Vulgar vocab: A rebuttal

The following article contains strong language that some readers may find offensive.

I was drunk, at a party and, not untypically, started spouting some shit about “that fucking article in The Stand” – this time the target was one about bad language. As it happens, I was directing my tirade at members of its editing team. Not sure how relevant that is, actually. I don’t know what I said, sometimes I’m told I come across as eloquent, sometimes obnoxious, (who knows why?) but anyway I woke up this morning with an email from one of those people asking me to write a rebuttal against what I thought was a terrible article about vulgar vocab. Bear with me; this is not about my drinking problem, not entirely anyway. Not sure if I’ve used that semi-colon correctly either.

My initial emotional reaction was complicated – pride from being asked, aggrieved at having to write publically something and deal with all the difficulties that poses (if you’ve convinced yourself you’re a man of integrity). Then I read the article in The Stand about bad language for the first time…

I tried to summarize it into three points:

1) Curse words are associated with women, disabled people, and homosexuals so we should stop using them.

2) People use them to be cool.

3) It’s more impressive if you can better articulate yourself.

I thought about the different rebuttals I could make to each. Things got exciting for about a minute, maybe less, then I started writing a polite refusal and apology to the person who’d emailed me, abandoned that too, and finally went outside to find a coffee shop with a comfortable seat so I can start reading my new post-modernist novel.

I hate Orwell but I’m gonna use him twice now. Many writers write (a) to masturbate their drippy egos or (b) to persuade others of something. Neither of these is great, George, you big gay retarded pussy, but filling space is shit. Most of all these many articles in these shit papers are as guilty of this as that black American football cunt is of killing his bitch and her lover.

Plato’s utopian masterpiece hoped that philosophers would rule because they could not live with inferiors ruling – not because they wanted power. In reality they best stick to their books, friends, and sex-lives, occasionally playing the game through tax paying or whatever. Ruling is left both to the naïve, earnest types who’d rather switch off in front of a game show than read something that might fracture their illusive dreams, and the all smiley, manipulative cunts who’d fuck anyone over and convince themselves of some kind of means-to-end justification, topped off with a bit of ‘rather me than him’ (or her – go fuck yourself) philosophy.

There’s irony in me filling space with a criticism of space-fillers. You all could write this. But the biggest irony is, no sorry I haven’t got one. What a stirring anti-climactic load of bollocks.

Headline image: muslimwriters.org