Word Choice Matters

When I was writing Deathday, I spent a lot of time coming up with colorful euphemisms for sex, genitalia, you name it.  It was a lot of fun coming up with different ways to refer to a guy's sunny side up.  Anything can be dirty if you present it in the right way.  I played it for laughs because the topic I was dealing with was heavy and I didn't want to write a depressing book about death.  I wanted to write a book about life.  Anyway, I used really specific words to get the laughs that I wanted.

But what about when you don't want the laughs?  I'm currently working on a book that's inspired by the hard boiled detective novels of Marlowe and Hammett.  Those detective novels have their own slang and I wanted to give my book that flavor.  But then I wrote the following snippet:

"She's guilty, Teddy.  Lucky fingered her.  Tess fingered her too, I was there.  By tomorrow, I'm betting half the school will have fingered her for this and there's nothing we can do."

The scene in which this unfortunate snippet resides is a really tense scene and I want readers to be on the edge wondering what's going to happen next.  But the word choice, finger, has another meaning, a sexual meaning.  Since I'm not playing this scene for laughs, any unintentional chuckles I get from this will ruin the mood and kill any tension I've created, and that's definitely not what I want.

So be careful when you're picking words, especially if you're using slang from another era.  Because if you finger someone who's got a lot of spunk, you may not like what happens.