I’ve always been a linguistic descriptivist, which is to say, I was entirely unbothered when literally gained a new definition. The fact that said new definition is opposite to its existing definition did not bother me, I was delighted with the addition of a new contranym to my lexicon.
The sturm and drang of complaints and general irritation did get old, especially because the venn diagram of people griping about how words have meanings, and people who say “I could care less,” is a circle. Words are for communication, and they mean what we understand them to mean when we use them between ourselves. The potential complexity of that is a beautiful thing.
One of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, will straight up make up a word to describe very particular feelings and it’s always done very naturally, the sort of effortless that people spend hours refining. Between context and the bouba/kiki effect, I’ve never had any trouble assigning meaning to those words, and it doesn’t slow me down at all.
Of course, socially, this does mean that words can attain unintended meanings, especially when one side of the conversation has a different understanding of the word than the other.
This is what happened to me with the word smut.
I’ve always felt that it was a fun, playful word, used to describe books that contain sexual content for the purpose (not necessarily the sole purpose) of titillation. This book has sex in it, and it’s fun! It’s smut!
I did not participate in online book discourse until very recently. Like… five months ago recently. The Milo Winter thing popped up on my YouTube and I got sucked in. My Instagram? Started in like February. I was approximately aware of BookTok, but I pronounce it like your grandma reading the word over her bifocals at arms length.
So when I casually described my books as smut and was promptly dumped into several conversations with very strong opinions about the word, I almost hopping my happy ass right back off of social media to continue being happy. The “Smut is valid” camp and the “Smut is porn” camp were both entirely predictable, and not really a problem. You can’t make art and be precious about it, so they didn’t bother me.
What snuck up on me with a club and a burlap sack was the romance -> smut -> erotica continuum.
Now, I’ve pieced this together like an anthropologist, so for the love of everything, do not take me as an authoritative source on the subject, but there is a very loud contingent of folks who keep crossing my feed who seem to feel that using the word smut is dismissive of sexual content in books, by assigning it a cutesy little word, and that for a book to contain smut, the sexual content needs to have no value within the story.
And, to me, that sounds an awful lot like the folks who were so upset about the new definition of literally.
Because personally, I like smut, both the word, and the content. I think it’s a fun, descriptive word, and can be as important to the overall work of fiction as any other scene.
And I’m not terribly interested in the rest of the discourse.
Recent Writing
He missed a step, was away from his body for a moment, and then was back and struck, as though by a fist, that she had asked him a question and he was supposed to say something, answer her, anything, but all he was capable of was admiring her eyes. And, eventually, breathing, he was capable of breathing. Not much, but it would have to do.
You even get a snippet from a smutty bit. Took me a minute to find one from my most recent writing session that wouldn’t violate any terms and conditions.
Next time, let’s talk about my current projects.
Do good friends.
Then They Kissed 