Several diaries recently have dealt with the issue of cursing on blogs and comments, and whether it is good, bad, or whatever. I've commented on several of these, but here's my thoughts in one diary.
flip if you'd like.
I post here for lots of reasons. But one reason I post, and, I feel safe in saying I am not alone, is to convince. Fore example, I would like to convince everyone to vote Democratic. I would like to convince everyone that Bush is evil. I would like to convince everyone that paying the head of Exxon Mobile $6,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, is obscene.
I don't need to convince most kossacks of these things. But people read this site and some of them are not kossacks. Probably not too many are die-hard Republicans, but some are wavering. We can convince them. We can convince them because we are right, because we are smart, and because we are passionate. But we cannot convince them of anything if they do not read our posts.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR did not say
"This day is fucked up. The fucking Japanese have bombed Pearl Fucking harbor, and we got the shit kicked out of us."
No.
He said
"This is a day which will live in infamy"
When this country was getting off the ground, one immortal line was not:
"Give me liberty, or go fuck yourself"
No.
"Give me liberty, or give me death!"
These are lines that inspired a lot of people. Lines with no curses. Lines with passion.
OK, some people don't mind cursing. Fine. But some people do. And if one of the reasons you write here is to reach people, then why turn them off?
OK, not everyone thinks that cursing is a sign of poor education, poor thought, or poor manners. But some people do. We need to reach everyone we can; we need to spread our message as widcly as possible.
We should use civil language not because the WSJ wants us to, but because they want us not to. When they can portray us as a bunch of screaming cursing loons, they win. When they can write that a lot of the posts here are 'fuck Bush' then they win. When some middle-of-the-road person logs on here and sees a post full of curses and leaves, never to return, who wins? The right wing. Not us.
But if we can say that it is Cheney who does the cursing, then we can say that not only are his thoughts obscence, his language is, as well. The we win. Then we will take this country back. And that is worth not cursing so much, I think.