May 2, 2024

The power of profanity

Quick story. 

As a Mormon, profanity was a big no-no. So was blasphemy - "Oh my god" was bad news. 

But blasphemy, in my personal playbook, trumped profanity as a sin. There's no commandment against profanity - just blasphemy. So while you couldn't say "God dammit," you could, if your conscience let you, say "Gosh dammit."

Which is of course hilarious to hear out loud. Nobody said that except me, that I know of. Until last month, when a character in the Fallout series on Amazon Prime exclaimed it. I was so happy. 

Anyway, I still had limits - I tried to not say "the s-word" or "the f-word" or others. But I wanted to convey the harmlessness of profanity in the comic, even while I'm still breaking the mental habit of giving those words greater weight. 

The first iteration of the comic, I was afraid of using the word. So I used the 💩 emoji.

I decided that wasn't quite comic enough, so I changed it to the 💩 emoji with a black box covering the eyes, to show it was serious enough it was being censored, old-school style. 

I ran it past some friends, and it just didn't work as well. I finally bit the bullet and went with "shit," which even now is hard to type out. 

I still feel like you should avoid profanity when intended to offend - telling somebody off shouldn't happen with or without profanity - but four-letter-words shouldn't have the gravitas that we give them when spoken casually. If they were used all the time in casual conversation, they'd eventually lose their power to offend, I believe. 

Meh. Anyway, the punchline of this comic is still hard for me, and I still want to apologize if any believers come here and get offended. Maybe eventually I'll calm the hell down.