Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory
I think that political correctness is more corrosive than censorship ever was.
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You're wrong. Political correctness
is censorship.
"You can't write that because somebody doesn't want to read that word" is censorship whether that word is "Devil" or "God". It's censorship no matter what the words are that we can't write. It's censorship if it's the "N-word" or the "F-word" or any other euphemistically letter-named word. If we can't legally put a word in a book, it's censorship no matter what name you stick on it.
There is a huge difference between choosing not to offend someone based on what they and you consider offensive, and being legally mandated not to say or write something that someone
else considers offensive. Neither one, by the way, has anything to do with a person's level or type of religious belief. I have seen all combinations. Remember, always, that a government with the power to make other people do what you want them to has the power to make
you do what
other people want you to. Censorship is censorship, whatever its political stripe.
Personally, I consider inappropriate profanity in books on a par with bad formatting, flat writing, or Mary Sues. If I buy a book and it turns out to be something I don't like, it doesn't matter, in terms of how I look at that author in the future, if the problem was that he had characters swear when they shouldn't, or couldn't write his way out of a soggy paper bag with a set of instructions. It's not a good book. There are a thousand reasons a book can be bad, and a character using profanity is just one of them. So, as a related example, is a book where every single character, from illiterate wino to college professor, talks exactly alike, and all in the author's voice. So the characters swear too much. Or the author swears too much. That's a reason not to buy any more books by that author, the same as any of that thousand other reasons. I don't distinguish it as a
special reason to dislike a book.
If we're going to have ratings, can we have ratings for painfully bad writing, too? Please? And maybe special ones for series that used to be good, but went off the rails? How about a rating for pointless plots? Goes nowhere, does nothing subplots? Characters that make you want to drown them? Characters that make you want to drown
yourself? There are innumerable reasons why a book can be terrible and the language used by the characters, not only in terms of whether they use "naughty" words but whether it fits their character in innumerable other ways, is only one of them. Given the number of reasons I've put a book down, I think it might be a minor one at that; it's so much harder to spot, let alone ignore, writing that starts out okay then turns deadly dull.
After all, in the end, the most horrible swear word you can think of is just a sound. It's just letters on a page. If you don't internalize it -- if you don't say "yes, this is true, and that's how I think" -- it's nothing more than a random string of characters, to acknowledge or ignore as you choose.
P.S. Pooh, how is not swearing "family-friendly" when the worst potty-mouths I've ever met have been 12 and under?