So. Going back to The Play. My Dear Director passed the script along to her priest, who liked it enough to approve the staged reading in the church. He did ask for certain changes, though, which seem reasonable. Can you guess?\n
Yes, the characters in my play swear. They say fuck<\/i> and shit<\/I> and gd-damn<\/i>. They don’t swear a lot. They aren’t inventive or startling in their profanity, but they speak modern English, and they are under tremendous strain, so they swear a bit. The rector asked for the removal only of the word that begins with an f<\/i> (second letter uck<\/i>), which was mostly not a big deal. There were nine instances, altogether; five of them were in Satan’s visit to Ishmael, one was in the phrase fucked up<\/i>, two were fucking<\/i> used as an intensifier, and one was an interjection. One of the intensifiers was actually difficult, as it was a sort of sudden outburst of intensity, such as people denote with the use of a profane intensifier, so I wound up with a sort of inarticulate groping for words rather than the blurting of profanity. I prefer the profanity, but it won’t wreck the play. None of the individual instances in Satan’s dialogue were difficult to expunge, but I was a trifle concerned about the cumulative effect. Still, it’s a church. And the rector is (for all intents and purposes) the producer. And I’ve got the file with the fuck<\/i>s in it, for if we ever put it on in a theater.\n
In fact, my Dear Director, after re-reading the thing, decided that under the circumstances, and with the audience that will come to a church to see a play based on Scripture, we risk losing them to the distraction of their own reaction to the one that starts with an s<\/i> and the one that starts with a Name of the Divine. So. Out they go. This is substantially harder. I should point out that my Dear Director did not say that the (mildish) profanity was bad, or that it wouldn’t work in another situation, just that her sense of the audience is that they will find it easier to focus on the play, the characters and the situation and all, if they aren’t startled by hearing Bad Words in Church. I could argue, but (and I think I have said this here before), she has much, much, much better judgment than I do for what Works. And what Works is what will work with that specific crowd in the specific circumstances. So, out they go.\n
There are fourteen instances of shit<\/i>, of which four refer to actual, you know, shit. Goat shit in the first instance. I could probably just globally replace shit<\/I> with crap<\/i>, except in the two instances of shithead<\/i>, which could be… um, well, I’ll have to work on that. They are both Satan abusing Ishmael, and I will need something that ideally mixes contempt, vulgarity, and an imputation of stupidity. Read my lips?<\/i> As I say, it’ll take some work. As for the gd-damn<\/i>s, there are only two of those, both of which were put in to replace the vehemence of uses of fuck<\/i>, so I’ll have to figure something out for those, too.\n
Gentle Readers will understand that this business pains me. I like profanity. I am not, by blog standards, a particularly profane writer, but when I cuss, I enjoy it. I am interested, intellectually, in the whole idea of profanity and Bad Words and their uses and differences, and have written about that a few times unrelated to anything at all. When I wrote dialogue with Bad Words, those were the words I wanted. It’s not only that these characters, as I imagine them, curse, each in a different amount, and that cursing is part of their language, which after all is the only tool I have for making them. It’s also that I want<\/i> the words—all the words—to have an effect on the audience, as well, and when Satan calls Ishmael a shithead<\/i> or describes Abraham’s knife as a big fucker<\/i>, the audience should react to that. The problem, though, is that the audience won’t necessarily react the way I want them to react, and the circumstances of the reading affect that, too. Feh.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger likes to cuss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18637,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11771\/revisions\/18637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}