Can I even comment on this? I have a truck driver mouth.
But I didn't always.
One day, I realized that being blonde (dark, dark blonde) and blue-eyed and spacey and...materially "privileged"* was causing serious problems for my image, so I started to curse. Not too much, but enough.
It worked. People stopped thinking they knew who I was based entirely outward appearances--on who they THOUGHT I was/should be--and started thinking of me in new and creative ways. Like: She's alive in there! Or: She's really pissed! Or: She's rude!
There are different kinds of cursing. The kind that hurts (You are a fucking bitch!) and the kind said as a general reflection on the state of the world/self (That is some heavy shit!) or (What the fuck!? I put the milk carton in the broom closet, again?).
Kids who curse relentlessly are either trying to throw you off their trail (because they don't want you to think you know them so well, when you don't) or are really upset about things. Even kids who haven't had a lot of healthy adult guidance KNOW cursing is making a statement.
Whether or not to curse in YA is, yawn, another controversy that has more to do with adults' inability to understand their kids than it does with anything else. Like, kids do it and we wish the world was a nice place where they didn't feel like cursing, but it isn't.
Here's the way my main character thinks at the lowest point of her life in all her sixteen years:
“Just so you know,” I said, very slowly, “I just became the fucking funniest new joke at school.”I had never before said fucking in front of my parents, but now seemed like the perfect time to start. My truck-driver mouth was the least of our worries.
*more about the quotes in another post
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