Bad words

If - linguistically - you're easily offended, you might want to look away now.

If you're my grandma, I'm going to ask you to - please, please - do just that. If you read this post, you will never make me a cup of tea or buy me a Terry's Chocolate Orange again. And I love you - and the tea and chocolate - far too much to risk that.

Gone?

Good. I shall thus begin again.

I am not The Write Girl for nothing. My love of language is all encompassing, and all consuming. It is like the love of a mother to a child: it is entire, it is uncompromising, and it is fierce. There is very little in writing, or in reading, or in speaking, that I don't think is beautiful. Even in its basest, misused forms - tortured and cut up and almost killed by people who don't know the difference between there and their or the necessity of correctly placed commas - the ability to communicate in detail (or fail, and therein lies beauty as well) thoughts and feelings and experiences astonishes me and lights me up. Love of words is part of me, and will remain so until - probably with some kind of pen between my teeth - I scribble my last words down on a post-it note and stick them on my head and die still trying to say something.

My love, therefore, is unconditional: I love the ugly and the rejected parts of language as much as I love the beautiful and illuminating parts. I don't love being hurt by words, but I love the fact that they can hurt - that they have an access to parts no knife can reach - and I don't love the hatred and evil that words can inspire, but I am constantly awed by the fact that it can be done. Thus it stands to reason - much to the chagrin of my mum - that I love swear words.

"They show a small vocabulary," my mum would tell me when I was a child and still grappling with the concept of bad words and good words: that sounds could be labelled so distinctly.
"But now my vocabulary is bigger," I would argue. "I know the word shit, now. I didn't know that before. That's one more word."
"And now you will use it instead of other, more powerful words, and your vocabulary will shrink," mum would snap back, and she would glower at me, and I would glower at her until one of us broke.
"Shit," I'd say with precision. And then mum would give me a smack on the bottom with equal deliberation.

It was partly true, of course. Swear words have their own power: they shorten communication, and therefore inevitably replace a stream of others. But - and here we differ in opinion - they have a different kind of power. Their power is brutal, ugly, delicious in bluntness and form: but, in essence, superficial. Replace a swear word with a clever, calculatedly biting and painful response, and the vocabulary may not have been shortened, but the results have. That pain will go deeper, and stay longer, than a paragraph of essentially impotent swear words. They are, in essence, the most gorgeous form of anger without pain: of hatred and frustration without resonance. Not knowing them, you maim your powers of expression. Not using them, you deny yourself the satisfaction of those harmless little darts: replacing them, instead, with large, calculated daggers. Because, essentially, your feelings will remain the same, but your ability to express them will be continuously both limited and stretched too far to compensate.

Plus they sound - phonetically - gorgeous. Like little word candies. Fuck. Fuccckkkkk. The breath of the F, the roundness of the U, the snap of the CK. Fuck. You would know it was an exclamation of pain or sadness or frustration if you'd never heard the English language before in your life.

Therefore, last night - while drinking lots of beer and eating as much sashimi as I could fit in my stomach - I decided to arm my Japanese colleague with whatever I could get my hands on. And, because he feels the same way about them as my mum does, it was extremely hard work.

"What English swear words do you know?" I asked Harai, blowing smoke over the balcony.
"I have no need for bad words."
"Of course you do. You swear in Japanese all the time."
Harai sighed.
"I am bad man."
"Be a bad man in English too. You know fuck?"
Harai flinched.
"I think yes. You say when you drop something or are angry."
"I know. How about Goddammit? That's a not so bad one to ease you in."
"Goatdammeet?"
"Yes. It means: oh no."
"Goat fuckin dammit?"
"That's the one. Bollocks - you know that one?"
"Borrocks?"
"Nearly."
"And what" - Harai was getting a little less uncomfortable now - "is sonoffabeech?"
I laughed.
"Where did you get that?"
"Last English teacher. He say it is like 'hey buddy'."
I laughed again.
"I guess, in very informal circles. But a son of a bitch is usually bad."
"What is beech?"
"It means a girl dog, literally. But in this context it's saying: your mum is a dog. In a not nice way. In an angry way."
"I can call girls beeches?"
"Only if you want to get slapped."
"You are my friend, yes?"
"Yes."
"So I can say wassup beech?"
I laughed again. I taught him wassup a few months ago - in reply to my yo - and he loves it.
"Yes. Not in front of the kids, though. They don't know enough English yet to deserve it. Until they can form full sentences, they're not allowed swear words. It's like not being allowed pudding until you've eaten dinner."
"Ah. The kids at school love the word fuck. They say all the time. They get it off American film."
"Of course they love the word fuck. Everybody loves the word fuck. It's delicious. Just like the Japanese equivalent. Kuso. Which has a similar kind of taste to it."

Because - in my eagerness to learn another language - you can bet that I've collected a fair few of their bad words as well. To balance out the good ones. A balanced, healthy diet is important. Even linguistically.

Language has no barriers: it can't be contained, and it can't be restricted. When the generations before us fought and died for the freedom of speech, it wasn't just for the ability to express the ideas we wanted to express: it was to express them how we wanted to express them. Like anything else, they should be used with moderation. I wouldn't speak or write purely in adjectives, or in nouns, or with too many full stops (although I do love a colon and semi-colon far more than is healthy). And so swear words should be used, too, when they are needed or wanted. They are the spice thrown into other ingredients to add spark, and edge, when spark and edge are wanting. To release emotion, when any other release could be damaging. And to let our mouths taste the shape of them, as well as all the others.

Language is beautiful, and so - therefore - there are no bad words, and no good words. There are just words; to be used, to be loved, and to be looked after.

And that includes the ugly ones.