HOW BIG YIN CHANGED USE OF BAD LANGUAGE
Sir Billy Connolly once famously rubbished the notion that swearing suggested a person had a poor vocabulary. “Rubbish,” he said. “I know thousands of words – but I still prefer f***.”
Billy is considered by many to be the connoisseur of cursing and his role in challenging the social taboos around bad language are explored in a fascinating new documentary about swearing’s place in our society. From the first published use of the F-word 500 years ago to new research revealing Scottish swearing is more affectionate than aggressive, the programme is, frankly, b****y fascinating.
Here, director John MacLaverty gives Paul English the lowdown on low language. There was a lot of swearing in the BBC Scotland programme Real Kashmir FC last year, about former Rangers and Aberdeen footballer David Robertson. But the BBC didn’t receive a single complaint about it.
Ewan Angus, former BBC Scotland commissioning editor, told me how there’s much less offence taken to swearing in Scotland than down south, for example.
Our programme has 75 F-words and 17 C-words – I think we use the C-word more than David.
We wanted to find out whether there was a specifically Scottish premise for swearing. But it was difficult to get a lot of historical information or data about it because swearing is hidden in the archives – it’s often been chopped out, censored, not recorded.
But it does seem Billy Connolly is probably the pivot point and that there’s a lot more swearing in Scotland and that it feels like people don’t care about that.
Connolly was perhaps the first to be ‘allowed’ to swear publicly a lot. There’s the euphemism ‘ industrial language’ and he was the first to take it into showbusiness.
Look at the
Edinburgh of the
1940s and The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and all that. Very Calvinist – it’s almost as if the pendulum swung back.
There’s a sequence in the programme which explains how every use of the C-word has to be cleared by the head of BBC Scotland. The BBC is one of the gatekeepers of language so it was a challenge to find some in the archive because so few are broadcast.
We were given access to the National Library of Scotland to see the first recorded use of the F-word.
It’s from the poem The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie by William Dunbar. It’s an unheralded and unique claim to fame. That felt like a real privilege – people can object to the language if they like but they can’t object to the historical fact that it was used in Scotland before anywhere else.
Another Scottish world-first.
At the other end of that is the study into the use of swearing on social media
platform Twitter. We spoke to the linguistics academic Kyle Gunn, whose research found that about 70 per cent of swearing on Twitter was actually part of otherwise normal everyday conversation.
It seems it’s just something that’s done in passing, not necessarily as a way to insult people, and a lot of the time people don’t even react to it. It confirmed to me that language is neutral – you can be aggressive without swearing and you can swear without being aggressive.
There were some stories we couldn’t get in to the programme. One of my favourites is a pal who is a primary head teacher. He dressed up as Santa and came in to the P1s and a kid shouted, ‘It’s only f*****g Santa.’
But I think when you start telling kids off for bad language, you open up a compartment in their head marked ‘powerful word – keep for further examination and usage’.
I felt it was important to have a woman (Cora Bissett) presenting to address that golf club mentality of “gentlemen, no swearing in front of the women”.
I did worry once I’d finished making the programme that the BBC might not want to broadcast it. But we actually interviewed the guy at BBC Scotland who makes those decisions about swearing so that meant I could say: “Well, you told us it was OK…”
I don’t think we live in the age of Mary Whitehouse and Moira
Knox any more. I think the prim, fusty era of Scottish society is gone – but I’ll still be wearing my tin helmet the night it goes out, just in
case.”