What you say?

My wife and I watched a very bad movie recently and it seemed the film makers felt they could make it better if it was laced with profanity.  I mean, it didn't serve a purpose, didn't drive the plot,  wasn't for shock value, didn't emphasize tense or emotional points in the story.  It didn't even serve one of the main reasons people use to justify profanity in a movie, "That's how people in <name the setting> actually talk."  As far as I could tell it was there to give the movie an 'R' rating.

I remember when I was in my late teens, working as a dishwasher at a restaurant, I said something to one of my co-workers and he looked at me.  He said that was the first time he had ever heard me swear.  I had never really thought about it.  In no way was I a well behaved kid in those days but I won't list the ways.  My parents or kids may read this and they don't need to know the things I did.  I was a follower and like most teenagers, I wanted to be cool and accepted.  But I guess that never included trying to impress people with my lack of language skills.  Like I said, I hadn't really thought of it up to that point. 

Currently, I am writing my first novel.  So, language has taken on a new importance in my life.  As I was writing a scene where "That's how people in biker bars" talk, I found I didn't want to put that language in there.  It would be justified because, that's how people in biker bars talk, but I fought the urge and in the end wrote around it.  Consequently the concept of profanity has been on my mind lately.

I was talking to a couple of very intelligent writers lately, who don't mind profanity in their writing and brought this up.  There were a couple of themes about the topic.  One, words are words.  We as humans assign meaning and we as humans make words naughty or nice.  Words are tools of the craft.

Well ... I don't know. That doesn't seem like a complete answer to me.  I went to the ultimate source for answers.  Sadly,  when I did the Google search today when writing this I couldn't find the link I really found interesting.  Basically, it said, the brain processes profanity in a completely different place of the brain than other words.  It comes from the automatic parts of the brain which is why, when you stub your toe, you are likely to say ouch or s*** rather than,  "The quality of this experience is less than optimal."  So, we can say words are words but our brain thinks they are different.

Another theme is that words are tools.  I love tools.  I have a garage floor full of them.  When I was in high school autoshop, the Snap-On truck came and I bought a 13mm combination wrench;  the main wrench anybody working a 1970's VW Beetle needs.  I paid a good sum at the time for it but it is a marvelous tool.  Thirty years later, that wrench is in my tool box and not on my garage floor.  I go through screw drivers like mad and buy more packages of them at Harbor Freight.  If I had a Snap-On screw driver I would be able to tell you right where it was but those things are expensive.  If language is a tool then we are in great luck!  It doesn't cost me anymore to use high quality words than it does to use cheap words.  We have a language full of Snap-On words so why use Harbor Freight words?

Let me entertain you

I was reading a book the other day on writing and it kept talking about the conflict in a story.  I thought that was interesting and tried to think of a story that was not based on a conflict of some type.  Every one I came up with contained some type of struggle, an obstacle to overcome, or any other way you want to describe a conflict. Some stories are tragedies which pull hard at our emotions and others are heroic triumphs pulling our emotions in a different direction but they are all based on someone else's hardships.  Basically, we entertain ourselves with other people's problems.  Some of their problems end well, some end very badly, but we are entertained.

This got me thinking about Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. It has been many years since I've read it so I don't remember all the details, but I remember it talking about humor being based on someones misfortunes.  Other than word play, humor has a victim.  We laugh, we find it funny when things go wrong for someone else.

This seems to be a universally human trait and can be seen in some primates as well.   This may not be a bad thing and since it looks like we're hardwired this way we might as well make the best of it.  What we can pull from this is the realization that what goes wrong in life, the conflict we face in everyday life, is what makes life interesting.  Just as a movie or book without conflict wouldn't be a story worth telling, a life without conflict wouldn't be a life worth living.  I think the challenge is, when at all possible, to be the wise architect of our own conflict rather than a foolish victim of misguided conflict, eg: college education vs. crack.