Mood Rings and Pigman

Yesterday Zoe came home from school with her loot from the treasure box (that she visits weekly because she knows how to be a good girl at school).

A mood ring.

I heard her tell Rae, "It's a mood ring, I check it to see what my attitude is."
And then with this melancholy-like voice, "See, right now I'm very happy."
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I recently finished this-

I enjoyed The Pigman, it was written for the Junior High aged, which is right up my alley. One of my main reasons is because of the language, have I even mentioned how much I dislike bad words?

In the back of the book there is an interview with Paul Zindel.
The question- In The Pigman , you use symbols, such as "%*$#", in place of four-letter words. Was that your original intent or did the publisher encourage you to avoid using controversial language?
His answer- I had to do what was comfortable for me, and I just felt that cursing- now I feel it more than ever- isn't really necessary. There is a difference between the written words and spoken words. I know curse words are thrown all around in kids' mouths, but such words don't help create a novel or a play. The type of language that has the highest literary merit does not happen to include massive amounts of curses...
Thank you Mr Zindel! Can you convince your fellow book writers of that??

The story is told of two high school students making friends with an elderly man. It is told from the youth's perspective and they take turns writing their story of Mr Pignati, aka The Pigman. Lorraine writing one chapter, John the next, until their story is told.
When I first started reading this book I thought it was recently published, but it didn't take long for me to notice otherwise and I checked- 1968. As this paragraph I am about to share will show clearly. But I really like this paragraph..... from The Pigman-

...this English teacher I'm going to tell you about.....says I'm such a card. A card she calls me, which sounds ridiculous coming out of the mouth of an old-maid English teacher who's practically fifty years old. I really hate it when a teacher has to show that she isn't behind the times by using some expression which sounds so up-to-date you know for sure she's behind the times. Besides, card really isn't up-to-date anymore, which makes it even more annoying. In fact, the thing Lorraine and I liked best about the Pigman was that he didn't go around saying we were cards or jazzy or cool or hip. He said we were delightful, and if there's one way to show how much you're not trying to make believe you're not behind the times, it's to go around saying people are delightful.

I often use the word cool when talking to the youth of today. (and everyone else, for that matter) So what I gather from that paragraph (which I think the youth would say they agree with) is that.... in '68 it was cool to say cool, therefor today it's not cool, so now when I say cool it's totally cool because I'm not trying to be up-to-date in my slang..... cool is the 'delightful' of 2008.