The curse of words

uch hullabaloo about swearing recently (banned by the Wireless music festival), but I maintain that a well-timed sweary moment is much less offensive than other, seemingly innocent words. When I worked at Tatler, we kept an email circulating around the office with the subject “BANNED WORDS”. If one of us thought of a new dirty word, we’d add it to the email and re-send it. The list included, but was not limited to, “pooch”, “quaff”, “achingly”, “shindig”, “hubby”, “tasty” and “classy”. “Pile”, as in big house, was also on there, although occasionally, when I was writing about a duke, it was quite hard to come up with another word for “castle”. My mother chips in here, saying she would like to add “vlog” to the list, because she thinks it’s much worse than certain other four-letter words.