On Cussing by Katherine Dunn

Author:Katherine Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2019-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Gwendolen

[Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

The N-Gram graph indicates the twentieth century reemergence of our beloved obscenities. Again, a lot of people were using these words all along, just not in polite company. However, in print the words began to tentatively revive with World War I, and jumped spectacularly after World War II.

Let me remind you that using such language in written material today is not innovative, and it is not particularly daring. We have the freedom to make decisions about how or whether to use bad words in our writing because of battles fought before most of us were born.

The two World Wars killed off the era of mandatory euphemism. Many social and economic traditions were, in fact, upended by World War I, which ended in November of 1918. The ghastly experiences of soldiers who survived that war had them using obscenities, and especially the word fuck, constantly. That didn’t stop once they got home.

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