All The Cool Kids Say Fuck
The coolest kids don’t let the fuck fuck everyone off
In my day the cool kids wore leather jackets, thick black eyeliner and said fuck all day long from behind a packet of Silk Cut. It was fun being fifteen.
These days the cool kids are all about tik-tok, plumped-up pouts and thinned down eyebrows. When they swear, it’s in writing (they haven’t spoken face-to-face with anyone in years.)
To sound cool, you have to write cool.
But cuss words are a fucker when you do them wrong. It’s true what they say — sometimes foreplay makes for a stronger climax.
I’ve heard of Charles Dickens and Chaucer! Those rascals knew how to style a good insult into a story. Heroes!
So that fine day when I started to call myself a writer, it felt wrong to carry on saying shite like FUCK OFF YOU DUMBFUCK DEMONIC SATAN-FACED RAT-ARSED PISSHEAD.
It was time for little old Piree to roll up her sleeves and get writerly even about angry topics. No giving into the ease of a good fuckerooni or wilting into a limp-lettuce!
A fuckless story about a total fucker
I had this landlord once. Never met him in person but he managed to stick my heart and soul into an industrial grater… blunt and slow… and mangle it into something that would make a street dog puke.
Complained to the council and a guy turned up. A white guy, 60ish and as bitter as a 10-week-old coffee. He hated his colleagues and the best thing about his job was that they’d brought him back as a contractor on an extortionate rate after sacking him a year before from his permanent role.
The meeting was like three hours long because he kept asking for coffee. If I didn’t know he worked for the council, his ability to stretch a twenty-minute conversation into three hours would have given the game away.
I play along, I’m good at small talk. I want this landlord nailed to the wall and castrated without anesthetic. I give him all the coffee he wants. Biscuits too.
He’s getting more and more on my side as I tell him about the situation but he says there’s not a lot the council can do because there are already people with way-worse landlords who aren’t getting attended to either.
All’s not lost though.
He tell me he’s married to a Nigerian woman. She’s beautiful, intelligent and they have the best sex ever. He tells me if I want he can arrange for the landlord to be knee-capped. He has contacts on his wife’s side who will do this as a favour to him.
I swear to God I didn’t lace his coffee with anything.
My husband couldn’t make the meeting so I was secretly recording it for him in case I needed to go over anything. I’ll never grass the guy up but I’ll never delete that audio either! It’s the kind of thing that only happens on films! Or to me!
The landlord never got physically nailed to the wall and castrated without anesthetic but I suspect he would have preferred that to what actually happened — we went to court, the judge ripped him a new hole and made him return all my deposit and pay compensation too!
Swearing is like puke, it splatters more than you want
If I can write a story about a giant abscessed runt of a landlord without using a single swear word, there’s no reason a seasoned writer can’t.
The reason for this story comes from a writer I’ve been following for a while. She has great insights and is very good at what she does.
But she throws fuck-this, fuck-that in almost every paragraph. It’s NASTY reading her stuff over breakfast. So much anger thrown about, hitting me, turning my stomach… in an article about marketing!!!!! As much as I like her, I had to unsubscribe.
It was like she was having a go at ME.
I can turn the air blue as much as the next person. I won’t ever stop using shite and bollocks and arsehole in my Medium stories — I’m from South London, it’s what we do.
But I don’t need to fuck everyone off with fuck fuck fuck at every turn. It’s not necessary. It’s not wanted.
When I use my cuss words, I like to think the reader isn’t being splattered by them. My cusses are about the thing I’m cussing about. I don’t want the reader to need to duck.
FUCK OFF YOU DUMBFUCK DEMONIC SATAN-FACED RAT-ARSED PISSHEAD is a pretty good sentence.
If I said it all the time, it would mean fuck all.
Stay classy, kids.
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