Cuss Words

Is it a scientific truth that once the mind has learned a worse word, and the mouth has acclimated to saying it, that a lesser swear will not sate the angry spirit?  Or is it just me?  

Is it perhaps another symptom of my untethered spirit?  

The tongue, perhaps, being so much the closer to the brain than the hands is more easily influenced to corruption by the Mr. Hyde within.  Proof to the latter being that I am far less likely to type an inappropriate word or phrase than to say it, even when angered.  And I have never felt the urge to write a swear word in the sand with my foot.  

Never may be an exaggeration, still it has been long enough that I cannot recall a specific instance.

It has been proved that swearing from the mouth can mitigate certain kinds of pain.  I wonder if this also works for anger.  If the pain from stubbing my toe in a dark room can be lessened by singing fuck into the air with a strong enough wind to carry it to all of the bedrooms in the house, can it also ameliorate my displeasure when I feel I have been crossed?  Also, does it work for people who use sign language?  Can they lessen their fury with swears of the hands?  Or is there something in expelling the air?  Are we ejecting a tiny piece of tainted soul that is corrupting our bodies?  Or, like a locomotive, is the smoke we're releasing just evidence of the fire within?  Or is the swear word not an indication of our internal selves at all?

I don't know.  I'm tempted toward belief in the latter, though I must disclose that I swear a good bit and I would hate to think of my soul as being corrupt, especially by something so mundane as a growing thesaurus of vile words.  So I have a bias in the argument.

I was born of a word puritan and a word libertine.  My mother has spoken the word "Damn" twice in my memory; each time a quote.  My father has scarcely gone a day without saying it.  In the 80s "shit" was all the rage; especially in what is to me a nostalgic phrase, "Well, shit fire!"  A turn that I'm certain is much more entertaining to say and hear than it is to do.  The phrase "God Dammit" was highly frowned upon, and "fuck" was forbidden.  In my life my father has said "fuck" only a handful of times and never in the same state as my mother.

I knew all of the cuss words by middle school, roughly age 11.  Some will be invented in the fullness of time, and some will lose their punch, but as they stand right now I know them and have so for some 33 years.  It's something that young children share on the bus and in the quiet corners of the classroom when the teachers are not around, or are not paying attention.  But knowing is not using.  Not all children will take that danger path from the verbal straight and narrow into the murky fields or corruption.

I did not say a lot of bad words when I was in middle school.  "Bitch" was funny to say, especially with incorrect context or meaning.  "What the bitch?" was something I might have said within earshot of a given friend who would laugh at it.  But it wasn't in anger.  I did not begin saying cuss words in anger until my life took a turn down a road I never wanted it to go and got hopelessly lost trying to find a short-cut back to the highway.  There may be causality there, but in which direction?

Never once has saying, "God Dammit" corrected a wrong.  More often it compounds the problem by upsetting my listening children, or angering my wife because my listening children are, in fact, listening.  It has, at times, lessened my own anger.  Though whether it lessened the anger because I had expelled some frustrated steam or because of the immature humor felt from figuratively stepping my toe over the line of maturity and into the sand of the taboo, I do not know.  Science has not answered this to my satisfaction.  Or is it just that said utterance caused immediate embarrassment at my personal loss of control which countered my anger?

What I can tell you is that prior to the scenic route my life has taken I never said, "God Dammit."  Ever.  Now it is a daily phrase.  Every time something goes awry, from spilling paint on my favorite pants to discovering someone else ate the last Pop Tart that was never meant for me.  "Fuck" won't do.  "Shit" and "Dammit" do not come close.  Only "God Dammit" makes me feel an inconsequential amount better.  Except that it doesn't really.

I wonder if, rather than being causally related to my problems, it is instead a symptom of my lack of discipline.  That same untethered spirit that doesn't want to practice music or practice drawing or re-edit a story, and subsequently never has a truly refine piece of art, is the one that doesn't want to care about the words coming out of my mouth.

Bad, But Good At Being Bad

In his book “On Writing” Stephen King categorizes writers in four ways; bad, competent, good and great.  He goes on to say that a bad writer can never be made competent and a good writer can never be made great.  A competent writer, however, can achieve goodness with considerable practice in reading and writing.

I wonder what that means for the great writer who never practices or the bad writer who practices constantly.  Can you be a bad-great writer?  Can you be a good-bad writer?  This is important for me to know.

Mr. King humbly does not categorize himself as a great writer.  He may think it and it may be so, but he does not say it.  In fact, he gives every indication, short of saying it, that he would call himself a competent writer who has achieved, through decades of devotion to his craft, goodness.

This puts me in a troubled state.  I know I am not great.  I have enough presence of mind to understand that everything I’ve created, poems, short stories, all of it, falls short of the glory of being memorized by high school seniors or being collected in a publisher’s century in review. 

I also have considerable reservations with putting myself in the same place as Stephen King.  How can I?  The man has written forty books and all of them – every last one – has been a world-wide best seller.  Being a best seller once could be a fluke, but not forty times.

Further, I have submitted my works to several publications in the past.  Poems and short stories have been coldly and sometimes politely rejected by all.  I have a hard time even getting family to read my short stories.  The short ones.

This leads me to the conclusion that my writing must be bad.  Now, don’t fret, dear reader of this widely ignored blog, for I have no intention of ceasing my writing.  I enjoy it.  But I’m curious.  If I practice my craft as Mr. King instructs in his book, can I become a good-bad writer?  Can I be bad, but be good at it?

Stephen King's "On Writing"

It was brought to his attention that he had written everything in the passive voice.  How could this have happened?  What could have been done to prevent it?

His writing was loved by him.  His process was carefully honed.  But, it seemed, his time had been wasted.

A tiny flaw was brought to his attention.  A passive voice had escaped his notice.  A shitty writing had become of his everything.  A frown he was had.

****

So I’m reading Stephen King’s “On Writing.”  I was reading it and loving it until he got to his metaphor of the tool box.  Apparently your tool box is supposed to have vocabulary, grammar and some non-grammatical no-nos to avoid.  There are other things too, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.

So I’m pretty good on vocab.  I’m not the greatest in the world, but I think I hold my own with respect to my peers.  King says that you should not intentionally improve your vocab, you should just read and improve it passively.  I don’t agree.  I mean, that’s a fine way of doing it, but I like looking new words up in the dictionary.  What I don’t do is intentionally try to use big words in my writing.  I think this is really what King was hoping writers avoid.  I use big words as I would in my regular speech, which is to say, on occasion.

On grammar I’m middle of the road.  Believe it or not, I learned most of my English grammar in my college German class.  I had been taught the rules before, but they didn’t stick until I learned them again in German.  I still have issues from time to time.  If I ever read a sentence I’ve written that confuses me grammatically I just rewrite it in a way that makes sense.  I will confess, however, that I do have a tendency to write sentences that contain a lot of commas and semicolons.  I’ll work on it.

But the one that got me was his list of no-nos.  In his list he says avoid over use of adverbs.  Got it.  I’ve got that completely.  Totally completely.  He also suggests avoiding sentences that aren’t sentences.  Duh.  Stay away from adverbs in phrasing, such as:

“I hate eating sand,” Michael said painfully.

King suggests we stick with he-said/she-said.  I was happy to hear this one because I long ago adopted this philosophy.  I’m sure I was taught this by someone somewhere.  But it’s my philosophy now.  Of course I let it slip from time to time.

The one that got me was the passive sentence.  Putting the subject as the object and using “to be _____ed” as the verb combo.  That’s an oversimplification.  I’m not going to give details about a passive sentence.  The first three paragraphs of this post are passive.  It sucks.  It obviously sucks.  King says it’s weak writing by a timid writer.  Sad face.

Worse is that I had a nagging suspicion of something.  I checked the story I am currently writing; the one I secretly hoped was wonderful.  And yes, it is full of passive voice.  It was discovered that I suck.

To My Reader(s) part 2

So I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing.  So far so good.  But one of the things he repeats and makes pretty clear is that in order to be a writer you must write.

When I started this blog it was – ostensibly – to become a writer.  You might have guessed this from the title.  But it was more specifically to become a writer at [adult swim] the grown up/night time version of Cartoon Network.  To that end I wrote every day, or nearly every day, for a year or so.  Then I got frustrated and distracted, as I’m known to do, and I left the blog for a while.  Then I came back, left, came back, started several other blogs, left, came back and left.

Now I’m back, and this time I think I’m here for good; for better or worse.

But I didn’t just “leave” the blog.  I stopped writing.  When the blog started I had gotten into a habit of writing in it every day and I saw my writing flourish.  Then I got involved in a book I was writing and my blogging stopped.  Then I stopped working on the book, but I never came back to my writing.

Let me rephrase: I am almost always creating.  There are some days when I don’t because I’m too busy with work/family/Skyrim.  But most days I have some kind of creative output.  And frequently that is writing.  I write a song.  I write a poem.  And some days I write haikus to put in my kids’ lunches.  If I’m not writing then I’m drawing or developing back story for something.

But those are excuses.  I should be writing, formally/semi-formally every day.  I should be putting words in a cohesive order to express an idea every day.  Not necessarily a story.  Not necessarily long.  But every day, putting something down.

So that’s what I’m gonna do.  For my 43 year (which begins soon, but I’ll go ahead and start now) I’m gonna write in this blog every weekday.  I will attempt to write on the weekends too, but my access to a computer is more limited on the weekends.  But Monday through Friday I will be posting to this blog.

I hope you enjoy.