June 26 is National Disability Independence Day

I have written several times in this space about swearing in murder mystery novels. In fact, if you do a Google search for profanity in mystery novels my blog posts are among the first references you’ll see.

What got me started on the subject, as I explained in one of my previous posts, was curiosity about my own use of profanity. After my first Nostalgia City mystery was published I got to wondering how many four-letter words I used and how that compared to other writers’ work.

I discovered, of course, that the use of profanity varies greatly in the genre, from no cussing whatsoever in many cozies to an abundance of f***ing vulgarity in the grittier forms of murder mysteries.

Unfortunately this necessitates further explanation before I can get to the reason I want to talk about bad words in the first place. Above I used asterisks rather than spelling out the obvious word. It’s my journalistic background that cemented the AP stylebook into my vocabulary. Many news outlets today—although there seem to be fewer and fewer—do not use four letter words and substitute asterisks. The older I get the less I care about maintaining this illusion of superiority. And certainly I use crude words—sparingly—in my novels. Lots of people swear these days and I believe I need to use “those words” to be realistic.

So this brings me to a funking problem. You read that correctly. As I’ve mentioned recently here I have a temporary injury to my right arm that makes it painful to type, therefore I have adopted a speech–to–text software, and I dictate most of my work including the mystery novel I’m working on right now.

After a short time I discovered that Nuance Dragon dictation software is prudish. Something in its programming makes it squeamish about any form of swearing. It changes my words. For example, thanks to the software, one of my characters said, “Are you shipping me?” Rest assured this had nothing to do with FedEx or UPS.

Yes, there is a way to override this prim prose. You can add words to the software’s vocabulary, but even that’s tricky. I added the word f**k but it still sometimes writes fark, unless I pronounce it very distinctly and slowly. But of course that’s the way I like to use the f-word.

I soon realized that you have to add every form of that word individually. Hence, even though I added the word f**k I had to add the word f**king otherwise it came out funking as you saw two paragraphs above.

On the positive side, the program is supposed to pick up on your style, and it does. It knows for example that the words Nostalgia City need to be capitalized because it is the title of my theme park, the setting for the novels. It also learned Lyle the name of one of my protagonists. It struggled for a long time with the name Drenda, one of my continuing characters. I had to manually teach it not to write Brenda.

This whole experience, brought on by a torn arm tendon—a fairly minor affliction by comparison—has taught me to appreciate the struggles that many disabled people face every day.

Tomorrow,  July 26, is National Disability Independence Day commemorating the signing into law of ADA, the Americans With Disabilities Act.

I salute all disabled Americans as they face their challenges and I shall dedicate the book I’m working on now to them.