%*#!ing mixed feelings on profanity

I love profanity. Always have. My mom used to make me give her a quarter every time I used “the F word.” A quarter, for a nine-year-old circa 1993, was a lot of money. I deemed the cost worth it and continued. (She blames my dad entirely for this.)

We’ve all heard all the arguments against saying “%*#!” in a blog, so I’ll skip right to the defense.

Profanity is colloquial. I like to write the way people actually talk. I take a professional pride in it, in fact. This doesn’t mean I can’t write other ways – I also take pride in (and make money from) being able to use any tone or personality successfully. But the fact is, people use profanity and when I compromise realism for politeness it makes me feel cheap and icky.

Profanity is fun. Crap%*#!er. Just think about that word. Its hilarious! Come on.

Profanity creates a feeling of community. We use profanity with people we’re comfortable around. It feels nice knowing you can say, “%*#! those %*#!ing %*#!ers,” and have people love you all the more for it.

Profanity isn’t actually offensive. You want offensive? Watch the news. It offends me that anyone can claim to be offended by language of any kind.

And yet, I have lingering doubts. I heard somewhere that profanity hurts your search ranking. That’s %*#!ed up. A friend of mine said he doesn’t re-post Facebook links that have profanity. I guess he has kids or something.

Dammit, if Galactica can do it, I can do it.

So, after months of deliberation, I decided to adjust the profanity level on the blog. There is one reason for this and one reason only: my absolutely firm belief in the power of evolution and the necessity of mutations. Over the past few days I’ve been carefully dicing and splicing the DNA sequence of Transmogrifant to include fewer %*#!s, &^*%s and !@#$s. (I haven’t actually used “!@#$” yet, but I felt it needed representation before it got killed. It’s a good one.)