My very first novel, which never got published, was a historical novel set in the first century. There, I have a street urchin in a Greek city calling someone, ‘You slimy gorgon!’ In another situation, a street kid swears, ‘I’ll drown in the Styx if you didn’t!’ I’m sure that to a first century Greek, those would sound quite vulgar. Also, most readers who know their mythology would recognise them as definately dirty.

Sam — heh. Yeah, leaving religion out of the equation entirely makes it hard. Zuni has a couple of words (”tisshomaha” is the only one I remember, and I might be misspelling it) that have no actual lexical meaning — they exist entirely for the purpose of expressing a certain impulse — but it’s hard to get those to mean anything to the reader.

Simon — I have an unsold book where the religion isn’t really based on gods, per se, and struggled with the phrase “an ungodly bang” in one scene. “An unholy bang” lacks that hard G in the middle, and an H just doesn’t convey the impact. But if there are no gods, can I use that word?

Your work-around of mentioning swearing without spelling it out, is something I saw Rowling doing more and more in the later Harry Potter books. I’ll probably copy it, if I end up writing this YA idea I have; teenagers swear a *lot* more than I think you can generally get away with in YA publishing, and that gives you a way to be realistic without being offensive.

I don’t use made up swearing, either. When writing my first book it was intended for adults, so I used a lot of ’shits’ but no ‘f–k’. (See? Can’t write it.)

Then, during the rewrites, I realised my then 10-year-old daughter was going to read this book the minute it came out. So, I took every swear word in the book and dropped it one notch. I ended up with just 1 or 2 ’shits’, and you know what? Because they were so rare they had the same impact as an f-bomb.

The other nice side-effect is that my supposedly adult book was cross-marketed to YA/Teen, and even to older readers in primary schools, and there are now several hundred copies in school libraries across Australia. Thanks, daughter-of-mine!

(I didn’t turn all the swearing into puff words, by the way. Often I just turned an exclamation into ‘Hal swore under his breath’, or similar. Again, it’s like using ‘yelling’ vs ’shouting’ - if you do it once or twice instead of all the time, it has a much bigger impact.

I don’t tend to swear in everyday conversation, so when I DO swear people know they should be running for cover.

Vulgarity and profanity have their uses.

But I think you need to make more of a distinction between profanity and insults. Of course racial and other epithets are “unacceptable language.” They are aimed at people, not at the hammer you just hit your thumb with. If you listen to teenagers or New Yorkers in the street, you will hear language that you would never hear at a business meeting (not where I work, anyway). But even teenagers know that calling people denigrating names is a nasty thing to do.

For the writer, having a character curse says one thing about him/her, but having them insult people based on their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or appearance says something else entirely.