We Should Use More Profanity In Writing
And perhaps everywhere else…
Why use a bad word when you can use a good word, is something that anti-profanity parrots like to repeat incessantly, besides parents, priests, and prudes. But I would like to challenge that age-old snobbishly aristocratic attitude towards language. Not because I perhaps was a sailor in a past life and with a reduced rum intake in the modern world, in favour of clean water and Nespresso coffee of course, I must feel angrier and thus need to express myself less scholarly. No, it hasn’t a skunks’ balls to do with any of that. Or with the fact that I wasn’t hugged enough as a child. It’s about something far closer to my heart. It’s about language and expression of feelings and thoughts.
As someone who speaks, not one, not two, but three languages, all fluently, I think I possess some authority to have an opinion on language, what works and doesn’t work when expressing one’s self. I shift between Hungarian, Romanian, and English on a daily basis. Note how all three languages are part of a different language family, which in itself has some surprising benefits. For instance, I found that while in Portugal, I was able to read and understand about 50% of the text anywhere I went. To me, that was surprising, but in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. Language is an incredibly powerful tool, and the more of them…
