Don’t deny us a swearing spree
‘My personal emails would be poorer without pithy acronyms like WTF…’
My current bedtime reading is Robert Peston’s tremendously interesting analysis of the mess we’ve got ourselves into, and although I haven’t got that far into his manifesto for change, when I do, I’ll be all over it like Trump with an adult film actress.
If that offends you, I’ll be with you shortly to address your outrage. But first let me say that one of the major reasons I picked up Pesto at the airport was the title of his book: WTF?
What a great name. It spoke to me in all its curt brevity. This, I could tell, was a book for grown-ups. Or, at the very least, the sort of grown-ups who grasp that sometimes a judiciously deployed swear word is the only thing that will do.
Once upon a time, before young people became teetotal Netflix addicts, earnestly subsisting on celibacy and smashed avocados, they were the ones who swore.
Four-letter words were acts of Sex Pistols rebellion, tiny verbal grenades primed to disrupt and shock, but ultimately harmless; how else would Johnny Rotten now be advertising Country Life butter?
Fast forward to 2018 and the bright young things of Google have been banned from using bad language, while the organisers of Wireless Festival have been told that pottymouthed performers will not be allowed. Nor will any of the artists be permitted to make obscene gestures or wear skimpy clothes. Crikey. Will you break it to Kanye and Skepta or shall I?
My daughter went to Wireless for
the first time two years ago, aged 15. She returned, hoarse, exhausted, but in a state of rapture, her white mesh top filthier than an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys.
“That’s boys, sweat and vodka,” she croaked. Or maybe it was: “Boys’ sweat and vodka.” I hope it was, but my main conclusion was that she had been metaphorically first-blooded in the mosh pit.
It had been a cultural awakening, she was alive and nobody had stolen her trainers. A grand day out, if you will, but without the National Trust afternoon tea. Would it have been as lung-bustlingly awesome without the X-rated rap rattling the local residents’ sash windows? Obviously not. Sorry, but there you go.
I’m as much of a nimby as anyone else – I can hear Wireless from my house, if not feel the bass juddering through my sternum – but I can safely say I do not understand the fuss.
Haringey Council’s edict to transform this event into some sort of PG, pre-watershed High Street Musical singalong is ridiculous and embarrassing.
My advice would be: please continue to crack down on knives and weapons, frisk every last kid for drugs, if you’ve got the police manpower
– but censoring songs is to censor language, which takes us all down a very different path.
Yes, swearing can be lazy, insulting and self-indulgent, but for all its potential banality, it can also be uniquely descriptive, a release of tension; society’s safety valve.
You don’t have to be a f------ Fulford – one of the foul-mouthed toffs of the Great Fulford estate, so memorably captured in a 2004 documentary – to appreciate the satisfaction that comes from an unmediated swearing spree.
That’s not to say I endorse swearing in public life. Poor Anne Diamond, sitting in for Jeremy Vine, was visibly shaken yesterday when a caller on his Channel 5 show abruptly subjected her to C-word abuse. It felt to her like an attack, because it was an attack, which is a different, highly toxic usage intended to hurt.
On the other hand, I used to do comedy and the rule of thumb was that any gag, or indeed gig, can be salvaged by a bit of swearing. It’s not clever, but it is funny and all the more so when it’s unexpected.
The first man to swear on British television was theatre critic Kenneth Tynan in 1965, whose use of the “F-bomb” during a live discussion show was either a slip of the tongue or a masterstroke of calculated selfpublicity.
The same can be said for virtually every sweary outburst on screen, although I do still have sympathy for former newsreader Anna Ford who, back in 1997, unthinkingly referred to The Archers’ ruthless landowner Simon Pemberton as a bit of a “s---”.
She was lambasted, but must be eternally grateful that she never had to introduce manipulative wife abuser Rob Titchener. Frankly, she would have uttered something so career-endingly egregious as to be frogmarched to Peggy Archer’s kitchen sink to wash her mouth out with a bar of carbolic soap.
Attitudes to swearing are partly generational, partly due to social milieu, pace Gordon Ramsay’s verdict: “Swearing is industry language. For as long as were alive, it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.”
I quite like that definition of swearing as linguistic “boisterousness”. A much better Christian than I once reassured me that (theoretically) as long as you don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, anything goes: be as exquisitely inventive as Malcolm Tucker. There’s a deal of difference between profanity and blasphemy.
Of course, all kinds of things slip out when you are in medias res, but as long as you aren’t swearing at anybody, then I don’t see a substantive problem.
My personal emails would definitely be poorer without such pithy acronyms as Peston’s WTF, the more apoplectic WTAF (A is for actual…) and the staccato dismissiveness of FFS.
Too much? Not for adults. We know swearing is simply part of the etymological mix, the ebb and flow, give and take of conversation. What’s exasperating is having to remind people that just because they take offence does not mean we gave it.