Let's get vulgar!

Or not, as the case may be.

Starting point: I was editing a book on Elvis Presley. It was literally mere weeks after he died (we already had the book on press) and the author was producing what he called a Tribute Event. I'm not quite sure what that specifically means, but you get the picture. This was the same author that once suggested we sit down and discuss turkey. He wasn't exactly great with idioms, but he knew his Elvis, and that was the important thing.

There was a need to get a great number of books to the event, and a truckload arrived in midtown Manhattan, and the show was about to begin, and there was one lone, lorn driver, and it was either have the books go out of print before we got them off the truck or pitch in and unload. I pitched in and unloaded, throwing off my jacket and tie (this was the 70s, and they hadn't invented casual anything yet) and grabbing boxes and getting them off the truck. Of course, I engaged in the expected repartee with the driver. In order to talk to him correctly, I realized, I had to speak his language, which was Mid-American Vulgar. That is, he put in one specific four-letter word into practically every sentence. I was never one to do that much, then or now. I don't recall a period in my life when every noun (and verb) I spoke needed a pleoonastic introductory cuss word. But that was (and is) a requirement of Mid-American Vulgar, and sometimes, if you wish to communicate with someone, that will be the language of choice. So it goes. I enjoyed that driver's company, and wanted to chat while we worked. We got the books to the Tribute Event in plenty of time.

While I was unloading that truck, by the way, an author I was working with at the time happened to pass by. She saw me and was, in a word, shocked. Her first question was, Had I lost my job? Whether she was worried about me or her book I can't say.

I do not want to give the impression that my normal language is expletive-free. I do on occasion utter something that I would not say in front of my mother, although less so nowadays since I'm no longer golfing. But mostly I keep it clean, without giving it much thought. Of course, the thing I do in my Day Job is edit books for a family audience, and it's not that the books are for a family audience when I get them, but they need to be after I edit them. I have learned long ago that simply eliminating bothersome words usually has no effect on impact. Good authors do more than just throw in a "fuck" to demonstrate that someone is pissed off, so there's plenty of other material in the text to get the message across. We edit by the paradigm of, if you'd hear it on prime-time network television, it's okay to use it in one of our stories, and if not, it isn't. Simple enough.

Unfortunately, a lot of venues no longer bar vulgarities from their publications. More to the point, more and more writers use vulgarities in their work, not in the dialogue of emotional characters, but simply as everyday adjectives/adverbs in their essay-writing. Mid-American Vulgar has taken over. When did this happen? When did it start that good authors who once knew better words now only use four-letter words? I know. Anything goes.

I see that sort of writing, for the most part, as lazy. It's one step up from talking with the word "like" coming out of your mouth every other phrase. It doesn't really do much to further the dialectic, shall we say. I think the battle is lost, though, for the most part. Except in very specific places like my DJ, and for the moment, network television (I can thank SCOTUS for that, I guess), words I would not speak in front of my mother will be on the printed page for her to read for herself.

Sigh.

The New Yorker, the yin to my DJ's yang and possibly the classiest joint in town, is not exempt from this. A blog posting by one of their copy editors gives her side of the story. Check it out.

It's fucking good shit.
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