EXPLICIT LANGUAGE: SHOULD I, OR SHOULDN'T I?

Cursing, what I grew up calling "cuss words," is generally considered a no-no in good books.  By good, I mean writings acceptable to almost everyone.  Some readers get butt-pucker squeamish about the use of even mild cursing, and they most certainly won't tolerate what my mother used to call "nasty talk."  A friend once told me that I should never write anything that would embarrass my mother, and had I followed his advice, nothing in print would have my name on it.  I write fiction, but I want my books to come off as realistic, something that could've happened.  I try to write about everyday people, real people, the kind of folks we all run across on a regular basis.  I also write about working class people, contemporary cowboys in particular.  And, I try to depict them as I know them, and that requires come explicit language.

In real life, most cowboys (and other people in general) don't use words like darn, shucks, shoot, sonofabuck, dadburnit, heck, and a variety of pseudo-slang words.  They don't go to the bathroom to poo poo, poop, tinkle, or pee pee.  They aren't likely to say something like, "You know, pard, those beans I just ate are working on me, and I need to expel a little gas."  Real men don't make gaseous emissions or pass gas, they fart.  That's just the way it is, regardless of what the squeamish reader had rather see in print.  Sorry, guys, but you won't likely find that sort of soft rough talk in my stories.  If the real words upset you, better not read my stuff.

That doesn't mean my books are rife with obscenities and curse words.  It does mean, however, that I'm not out to change the way things are, clean words up for you, or polish them to where they become more acceptable to more readers.  I guess it all depends on where you're coming from, what your intent is when you write, but some things require clean, no rough language stories.  If you're going to be realistic with your writings, you also have to accept that some people just don't curse, don't use rough language.  If you write about them, the do it right and keep it clean.  If you're writing about rough, more worldly people, then let them be what they are in real life.  That's doing it right.

There's another point here that needs to be made about obscenities in print.  A writer can create with words a situation or event that is absolutely obscene and not use a single obscene word.  Is that not just as bad or worse than actually using the words?  Violence, blood and guts stuff, can be more obscene than anything relating to sex.  In short, it's not so much the word that counts; it's the context within which it is used.  When it gets right down to it, the English language has very few obscene words.  Like a former Supreme Court justice once said, "I can't give you a definition of obscenity, but I know it when I see it."  Obscenity is in the eye of the beholder most of the time, not in the construction of a particular word or sentence.