I have to think of the hilarious passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls where Hemingway has replaced the Spanish “me cago en la leche” with the English “I obscenity in the milk.”. Nothing could be more satisfying than crying out: “I obscenity in the milk!”
I once read an interesting article (but I don’t know where) which claimed that American movies use violence as a symbol of sex, whereas European movies use sex as a symbol of violence. Too black and white, obviously, but there is some truth in it.
You do not seriously believe that people who think it is immoral to eat meat believe this because eating meat gives pleasure? On the contrary, they believe this because they believe it causes suffering.
Also, the mindset you seem to deprecate here is a mindset which I hope everyone has. I am certain there are people who find slavery, murder, and rape pleasurable, but because we consider them morally offensive, we ban them. Which is great.
Your apparent attempt to defeat the meat-abolitionist by ridiculing him as a sour, grumpy guy who just doesn’t want other people to have fun is rather wrong-headed. There is a substantive moral disagreement here, and it deserves a serious debate, not a cheap attempt to avoid debate by ridiculing the opponent.
They’ve done some pretty creative things this way – my wife was talking about hearing Lil Jon’s “Get Low” on the radio, and I was like, “How can they possibly put that on the radio? If you bleep everything they won’t play on the radio there won’t be anything left.” Here’s the original and here’s the version without about half the words replaced. (Both versions of the video are, well, probably about as sexist as you expect them to be.)
And after Adult Swim took over Super Deluxe they had censored versions of the Professor Brothers. The Professor Brothers! It’d be more faithful to rewrite the scripts so they don’t use the letter “e.” (Say, have you noticed that the big swear words don’t have “e” in them? Hm.)
I watch my mouth a lot now because my two-year-old is practically a mynah bird (link contains swearing and suboptimal childrearing) and I don’t want him going around cursing. Today I was reading to my wife from a letter PG Wodehouse wrote about GB Shaw, and I substituted “silly donkey” for “silly ass” as a precaution. My kid proceeded to say “silly donkey” about ten times in a row. I had that sublime pleasure – German surely has a word for it – that you get when you bring an umbrella with you and it actually rains.
Sorry, but when I am placed in the same category as slavers, murderers and rapists because I enjoy eating meat, I have trouble calling that serious debate.
The difference, of course, is fundamental: Slavers, murderers and rapists who ply their foul trades victimize other people. (For that matter, so do a lot of activities which we tolerate without question; somebody who interferes with my ability to breathe by wearing heavy perfume or applying fingernail lacquer in a sealed train or bus can do so without hindrance, yet would undoubtedly be the very first to demand that I be burned at the stake were I to attempt to relax with a few puffs on a tobacco pipe.) My consumption of a thick steak, blood rare, esconced in sauce Bearnaise, accompanied by fried potatoes and creamed spinach and washed down with a nice glass of beer or wine, harms no one, save the damage to the sensibilities of those who find it intolerable that somebody should enjoy something that they have decreed to be immoral.
I’m not going to say that your conclusion’s wrong, here, but your line of argument is pretty flimsy. It appears to be “I really enjoy steak a lot. I don’t think I’m causing any harm. Therefore, anybody who disapproves of my eating steak cannot possibly think that I am causing harm, therefore their only possible motivation is that they hate it when people enjoy anything, and therefore I am excused from considering any actual arguments to the contrary that they might present.”
If you’re more interested in your steak than in arguments, fine. Enjoy your steak. I’m not sure how begging the question contributes to the experience, though.
Heh heh. That is awesome. Ursula K. LeGuin FTMFW!!
FWIW, what I’m working on now will contain plenty of explicit curses. I don’t wanna do it just to do it, but nor do I want to stop myself. It’s not really about whether it’s justified. I don’t have to justify any other word. Why these? It should just be taken as read that my intention (fallible as it may be) is to choose the appropriate words. Assume good faith. In other words, I don’t think I should have to think about it. But UKL has a point — perhaps a bit more creativity would be in order.
Aaah, but if you’re a writer, you have to justify every word.
Okay, okay, maybe not ‘the’. Uunless you put it in the wrong place. But if you’re publishing a finished piece of writing, your choice of words is legitimate grounds for criticism. This is particularly true for words that stick out: if you name a character Yehoweh Porn, you should probably expect that your readers are going to notice and that some of them are going to have Opinions.
In general, your intention as a writer is not as important as what you actually did. My intention as a teenage poet was to construct timeless works that would rival T.S. Eliot at his best, which was really just a matter of apppropriate word choice, y’know?
Criticism is one thing. Asking a writer to justify his grounds in order to render the wording legitimate is something else. A lot of writers prefer to let their work speak for itself and never answer any criticism, and never attempt to explain themselves. Does this make their choices automatically illegitimate?
Of course, good writing involves difficult choices, but for me whether or not it is ‘profane’ is almost never among the relevant criteria. I’m certainly not interested in justifying my epithets on a case-by-case basis (nor anything else on that basis). That doesn’t mean my choices are careless. But I write it as a fiction rather than as an essay for a reason. 8)
Sure! In my attempt to make a funny I probably wasn’t being very clear there. When I say ‘justify’, I don’t mean that you literally have to stand up and answer questions on everything you do. That’d be a ridiculously strong demand. What is true, though, is that you’re going to have to justify yourself through the work. The work has to give its audience reasons for why it does the things it does – they don’t have to be carefully-articulated, exhaustive, explicit reasons, but the audience still has to get them at some level.
To say the same thing in another way: if you’re going back over a draft, and you see something you did and you can’t think of a good reason that you did it, or any good reason to keep it, that’s a pretty clear sign that you need to take it out. And the level of scrutiny needs to be a bit higher for some things than for others. This is not a particularly high standard for justification.
(Note that I’m not a cryptoantiprofanitarian, here. Most of the things I write, I swear like a shipload of chav pirates being boarded by the Marines’ special hip-hop taskforce. I’m just saying, if I thought it didn’t matter I wouldn’t be wasting space and energy on it.)
To be honest, the concept of “bleeping out” or silencing curse words is profoundly disturbing to me. Not just because I find it juvenile (if you wanted to express a word that you expect would be understood as such, why not, you know, do it?), but because it smacks of mysticism. We break up the word and create all these disconnects because we don’t want to summon the demon symbolized by the word.
Or perhaps it’s a feeling of hypocrisy it evokes in me. “Hey, I want my stuff to be cool and edgy… but not too cool and edgy, and certainly not enough to make anyone complain.” It’s a fig leaf, one that tries to obfuscate the issue by removing the noise but keeping the sentiment. To be frank, I have a hard time seeing why it even works. It’d certainly offend me far more to be called a m----------r than any actual curse I could name. R—t, g–s?
(My italics.) If you know of a way to produce a thick steak without harming anyone, please tell the world! Look, it is one thing if you believe that the harm you do to the cow by killing her is less than the good you do to yourself by eating her. (That, after all, is the moral issue here.) But how could you possibly claim that you are harming no one?
Please note that I’m not trying to get you into a discussion, or trying to convince you that you are being immoral, or anything like that. I’m only trying to get you to acknowledge that there actually is a moral issue here, and not just a bunch of fun-hating grouches trying to spoil the party for other people. (Because that was the original assertion that got my blood boiling.)
Which is rather off-topic anyway, so maybe we should let the issue rest.
Ah, the beauty of the human being. It invented “morals” and “ethics”, and then it invented “gods”, and somehow it wound up using these three little wonderful things to make life really, really hard and unpleasant.
The other day, I saw a dog who thought nothing of licking his genitals in a public place. Such alien creatures to our moral high grounds. I wonder if when they bark continuously they’re really swearing full throtlle, and we just can’t tell.
Well, if we can’t agree on matters of gastronomy, we can at least agree that the Pythons were very funny. Perhaps comedy is the key to world peace – we wouldn’t have time to make war if we were all too busy laughing.
For the record, although I believe meat and Monty Python are two of the greatest inventions in the history of the world, I have no interest whatsoever in eating Spam (although the stuff does make an appearance in my current IF work in progress, The Spy Who Ate Lunch (seriously)).
Hey, it was fun! I absolutely agree that there is a moral issue, but I don’t think that means there isn’t a faction of fun-hating grouches in the debate. I encourage all hungry philosophers to check out this blog I just discovered. Here’s an interview with a really smart, interesting vegan:
I see where you’re coming from. I don’t really disagree with any of that, except that for me the question of whether a word is profane or not, is not one of the things I consider requiring of any special justification. They are equivalent to me. There is zero weight accorded to whether anyone else might be offended, if I am writing an adult work. It sounds like that is not unlike the approach you actually take, so we must have just been talking past each other for a bit there. 8)
BTW for an alternate perspective to Le Guin’s (one more in accord with my tastes, although Le Guin’s essay is still kinda priceless) here’s Stephen Fry cursing on video and loving it…
Bleeping words out is really an interesting example. They almost always supply enough letters or enough context to know what the cursewords are, don’t they? And everybody knows the standard cursewords, don’t they? So it’s all just a big fiction: Stephen Fry nailed it.
Back at Robert’s comment about ratings systems turning into censorship - it mostly remains that filmmakers end up censoring themselves for commercial purposes. Horror film fans know the phenomenon of the PG-13 horror film, where they know the thing is gonna be tame because the producers make sure they put in insufficient gore or whatever to warrant an R rating, so they could get more money out of a younger audience. But that’s their choice in a big commercial industry. I don’t think films with extreme content have trouble actually getting screened per se these days.
From an Aussie perspective, I think America has too few ratings gradings, and I look to that as the problem rather than the concept of a ratings system itself. The jump from USA PG-13 to R is too great. Here we have no shortage of gradient. G, PG, M, MA15+, R. Of course, our problem of late is that the same ratings are applied to videogames, except they did not permit the R (18+ only) rating to cross to gaming, because of the dumb assumption only kids play games. The result being we occasionally are famous for banning games that would have got an R, because legally they can’t have one, and editing games so that they squeeze into MA15. But also - a lot of folks suspect (including me) that some games that would warrant an R if it existed are being squeezed into MA15 unedited, meaning they’re really being silently endorsed for an audience younger than was intended. But fortunately the introduction of R for games is in parliament here atm, so this situation should soon be rectified.
That makes sense, even without the drug addict. People tend to curse when they are aggressive or threatening – I guess that’s one of the primary uses of curses. So curses may not unreasonably be expected to be felt as aggressions.
