Naughty Author's Voice! No biscuit!

There's a lot written advice-wise about finding your authentic voice as a writer. I believe in that. I also believe I have a strong, consistent, authentic voice. The problem is that voice seems to have a swearing problem.

So I have tried to, in the interest of SEO ranking and tender ears, tone it down and keep a nice PG rating. However, now that I have found a field that I'm so truly passionate about, it gets a little more difficult to keep from letting the occasional expletive slip out. Well, possibly more than occasional expletive.

I've tried giving up swearing several times. Quarters in jars, rubber bands on wrists - you name it. The problem is that I was raised by an engineer. I'm married to an engineer and his friends are all engineers. For those of you who have not been graced by loads of computer engineers in your life, it's like living on a pirate ship. Swearing is an art form. Add to that the fact that my best friend lived in Scotland, and well... Let's just say this is probably the longest couple of paragraphs I've written without feeling a dire need to sneak in a four letter word.

I also considered substituting another harmless word for the swear word (of course you have to misspell it so the search engine bots don't think you're writing an article about something else.) So I thought of using the word "monkie." But here is a sample of how it would sound:

"Wow! Band X is monkie amazing. Holy monkie-monkie, I'm going to need every monkie CD they've ever put out."

Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I do have a substantial vocabulary. I promise I do. Real people have actually heard me use words like stentorian, rubato, and involutions correctly - I even use the word "myriad" properly in conversation and writing. (Okay, that's probably because the movie "Heathers" imprinted it upon me.) Swearing simply adds a certain color and well, texture, where multi syllabic high-scrabble-scoring words just won't do. I particularly admire the versatility of the f-bomb. And what English major wouldn't? It can be nearly every part of speech in a sentence? It's a beautiful thing, really.


Not work listenable - really, really. http://www.twoguys.org/~gregh/fword.wav