Sunday November 7, 2021; 1:19 AM EDT
- (9 min read)#
- Eventually, your mom will find the blog part, and then text you, and say mom things like "you are awesome" and "I am so proud". She will also include a bit asking why you feel the need to use the F word all the time. #
- This happens to everyone. It's like dreaming about that moped when you're a teenager, because it's a Real Motorized Vehicle you can drive on the street. That means mobile. And being mobile means you can escape the house and go places. You can go anywhere. This is what will solve all your social problems, each of which stem solely from the single fact that you need rides everywhere, and if you fix that one thing then everything else falls into place and you can get to be like everyone else. And you are not old enough for a learner's permit. That is far, far in the future. But soon you will be old enough for a moped.#
- You never do get the moped, of course, because mopeds suck, and you're a teenager, which means even though summer lasts exactly three million years, the day you were born the captain said "PUNCH IT" and the stars turned into lines and then you're thrown back into your seat and the car is lurching and shuddering and the tires are screeching because what even is a clutch and are you really supposed to throw your hat in the air like that I think we need to return these and your friends get married and we all move away and it seems so slow and we drift and nothing is really happening and you're collecting a paycheck and paying rent and suddenly we all still feel 21 even though things hurt now and our friends are starting to be dead instead of someone you can just fucking talk to for one last goddamn second.#
- Also, nobody even knows what a moped is anymore because anybody with any sense at all is riding a wheel. (Try it sometime!) #
- Update: See this post for more about why the wheel is fucking awesome.#
- The profanity thing has been on my mind recently, anyway, though, because my kid's around my writing. He doesn't know or care what it says (ask me how I know). But he knows sometimes I have Siri read it aloud to me, and sometimes I go into the other room for that. And I have used profanity in front of him, twice. Which means I remember it twice, and he probably has, with laser-like kid vision memory, noted approximately four hundred thousand other incidences I've since forgotten, or left a cartoon out, or didn't realize he could hear, or whatever. (How have you accidentally screwed up your kid today?)#
- Siri does pretty good with profanity these days. But the single greatest Siri- and profanity-related improvement in my life has been this one weird trick:#
- Settings / Accessibility / Spoken Content / Pronunciations#
- Click plus sign#
- Phrase: Trump#
- Substitution: FUCK head#
- Languages: All#
- Ignore case: On#
- Apply to all apps: On#
- (The capitalization on the substitution helps Siri provide the right emphasis.)#
- So I guess that's two reasons why I don't let the kiddo listen to Siri read me things.#
- The only way I've figured out how to get Siri to read me the text of most web pages is this weird two-finger downward swipe from the top of the phone, and I can only do the swipe properly half the time. Eventually, I get the swipe correct and Siri starts reading aloud. Try reader mode, too, if Siri starts reading a bunch of ads or menu options. Here's how to enable the two-finger swipe:#
- Settings / Accessibility / Spoken Content#
- Speak Screen: On#
- I made a video so you can see how it works.#
- #
- Anyway, the language I'm using is really fucking unprofessional. And unnecessary. I can express myself without profanity just fine. So why would I do it here? It's a tough choice. And obviously deliberate.#
- Right off the bat, it's a way of establishing linguistic dominance over a space. This is my fucking space. These are my fucking opinions. #
- Nobody is fucking paying me to say this shit because nobody fucking pays you to swear.#
- You get paid to write clear, concise text, focusing on precisely what must be conveyed, nothing else. You remove unnecessary words.#
- Edit: I removed three words from that sentence just now. Life goes better if you try to remove half the words from everything you write. (And don't send 80 percent of the emails, either. But first, cut half the words before not hitting send.) #
- You also get paid to establish a linguistic space, carve it out, and say, "This space is safe. It has been cultivated. It has been plowed under and fertilized and cared for and gardened and it is productive and will not hurt you." #
- Does that sound oppressive and corporate and boring and safe and staid and likely committee-approved? Yes! And it's a good thing that we have language like that. Because, It turns out, this is what basic human respect sounds like. No, really. Basic human respect means, over time, people yell loud enough and eventually we all get it into our collective fucking heads that goddamnit maybe we really should listen for once. And then actually do things in the real world that matter. #
- Bit by agonizing bit, that clean, corporate-sounding, extremely safe language, converges toward basic human respect. Even if the people who are signing off are doing it because they just want to shut the fucking whiners up and they couldn't really give a fucking shit about wheelchairs or trans people or race or anything else, they are still doing good every time they give in, and the universe becomes just that teensiest little bit better.#
- I have spent a very long time believing that nothing I say matters. The fucking Trump administration didn't help with that shit one bit. It's obvious to me that for some people, words are just sounds they make with their mouths. But I've also been doing a lot of thinking, and I've come to believe that real change is possible. I've never been able to create it in the ways I want—there's a whole lot of not even trying in that phrase—but I think I've seen society change in ways that show saying stuff can make a difference.#
- So, here I am, saying stuff. And using language I wouldn't show my own mother, or kid. #
- I could establish the linguistic space another way. Part of building community is interacting with people in an open, engaging fashion. You use friendly language, kind of informal, and you include some safe personal details, the kind that humanize what you're saying and the image you're presenting. You'll use words like kiddo, and mom. Maybe you'll talk about your dog, or your hobbies. This is good, too. You can see, I'm doing it here in the blog part. #
- I've done it professionally, before, too. It's a kind of performance, like anything else we do in public, like wearing clothes. It's a way of creating a bond with your audience, of saying we're both here in this together, and I'm like you. It sounds trite but it really is a good thing. #
- These tiny little bits of "hey I'm like you" are what bind us together as living creatures. There is no such thing as just one human. Every single effort made by anybody, anywhere, to understand what it's like to be some other person, is a great good for everyone, and should be encouraged at every single opportunity.#
- So in fact, we can see, I'm already using techniques that are designed specifically to draw people together. Why would I use language that will necessarily drive some people away? #
- When I was a kid, I couldn't even look at bad words. I couldn't hear them, I couldn't think about them. They were too bad. So I know what that's like, it can cause actual distress for some people to read profanity, no joke. #
- Well, part of it is, I can't please everyone. This sounds completely fucking obvious, and it is in fact so completely fucking obvious that it has escaped me my entire life. You can work yourself into an absolute paralysis, if you're a particular kind of person, trying to do the Right Thing Every Fucking Time. (I have trouble writing fiction because I can't stand to see my characters in distress.)#
- So the profanity is part of a series of choices to establish some operating parameters—to literally narrow my creative options.#
- I've previously written about cutting down on choices, eliminating options, as a way to stay focused on what matters, so you don't bother maintaining things you don't really need. But removing choices also means you're carving out a space. You're walling off entire areas and saying, "I'm not even going over there." #
- This sounds bad! Creativity needs options, right? Well, no. Creativity doesn't need options. Creativity will do just fine without options. Creativity makes its own options.#
- What creativity needs is problems to solve.#
- If you sit there in front of a canvas, or typewriter, or any other creative tool, kitted out any way you like, with the right tea and music and light and whatever else you need, what do you get? That's right, you get jack fucking shit. Because you're just sitting there looking at a bunch of tools with nothing to make.#
- At the very lowest level, the most basic thing you need to say is,"this thing I am making is this, and not that." Maybe all you did was just pick a color at random and splash a big red mark on the canvas. Right there, you've just eliminated a whole giant swath of options. But now you have a problem to solve, and creativity now has a little room to play.#
- So, when I add profanity to the mix, I remove other options. And that means, either I just kind of mess around and sometimes swear to be edgy. Or, I lean in. And try to do my absolute best to work with profanity like any other tool. #
- There are other reasons, like establishing a base set of expectations, a useful way to express strong opinions, a lazy way to express strong opinions, the fact that there are some things about the way that human societies work that just absolutely fucking infuriate me, and all the other usual reasons why people swear. #
- But really, I'm swearing here for the same reason other people play games. I can't play games anymore, I can't solve puzzles. They're artificial, some jackass just tried to make it hard, yay you figured out something that someone deliberately tried to make hard. #
- I actually love the idea of puzzles and mysteries and hand-crafted wonder, and I love things that are hard for that reason. I love the books that require decoding to find actual buried treasure. I love the idea. But I have no interest in solving those puzzles myself.#
- Real fucking puzzles, like how do I get people to take me seriously when I use language that sounds like I'm 11 and just learned my head won't literally explode if I say the word "shit"? Sign me up.#