, it takes me a minute to get past the bad words and hear what the person is saying, like looking for Waldo in a mess of colors.
Bad words can be aggressive like they were that day on the bus, but they can also be freeing. I don’t know if “freeing” is the right word (I guess “good” words can be wrong too). What I mean to say is, sometimes, when something goes wrong, saying the one that starts with f and ends with ck doesn’t feel wrong. Bad words can feel pretty good.
There seem to be different levels of swearing and different degrees of creativity across cultures, too. I read an essay on the subject by David Sedaris in Calypso a few years ago. I think he concluded that Romania took the gold on swearing creativity. Bad words there aren’t simply swear-words, but rather very descriptive, very expressive phrases.
Creative and convoluted or short and straightforward, it seems we all use them. They play their part as all the other words do. And if we use them when we talk to each other, I guess it makes sense that they find their way into our writing too.
