Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, I call bullshit, too. What motivates this caution but politeness that simultaneously evades and acknowledges the way we speak now? Great literature eschews bad language — so goes the conventional wisdom — but the swearing is there anyway, because the literature is written and read by polite people who swear. Palimpsestual profanity shapes attitudes towards proper speech, that is, speech that’s proper in a fictional setting. Continue reading →