Is council message just a sign of the times?

FLIPPING heck, what is going on in Cheltenham? It is the last place you would expect to find the local council swearing at residents and visitors in its own street signs.

The council signs have appeared after a deluge of litter in that lovely town’s parks and they include the rude word “t***er”.

The word is rude enough, indeed, that typing it out in full feels wrong; and there’s the problem. Even mild swearing comes with a context and while something that’s acceptable down the newly re-opened pubs (about ruddy time) or between friends feels more brutal when you see it printed on a sign or indeed in a newspaper.

That sign in full reads: “Why are you tossing litter round here?” before giving the reader three answers from which to choose (“I’m lazy; I don’t care about this community; I think other people should pay to clean up after me”). Its final note is: “Don’t be a t***er. You brought your rubbish here, take it home with you.”

Nobody can argue with the sentiment. Anyone who brings stuff to a park surely does so in a bag, which they can use to take it all home again. Lockdown has seen our public spaces turned into tips and even toilets and the people responsible are not just slobs, but a mystery in the way they don’t seem to mind spoiling the very thing they came to enjoy.

But the word t***er itself is a problem if even a columnist cannot find the b***s to type it in full but, instead, resorts to those annoying asterisks and asks the reader to fill the gaps. There’s a risk that publically swearing at the slobs, even in a mild manner, sullies those spaces even further.

Perhaps times have changed, and we should go with the flow. The weekend saw reports of people waving a sign from a bridge on the A30, warning tourists heading for Cornwall to “turn around and buzz off ” except they didn’t say buzz but something starting with the sixth letter of the alphabet.

Elsewhere, even the ghosts are swearing: in other recent reports, a spooky woman in white has been appearing at Dead Woman’s Ditch on the Quantocks and shouting at walkers to also “buzz off ” (not quite buzz but see above). When I was a lad, ghosts just went ‘whoo-whoo’ but times do change and it is important to keep up.

It’s likely we are just getting angrier, after months of lockdown presided over by a government which has little to offer except the branding of everything as ‘world-beating’ when really that only applies to our death toll and the likely scale of the forthcoming recession.

Swearing is perhaps all we have left, and there is proof that it helps. A decade ago, scientists persuaded 67 people to stick their hands in buckets of iced water for as long as they could bear. Some were allowed to curse out loud, and some not: the swearers lasted longest although they still reported that it was blinking cold. We can, it seems, endure hardship a little better if we reach for our rudest words.

But that doesn’t mean we have to write them down for public consumption. Ofcom, the organisation that regulates radio and television, tried to get to the bottom (sorry) of this a few years ago with a survey of what people saw as Britain’s most foul utterances.

It came up with 150 words and phrases, ranked by rudeness, and the only one that feels appropriate to type here is ‘damn’, which was about 149 places short of the joint top spot held by the two enduring favourites which cannot be masked by any number of asterisks.

The regulators found that attitudes to swearing had softened a little, although pleasingly there seemed less tolerance to the use of discriminatory insults. But there was no appetite for the unleashing of abusive language on our screens and radios, and the same is broadly true for the printed press.

We are, it seems, keen to retain our civility even in the face of the kind of t***ers who drop rubbish in our parks.