Forbidden words

Anyone who knows me knows that I can be foul mouthed. I tend to follow George Carlin’s view on language: there are no bad words. Bad thoughts, bad intentions, and then the words that we tend to attach to them. Our words only have the power we give them.

However, much as I believe this for almost every word I’ve come across, there are two that I will not say, under any circumstances. These two words have never crossed my lips, and if I have been required to refer to them in the past (typically only if I’m sharing that someone else has spoken these forbidden words), I refer to them by their first letter only, much like a child would. They have become “the c-word” and “the n-word” to me, and even insinuating them bothers me.

So why, if I tend to follow the “words are just letters arranged on the page, neither negative nor positive” view point, why am I so against these words? Possibly because of the negative emotions behind them. They have been so strong, for so long, that I have been unable to remove the emotions from the words. Or it could be some residual influence from my mother, these were her forbidden words as well. Or maybe it’s society, I know of many people for whom these words are forbidden.

So, as a writer, I have an issue. These words are not taboo for everyone. In fact, many people use them on a daily basis, in both a negative and positive way (though, the same people don’t tend to use them as both). And by restricting my vocabulary, by saying “these are the two words I will never say or write, under any circumstances,” I am restricting myself. There have been two times, one for each word, that in the natural flow of dialogue that occurs in my head as I write (I’ve often said that I watch the characters interact, listen to them speak to each other and to me, and then write what I’ve witnessed), these words have cropped up, and I’ve ignored them.

The first was when I was writing a short story for a creative writing class. It’s a particularly violent story following the minutes before a girl is raped. A topic most would consider taboo, but I stepped outside my comfort zone, wrote even though I was disgusted—both with the character and with myself—wrote through the feeling of bugs crawling under my skin and of needing a shower, and got the story to paper. But when the male character, in a fit of temper, hits the female character and called her one of my forbidden words, I stalled. I heard it, plain as day, the way his voice rasped, almost spat the word out. I saw the way his face contorted in rage, saw his thin lips form the word, his yellowed teeth almost biting out the end. But I couldn’t do it. Here I was, writing a story about one of the worst atrocities that could happen to a woman, and I couldn’t type out a four lettered word. Instead I used “cooze,” a slang term popular in Vietnam during the conflict that meant much the same thing. I’ve considered going in and editing it, of putting in the word as I heard it, but I haven’t.

The second time was more recent, as I was brainstorming a story I was going to write for myself. Set in Georgia, either slightly before or towards the beginning of the Civil War, the main character was set to be the son of a wealthy plantation owner. His father, getting on in years, has started handing over responsibilities to his son, including management of the dozen or so slaves he will inherit with the house and the land. The son, through his interaction with the family’s slaves, falls in love with one of the girls. Not lust, as was common for the time, but honest to god love. He starts to daydream about a world where he could take this girl as his wife, where she would be the mistress of his house, where they would have and raise children together, and sit out on the porch, drinking sweet tea, as they watched them play in the summer sun. However, he realized that this would never happen, considered setting her free, hating himself for imprisoning the woman he loved, and wanting her freedom, her happiness, over his own. But he realized that this, too, was unlikely to happen. He knows that freed slaves, even in the North, still run the risk of being captured, brought back to the South, and sold back into slavery. The thought of what would happen to her if she belonged to another, and possibly a small measure of selfish longing, keeps him from letting her go.

As with most of my writing, the idea for this story grew into being around a scene that played out in my head, where one of the lower class white boys that the father hired to help manage the slaves is bullying the son’s love interest. He steps in, and the boy spits out insults and curses, one of them including one of my forbidden words. In this case, I simply never wrote the story.

I feel very strongly about these words, often wishing that they would be done away with, that they never existed. But the fact of the matter is that they do exist, and that for some people they are used as commonly as I use “ah hell.” And so I wonder, if I cannot even bring myself to type them, even if it’s once in a blue moon, and only with careful thought and consideration, does that make me noble some how, or does it hurt my writing?