Cursing…

I had one correspondent say that my book she read would just be fine without the bad language. I overheard another person say that a musical play would be much better if it weren’t so crude.  This has me thinking about the audiences for my fiction stories. Because this is intended to be a PG-13 website, I won’t go into examples here, but I want to analyze authors’ use of cursing all the same.

First point: Cursing is a cultural phenomenon. It’s an old one too, although cursing publicly used to...