The curse of swearing in children's books

Swearing in children's books, and even in books for teenagers, used to be pure anathema.  SE Hinton's 1967 young adult novel The Outsiders, for instance, an emotionally-charged account of youthful gangs clashing in Tulsa, features no language more colourful than "Glory!", "Shoot!" or a very occasional "Hell!"  On this side of the pond, Robert Westall's 1975 Carnegie-winner The Machine-Gunners generated a sustained fuss over the inclusion of "bloody", as this 1978 letter from Puffin editor Kaye Webb suggests. Despite being set in second world war-torn England at a time of great fear and freedom for its child protagonists, and featuring a story saturated with exhilaration, danger and distress, the use of even a mild swearword was a step too far into realism for many parents and teachers at the time of its publication.

As swearing on the telly, in films and by grouchy adults who don't watch their tongues becomes steadily normalised, however, our 19th-century notions of profanity and propriety have been quietly eroded. Moments like the one in 2008 when Jacqueline Wilson was obliged by Asda, guardian of literary mores and tastes, to substitute "twit" for "twat" are becoming less and less common. That the Wilson hoo-ha came about as the result of one customer's complaint – that subsequently garnered a very few more in support – is significant: there was no gradually swelling poison-sac of save-the-children, burn-the-books indignation, only a grandmother with an obscenity reflex more sensitive than most who felt she couldn't just take the book back for a refund.

Wilson's case was unusual in leading to action at Random House. Although Westall, in the 70s, repeatedly had to justify his choice of vocabulary, David Almond only became aware of the high-level publishers' meeting at which the use of "bollocks" in Skellig was intently discussed after it had happened – the end result was to leave the offending testicles undisturbed.  Publishers are in general more likely now to choose inaction over excision, secure in the knowledge that great querulous waves are unlikely to result from a single rude word, or even a plethora of the same, providing it reads as "appropriate" rather than "gratuitous". It's probably easier to get away with a cuss word in a children's book than it is on the news.

This is, in my view, a very good thing. Bending over backwards, sideways and generally playing Twister to avoid the inclusion of swearwords in earlier, more censorious publishing climes has led many an otherwise assured and exemplary author into literary pitfalls. There are few Diana Wynne Jones novels, for instance, that I don't reread on a regular basis, but Wilkins' Tooth is one of them; trying to convey the highly-spiced language of the local gang of youthful ne'er-do-weels, Wynne Jones literally resorts to colours: "I'll orange well" this, "you purple" that.  The effect is to date the book astonishingly. It comes across as mercilessly twee, which is a pity as it portrays Jones as exactly what she isn't – a safe-for-kiddies, sanitised, patronising writer.

Authors publishing right now are not immune either to the pitfalls of invented profanity. Another favourite of mine, Scott Westerfeld, whose ear for invented language is usually sound, grated on me a bit with Leviathan, a steampunk alternate history of events leading into the first world war.  "Clart" is a good coinage for "shit" – it sounds appropriately dirty – but "bum-rag" just gets overused by the heroine-posing-as-hero in her attempts to swagger convincingly, and "Barking spiders!" is frankly rubbish. There are loads of better authentic early 20th century swear-words. Even "damn" would do nicely for a bit of variation.

Even in realistic, contemporary teen fiction, however, it's not always necessary to use the words themselves. Children and teenagers often retain a sense of swearing as excitingly taboo – they may know the vocabulary back-to-front but hesitate to use it in front of authority figures until a crisis point is reached. Reflecting this sense of forbidden appeal, sometimes you get more bang for your buck by going at rudeness obliquely, as Louise Rennison does when a drama group collapses into hysteria on hearing that their instructor "trained at Lecoq". Similarly, Grace Dent's heroine Shiraz Bailey Wood reflects guiltily that she was responsible for originating the nickname "Hairy Bunt" which has driven the unfortunately-named Miss Bunt to flee the teaching profession.

In my view, the cardinal sin is asterisks or dashes – they disturb the flow of reading, and so have the opposite effect to that intended, since they focus the reader's disrupted attention on the censored word. What are your views on swearing in books for younger readers? Best invented swear-words? And the most ill-advised self-censorship?