The F Bomb

So I tried a little experiment the other day. I pulled out a popular, commercially successful YA novel which had been published by a reputable house and turned into a successful motion picture and counted the “fucks” on every page.

That got a little boring (there were a lot of them) so I decided to simply check to see if the F Word appeared on every page. That became tedious as well (few pages lacked a “fuck”), especially because I became distracted by all the “shits” and considered tabulating their occurrences, too.

This little experiment actually had a point. I’ve been wondering: if YA dialect is to be authentic, must it necessarily be obscene? And yes, I do mean dialect, not dialogue. Face it, grownups: they speak a version of English more easily translated in the Urban Dictionary than the Oxford English Dictionary. More than occasionally I hear a word emerge from a teenage mouth and I wonder: what the dickens did that mean? For example: rager. Until recently I didn’t know a rager was a big party, and I’m not alone in my ignorance. I was out hiking with moms-of-teenage-kids and I asked the group, “So, who knows what a rager is?” and nary a soul could answer. So, yes, teens speak in dialect.

But, back to the potty mouth. I ask you: really?

Are today’s teenagers swearing to such an extent that a realistic depiction of their conversation translates into an F Bomb or more per page? I consider this just as I complete a scene in my latest novel in which the F Bomb most certainly appears and feels appropriate. The characters’ language is consistent with their behavior and deportment and the choices they make later in the book. Then again … am I just being lazy? Do I hope to find an authentic voice by simply sprinkling the text with a few swears, plus the occasional “dude” and the ever-present “like”? (As in, “It was, like, you know, totally awesome, dude, like, you wouldn’t believe it!”)

My brother and his family recently returned from a trip in Ireland, and my little nephew, all of seven years old, commented, “All the kids are always saying …” He leaned in to whisper: “Fuck!” Yes indeedy the F Bomb is alive and well among Irish youth today … and if you don’t believe my nephew check out Roddy Doyle’s books. I was thumbing through The Barrytown Trilogy and saw more F’s per page than in the aforementioned YA-novel-turned-into-a-successful-motion-picture.

But here’s the deal: Doyle’s dialogue rings true. He knows his characters, this is how they speak to each other, and if it’s a struggle to understand it on the page, try reading it out loud. You hear real people, you get caught up the cadences of their language, and before you know it you are transported into their world.

Author (and newly minted Printz Award winner!) Libba Bray does this very well. Her teenage-boy narrator in Going Bovine, with all his variations on the word “suck” and the proliferation of “dude!” is pure American teen. I believe in this boy and I walk alongside him on his journey. Likewise, the obscenity-free Victorian-era patter of her teenage girls in A Great and Terrible Beauty. Their language, more than anything else, helped place me in a time and space quite different to my own.

I know dang well that a single F-Bomb might keep my book off certain library shelves. But I also know that in my quest for authentic voice, I may have to choose words and language which I personally may not use, but which my characters will use. I guess the challenge is to use the language carefully and not gratuitously. But I guess that can be said for every word on the page. Le mot juste, and all that.