Swearing in literature: share examples of bad language in good books

Art and literature would miss out without the rude language of everyday life share examples of the quality quotes that would fall foul of Putin

If Vladimir Putin gets his way and he tends to any book published in Russia that contains "foul language" will soon have to be sold in a sealed package and marked with a warning. Swearwords will also be banned and fines issued to anyone who sneaks them into films, plays, music gigs and any other public performances, according to the law passed this week by the lower house of the Russian parliament.

Not only is vulgar slang a vital component of Russian literature and art, but the clampdown is completely preposterous per se, argued Irvine Welsh

It seems to be an attempt to erase and/or marginalise certain cultures, ie the working class, the ghetto, and so on. Language is a living, organic thing. If you start to try to control that and prescribe what people say, the next thing is prescribing what people think.

Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon gets top marks just for the swearing. I mean, really, this is top-tier stuff: profane, inventive, funny and gob-smackingly offensive. I'm not being facetious: dialect is hard to get right and can be hard to balance. Fagan has a great ear for dialogue and has captured Lothian/Edinburgh Scots perfectly (and, yes, that means a huge amount of profanity). Coming from the area, there was an extra pleasure for me in reading familiar words, some of which I hadn't heard since school, e.g. spraffing, shan, chore, ken, ay (pronounced like a capital A) used as an interrogative, the word "how?" used to mean "why?" and something giving you the boak).

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