Quote Originally Posted by Shadow
Just a couple of quick points, as I think some have misunderstood me.
Point taken, Shadow, absolutely.
Also what you say about the Japanese culture is true. I find it indeed difficult to picture a Samurai swearing. I guess in that culture, loosing your temper would be a big loss of honour and could call for a seppuko.
But as for Greeks, Romans or Saxons swearing, that is much easier to imagine ;-)


Quote Originally Posted by Shadow
I wonder what it says about our society that ever time I get one of those expensive literary magazines in the mail, it usually has more than a couple of such words in it.
hehe, and that is worrying as well. Seems like our standards are dropping fast.

Or is ist just that our attitude towards writing has changed and we are now more trying to represent the actually spoken word, rather than seeing our texts as a beautiful, albeit artificial (=artistic) pieces of art?

I remember a passage by Robert Graves in "I, Claudius" where he lets Claudius relate the event of Ceasar's battle speech before the battle against Pompeius. Don't believe a word when you read his battle speach, he has Claudius say. In fact Ceasar stood up from his breakfast table the morning before the battle to address his troops. Picking up a radish from his plate he pretends the radish is Pompeius and puts on a comic show that has his soldiers roaring with laughter, ridiculing Pompeius in the rudest way. The things he did with that radish would have made a prostitute blush. But of course this is nothing he would have wanted to be recorded for posterity. So is his biographers and propaganda advisors wrote a nice and heroic speech about the virtues of courage, freedom and the values of Republican Rome.

All this is just fiction, but I enjoyed reading this passage a lot.
And the passage is also a nice example of how you can describe a situation full of profanity without using the actual word.