LINGO LIMBO II
In his YA novel Feed, M. T. Anderson does an impressive job of circumventing outdated slang by inventing his own. The story is set in the future, and a dude becomes a unit, jerks become corps, cool is now brag, and major is meg… as in: Unit! Did you like see that brag upcar on the feed, meg sweet, going into mal just like thinking about it. I remember being dazzled by the sheer inventiveness of his prose when I first read the book.
A second look reminded me that, as in the preceding example, he dusted off a word the beats used in the 50s. Anderson’s use of this retro word, like, succeeds, perhaps, because many of his other words are so fresh. He also mixed in classic slang, including the last word of the book’s very first line: We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
All I can say is thank God for suck. For cool and coolest. For the classics freaky and weird. Not to mention, crush, though more typical today is crushing on — as in, crushing on a love object. And dudes, I’m definitely for hanging on to puke, a word coined by none other than Shakespeare (who, by the way, also came up with O hell!).
True, there are some for whom cool is no longer cool, but if a writer uses the word in a novel, teen readers generally will let it pass. So familiar to all that they hardly qualify any more as slang, such words offend virtually no one. Obscenities and blasphemies that once were taboo – and not only in tween and teen lit – now offend few readers either. Authors use them in more and more books. In addition to deciding what texting and hip hop lingo and slang expressions my character naturally chooses and uses, I’ve had to consider what swear words, for her, are the norm.
Comedian George Carlin once riffed on the seven “dirty” words, including shit. Today, varied forms of it — shit-all, bullshit, give a shit, surprised and shit, holy shit, oh, shit, shit yo, nobody knows shit – appear so frequently in some YA books that I’m willing to bet that not only in its original organic form, but this other, shit will be with us forever. It appears twice in my novel… for good reasons.
Just cause used to be the raison d’etre for inserting a swear word in a YA book: a trauma so great, a shock so profound, an act so dastardly, that it would seem unnatural for an expletive not to escape a character’s lips. In books like the prize-winning Going Bovine, about a hallucinating dying teen with mad cow disease, and Punkzilla, a novel-in-letters about a vulnerable fourteen-year-old’s intro to the seamiest of life experiences — each boy on the road trip from hell — the string of shocking events almost justifies the page-by-page explicit language.
I say, almost because I’m personally not crazy about wading through an unending stream of obscenities in any book. I’m not crazy about using a lot of them in my own writing, either. Turns out I’m in good company, as Will Shakespeare apparently felt as I do. While all his contemporaries featured cursing in dozens of lines in each of their plays, he did so, according to Bill Bryson in Shakespeare, The World as Stage, only three times in his career. In fact, one of his characters laments:
Why, what an ass am I! Ay sure.
This is most brave
That I…
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab – (prostitute)
A scullion! (the lowest kind of kitchen servant)
Teens once could use curse words to underscore their place as members of a social/age group distanced and distinguishable from mainstream/grownup/stodgy society. Peppering speech with an expletive or two provided a fairly benign way to rebel… not to mention an outlet for pent-up anger or frustration (which, from time to time, teens have in spades). More recently, however, with old taboos in decline, it seems that only racist and sexist terms warrant notice if encountered in the pages of their books. What formerly was considered indecent is now pretty ho-hum, part of most teens’ everyday speech.
A writer using the first-person voice needs to be especially sensitive to that young fictional speaker’s language and reality. It follows that I’m extremely relieved that my narrator happens to be a suburban thirteen-year-old girl rather than a sixteen-year-old sociopath/runaway or an Amish kid with Tourette Syndrome. I’m hoping that two holy craps, a couple of shits, a double-damn, and the occasional substitution – frigging, fricking, freaking — for the original mother of all cuss words, will not only suffice, but ring true. An editor will, doubtless, have an opinion about this. Do you? As always, I welcome fellow writers’ and others’ thoughts!
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