Quote:
Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers
As a novelist I try to keep it to a minimum, but I write crime fiction so I also have to be realistic. If a meth addict is in a rage, he's going to use the F word, maybe a few times. If someone pulls a gun on my detective protagonist, he's not going to say or think "Darn."
L.J.
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I fall into the "realistic for the character and situation can be dealt with" camp, but I'm sure you've met people IRL who are excessively foul-mouthed beyond what can be justified by who they are and what situation they're in. That's about my cutoff for language. If someone's just casually using obscenities as sentence filler or punctuation, that puts me off big-time (and I'm not into fiction with gangsta thugs as main characters, since I find that lifestyle morally objectionable).
I'm quite sure a writer has already found her way to
TV Tropes, but other thread readers might be interested in their discussion of
Cluster F Bombs,
Precision F Strikes, and related topics.
Profanity does lose a lot of impact on the hearer/reader if overdone, which I think a lot of the types I deal with IRL, especially on public transit (which is why my iPod and noise-blocking earphones are a body part when I'm using transit), would do very well to keep in mind, unless they actually do have such pathetically deficient and limited vocabularies that's what they've got (or want everyone around them to think that's the case).