Questionable Content ?

Okay, this is weird but I don't know who to ask so I'll throw it out to you all. I need help with a somewhat ticklish bit of research and I know that there are some of you out there who are more familiar with this part of the world than I. You may even have a fourteen year old boy in your family.

I'm writing just now about Calven - the 14 year old boy Dorothy is taking care of -- and I need to know how he would refer (in his thoughts or around his peers) to his . . . ah . . . personal equipment. And while I'm not squeamish about language, I don't want to attract the 'wrong' sort of attention to this blog, so I'll go for the old missing letters ploy.



Would a 14 year old boy of today, of decidedly local (western North Carolina/east Tennessee) background (and, till recently, hanging around with bad company) talk about his p____r? Or his d__k? Or what?

The things a writer has to consider in search of authenticity!

Inquiring minds want to know. Or at least, this one does. Please email me rather than using the word in a reply.

Thanks.

A Living Language

"The living language is like a cow-path: it is the creation of the cows themselves who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay."

E.B White

I love White's image. As a writer, I find that I need to travel many paths in order to tell the story as it should be told. The main path -- that well-traveled one labeled Correct English Usage -- is the one I try to stick to for the narrative portions of my writing. I may unintentionally stray now and then, as I slip into the comfortable Southern idiom of my upbringing, but generally I aim for the English teacher's ideal -- grammatical, with word usage and punctuation as close to standard as I can make them.

Occasionally I rebel. For example, my spell-checker, my dictionary, and my copy-editor all tell me that Realtor must always be capitalized. I disagree, feeling that it gives the word too much importance in a sentence (sorry, Sallie Kate) and continue to make it lower-case.

When I'm writing dialogue, those alternative paths of slang and dialect are crucial to making characters, with all their differences of age, education, and upbringing, come alive. I dearly enjoy exploring those side paths of language. Here again, I test my copy-editor's patience with my use of the North Carolina mountain talk as I've heard it. The dialect is not one-size-fits-all -- some older characters may use atter and hit, their children will say after and it, and both generations will say you uns. Or perhaps y'uns -- it seems to differ from family to family. Elizabeth, from the South, though not the mountains, says you all (which my poor long-suffering copy editor wants to hyphenate or change to y'all.

I just change it back, being, as White says, under no obligation to stay.