Rise of the four-letter word

Press, 27 November 1982, Page 15

Rise of the four-letter word

IAN JACK,

of the London “Sunday

Times,” reports on the state of British swearing, with a comment that New Zealand ‘is very prissy, linguistically.’

Workers on the assembly line at British Leyland's car plant in Oxford returned to work earlier this month after a strike prompted — at least in part 7- by what they claimed, was the management's use of bad language. Managers, they said, had sworn abrasively at members of the workforce. The dispute, the so-called -swearing strike," caused some cynical eyebrows and questions to be raised; it was difficult to believe that the strikers themselves spoke with the chastity of Sunday School teachers. Surely this was a mote-and-bea’m situation? Where had they been living all these years? Had they never watched a television play, or been to a football match, or (even) passed a school playground? Was this simply not a good excuse to down tools and (as it were) bugger off to the pub? 1 telephoned David Buckle, the Transport and General Workers Union official in Oxford, to discover the precise words to which his members had taken such exception. Buckle was reticent. "I have a lady secretary sitting beside me,” he said, but if I say the words were effing bastards, and effing pigs, you'll no doubt get my meaning.” Indeed we do. Mr Buckle could have employed the adjectives frigging or naffing, or even played totally safe by going for blanking baskets, and we. would all . know the real words which lurked beneath the euphemisms. He was simply observing the old courtly virtues — virtues which this article also intends to observe — by trying to avoid potential offence or embarrassment to either the woman beside him or the stranger on the telephone. “Gordon Bennett!” or “Sugar!” it was tempting to exclaim in reply, “that’s pretty strong stuff, Mr Buckle.” But the temptation was resisted, for even a brief investigation of the current state of British swearing reveals a complex of attitudes which must be taken seriously — and a central paradox. People of all classes and stations in Britain probably swear more today than at any time in recent history — and here we are talking of the hard Anglo-Saxon stuff, not the quaint “bloodies” of yesteryear — but the sheer commonness of four-letter words has not greatly reduced their capacity to shock or offend. It depends upon who is swearing, to whom, and where. For example, a man might tolerate a friendly “f... off” from a male colleague, but not the same words from a female colleague or his boss or (heaven forbid!) his

wife. Equally, a reader of fiction might take no exception to the 49 f . . .s on one page of Martin Amis’s novel, “Success” (page 52 actually), but the same person, watching television, might be shocked by a similar dose of the word in a documentary film. The new Channel Four, which started broadcasting the day after the Oxford car men downed tools, discovered this rather quickly. Like the rest of the broadcast media, the new channel has a duty under the Broadcasting Act to ensure that its output offends neither “good taste” nor “decency.” More specifically, under guidelines produced by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, it is asked “to avoid the gratui-

tous use of language likely to offend”; although its use can be defended (after 9 p.m. when the children are thought to be in bed) on the grounds of “context” »and “authenticity.”. Several films shown on Channel Four, have needed this defence. "Network,” “Semi-Tough” and “Remembrance” were all peppered with four-letter words which

the station, which likes to consider itself an “adult" channel, chose not to cut. “Our position,” says a Channel Four spokesman, “is that we wouldn’t want to censor the language of the filmmaking talents we are able to display.” The 8.8. C. behaves differently. According to Alan Hart, Controller of 8.8. C. 1, it frequently chops bad language out of late-night films — but then the 8.8. C. has been living with political opposition and Mrs Mary Whitehouse for rather longer •than Channel Four.

Mrs Whitehouse is already heading in that station’s direction. She has written to the Attorney General asking him, in her own words, “to fire a warning shot across Channel Four’s bows.” She and her fellow members of the National Viewers and Listeners Association have been counting words. In one episode of the soapopera, “Brookside,” Mrs Whitehouse bagged one “bastard,” one “sod-off,” one “If - I - was - on - fire - you - wouldn’t - piss - on -me” and one “have - we - buggery.” She is reasonably happy to repeat these words down the telephone, but draws the line at her real concern, “the Anglo-Saxon word.” Even in her letter to the attorney general, she says, she refers to it as “eff, dot, dot, dot.” In the 19605, Mrs Whitehouse battled unsuccessfully against “bloody” — she counted 44 examples in one episode of the 8.8. C. series, “Till Death Do Us Part" — and today senses that she is about to depart on a similar crusade against the AngloSaxon word. “It’s my impression,” She says, “that there have been more four-letter words on Channel Four in a fortnight than on any other channel in a whole year.” Mrs Whitehouse may' be

trying to stop the flood after the dam has broken, but she is determined to win this time: “I’ll put my reputation on the line. Unless something is done, and done quickly, we’ll have four-letter words littering our programmes in future, just as ‘bloody’ does now.

“What we’re talking about is the crudeness and coarseness and innate vulgarity of these words. They tend to destroy the nuance of feeling which language exists to express. They reduce sexual experience to a harsh and crude act. They’re destructive to our culture and destructive to relationships. People, ordinary people, are concerned and frustrated beyond measure.” Mrs Whitehouse’s view that language is changed from the top of the social heap rather than the bottom, by' a conspiratorial liberal elite rather than by the crowd, may puzzle anyone who has ever listened to the dreary adjectival swearing of (say) a skin-head. But it does get some support from Professor Randolph Quirk, the vice-chancellor of London University and a distinguished writer and lecturer on language. Professor Quirk uses four letter words as a doctor might handle the human body; quite dispassionately. The telephone line rang to the sound of Anglo-Saxon, probably in contravention of the obscenity law contained in the Telecommunications Act, 1981. It was true, he thought, that there was “a greater spread” of swearing in Britain today. But, he added, “we in the so-called arty circles often don’t realise how much further we’ve gone in this direction than the rest of society.” He recalled the outrage caused when Kenneth Tynan said “f. . .” on television, the first person ever to do so, in 1965. “I couldn’t understand the fuss. It was a word we’d used in the senior common room for years. And then I found myself with a group of engineering and ' medical students one day and discov-

ered that they had been absolutely appalled by Tynan. You see, swearing not only affects different classes in different ways, there can even be differences between professions.” He thought that today society had “a more honest recognition” of a language that has always been with us, though suppressed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, for example, included the Anglo-Saxoh words for the first time only in the 19705. He did admit, however, that this recognition clashed with what he termed puritanism of much of the population, and particularly the workingclass. (I am not sure if the professor used the word “puritanism” pejoratively, but he certainly seemed to take a dim view of New Zealand, which he described as “very • prissy, linguistically.”)

Which raises another great paradox in-British swearing: the working-class, after all, are the people who are supposed to have been swearing, unrecognised, for years. But they have bound the habit with rules and regulations,

appropriate and inappropriate times and places. Many abhor the fact that the old Anglo-Saxon has crept out of its prison in the mine, the mill, and the public bar and is now threatening an assault on the living-room. Alan Bleasdale, the writer whose 8.8. C. series, “The Boys From the Black Stuff,” so vividly revealed the lives of the Liverpool unemployed, charts this progress quite specifically: “I first heard a woman swear in 1967. She was a teacher in the same school as me, and I was appalled.” Bleasdale went abroad in 1971, returning in 1974. “When I left I’d never heard a girl pupil swear. When I came back, I found beautiful little 11-year-olds shouting ‘you f . . .ing twat’ down the school corridor. I was appalled again.” Nonetheless, the word frigging featured often in Bleasdale’s recent series. Authenticity, presumably, was the criterion here. Working-class communities may prove the last bastions of the courtly virtues. As Bleasdale says: “The people I grew up with still can’t bear to hear a woman swear, and very few working men will swear in front of their wives unless they (the men) are drunk.” Whether women need or

appreciate this protection is another matter. Sometimes, one feels, it is sensitive men who should be supplied with ear-muffs. Earlier this month I talked to an old miner in Wigan who had been unlucky enough to watch and hear Pamela Stephenson’s performance at the lunch for “The Woman of The Year.”

“That Stephenson woman . . .”, he said; puzzled. “It beats me why academic types like that have to swear. I mean it’s degrading, isn’t it? We swore down the pit because we were driven to swear. You need to swear if you’re up to your arse in water and it’s as black as night. But there’s nothing clever about swearing, is there?” 'I Professor Quirk would disagree. In a book (“Style and Communication in the English Language”), to be published next month he welcomes the continuing trend “away from old constraints and rigidities?’ But his chapter on swearing, entitled “Sound Barriers and Gangbangsprache,” closes with a bleak rider.

“I find it no easier than anyone else to view sympathetically the abuses and perversions of what I have been trying to see as broadly beneficent trends,” writes the professor. “Obscene and brutal language is certainly more audible, not merely among the idealistic and ‘progressive’ but also among the muggers, the ‘Pakibashers,’ the black hoodlums and white back-lashers, and it is not surprising if the relaxed constraints are linked in the minds of many not with an enhanced democracy but with more sinister fascistic trends, street violence, and mob rule. “The pom merchants, like the poor, have always been with us, as have the cruel and the brutal and the mentally retarded. We must take the roughnecks with the smoothies and accept that any major social movement will spawn its deviants.” Such fair-minded sentiments are perhaps easier to take on board if one reads them in some civilised spot far removed from a railway carriage full of Millwall soccer supporters, boy soldiers, or (who knows?) professors of linguistics. Place most people in the midst of Professor Quirk’s “gangbangsprache” and they will still show a strong desire to leave at the next station.

N.Z. ‘prissy, linguistically’

‘Obscene and brutal’