Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
If you judge the use of profanity in a particular bit of writing to be gratuitous have you not already decided that the writing lacks skill, and if that's right, doesn't what you are saying have a circularity about it? I don't like bad writing - and I'm not sure it is made any better or worse if it includes profanities. But generally I quite like swearing - it can be very effectively used or it can be ineffectively used, just like adjectives, displaced focalization, point of view and all the other tools at the disposal of a writer.
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I believe I already answered that in
Post #153.
I like pizza, but I don't want it for every meal, and I wouldn't hire a cook for my family who made nothing but pizza.
In the first place, I could never afford a cook. And in the second place, such a diet would quickly become mind-numbingly dull.
To restate what I said in Post #153: There are great writers who use a great deal of profanity, but there are also many lesser lights who use profanity to cover their lack of skill. In any case, I don't enjoy gratuitous use of offensive language. (I don't consider Carlin to have used offensive language gratuitously. It always fit in with points he was trying to get across. There's a difference between extensive and gratuitous.)