Some Linguistics for the witted!
The editor of the new Lonely Planet guide to London has warned visitors
to be prepared to have their sensitivities assaulted. We Londoners are
all swearing like troopers. We're dumbstruck without the F-word, she
says. And she's right. There are few people now who, when dropping a
frozen chicken on their big toe, could satisfy themselves with my late
mother's restrained, "Oh, blast." Or George Bush's preferred, "Aw, heck."
The nature of swearing has changed over the years. The balance has
tipped between the blasphemous and the obscene. I grew up in a household,
religious in that typically middle-class, glass-of-sherry, C of E way,
where it was almost more acceptable to say "fu__" than "Je--s". Although
the biggest obscenity in my teenage life would have been to call the
loo the toilet. The point of swearing, rather lost these days in the
flurry of overuse, is to crash taboos and create offence. Sex took over
from religion and obscenity became the new shocker. Although Muslims, it
has to be said, don't go a bundle on either. And different cultures
swear in different ways. Europe is big on the genito-urinary, whereas in
Catholic countries they tend to major in mothers, whores and
illegitimacy.
What has changed is the way we have taken the private language of
frustration and abuse and made it a feature of everyday inarticulacy. In the 80s I was once
at the City Varieties in Leeds. An old stage manager
hated the swearing on stage. Yet, as he stood at the side complaining, a
cack-handed stage-hand struggled across the rig above us and dropped a
screwdriver. Without drawing breath, the old stage manager seamlessly
interrupted his rant against swearing by yelling at the kid, "Mind what
you're fu--ing doing". (courtesy Simon Fanshawe)
The editor of the new Lonely Planet guide to London has warned visitors
to be prepared to have their sensitivities assaulted. We Londoners are
all swearing like troopers. We're dumbstruck without the F-word, she
says. And she's right. There are few people now who, when dropping a
frozen chicken on their big toe, could satisfy themselves with my late
mother's restrained, "Oh, blast." Or George Bush's preferred, "Aw, heck."
The nature of swearing has changed over the years. The balance has
tipped between the blasphemous and the obscene. I grew up in a household,
religious in that typically middle-class, glass-of-sherry, C of E way,
where it was almost more acceptable to say "fu__" than "Je--s". Although
the biggest obscenity in my teenage life would have been to call the
loo the toilet. The point of swearing, rather lost these days in the
flurry of overuse, is to crash taboos and create offence. Sex took over
from religion and obscenity became the new shocker. Although Muslims, it
has to be said, don't go a bundle on either. And different cultures
swear in different ways. Europe is big on the genito-urinary, whereas in
Catholic countries they tend to major in mothers, whores and
illegitimacy.
What has changed is the way we have taken the private language of
frustration and abuse and made it a feature of everyday inarticulacy. In the 80s I was once
at the City Varieties in Leeds. An old stage manager
hated the swearing on stage. Yet, as he stood at the side complaining, a
cack-handed stage-hand struggled across the rig above us and dropped a
screwdriver. Without drawing breath, the old stage manager seamlessly
interrupted his rant against swearing by yelling at the kid, "Mind what
you're fu--ing doing". (courtesy Simon Fanshawe)
eace: