Andrew Kay: A thousand Curses
When did our language become so bad?
I swear far too much. Maybe it’s an anger management issue but my everyday is peppered with expletives from the mild to the frankly disgraceful. It’s crept up on me like damp and has invaded my speech so much that I am now very conscious of it.
I remember being a child and being shocked when I heard people swear. As a kid I never swore, to do so and to be found out would have instigated a slap around the legs from Mum. She seldom swore and when she did it was mild, the occassional ‘bloody’ and perhaps ‘bugger’, but nothing worse and yes, there was far worse.
Oh I knew the words, and the worse words, but there was such a stigma attached to them that they were reserved for extreme circumstances. Even when I had plucked up the courage to use a few I would never have done so in earshot of either Mum or Dad.
I’m not sure we even realised what most of them meant either. The ‘F’ word was certainly not associated with copulation, for that the current parlance was ‘shag’, a term that has almost disappeared. And bugger… well enough said.
I cannot remember when I first swore in front of my parents but I was certainly over twenty, and even then the ‘F’ word was never uttered. To this day I have only ever heard Mum use it once and that was in very extreme circumstances, a burnt cake or something, I can’t remember.
I remember clearly the scandal that came from the critic Kenneth Tynan swearing on TV and then the Sex Pistols with Bill Grundy and an outburst of four letter words. I was at the Sex Pistols’ first gig and I promise you that Bill and the TV audience got off lightly, at least they didn’t get spat on or have their eardrums perforated by the excitingly hellish din that they created on stage.
Perhaps that was the start of the devaluation of the curse. Where once swear words were powerful and bitter currency, now they are merely used as punctuation in our common speech patterns. It’s a sad thing in a way, a blanding of our language, a lost opportunity to be forcefully offensive whenever the need might arise.
The Americans have a better way of cursing, which I suspect comes from the Italian community. A single swear word is never enough, they have to be incorporated in a far more complex curse. These often engage in slights against your family or lineage – ‘Son of a…’ ‘Your mother is a…’ – you know the kind of thing I refer to so I need not spell it out.
In this way American and Latino curses have so much more power and because they are often full sentences they cannot be used to punctuate ordinary language.
The Monty Python team summed up this style of cursing in their brilliant movie, The Holy Grail where King Arthur is verbally abused by French soldiers. “I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”. It strikes the King and his knights to their very hearts – and had us reeling with laughter in our seats, especially when the French soldiers go on and on with their pithy and very silly abuse. Of course the Pythons were merely demonstrating that, when used in this way, curses are a pretty worthless commodity, toothless and – yes silly.
Silliness abounds in print. DH Lawrence’s notorious novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for years because he had dared to put on paper what so many people said in real life. Was it the use of the ‘F’ and ‘C’ words that so offended or was it the idea that a ‘member’ of the lower classes could dare to have carnal knowledge of a posh bird? I suspect that the latter played a far more important role in the whole issue.
Words are funny things. Especially words that are used as terms of abuse. I remember well an archbishop declaring that he wanted to reclaim the word ‘gay’. The pithy response was that he was welcome to it if he would also take back ‘queer’, ‘bender’, ‘pouff’ and sundry other terms that have been applied to being homosexual.
Of course this was followed by the gay community, in part, reclaiming the term ‘queer’. After that came queer politics, taking ownership of what had once been a term of abuse had sanitised it, made it acceptable and powerful.
More recently we have seen the word ‘gay’ turned into a term for something that is bad – “You’re so gay” – well yes I know I am, what of it? And thank you for noticing!
Perhaps I am beyond being verbally abused. Six decades in and curses simply bounce off me. But I do worry that my language is frosted with profanities. Oh I know that I never swear on these pages, I am careful in that respect because I value this space and the opportunities that it affords me. Add to this my total dislike for the rampant silliness that is the substitution of letters with asterisks. Really? I mean REALLY? What on Earth are all those asterisks about, surely people are not so stupid as to think that by omitting the middle two letters from a four letter expletive they are making it okay? Of course they are not, they are in fact stressing its power, making it more important, more potent. If you don’t want to print the word then cut the word and find a better one. If you cannot find a better one then print the thing and be damned. I hate too when TV broadcasters bleep. If you have to bleep because your programme is on before the watershed, then think again about the timing and your broadcast policy. I rather like the warnings that come up on the online TV channels that warn you of the kind of thing that you are about to encounter. Adult language and themes they say. Adult? Well maybe in some people’s worlds but not in mine. Especially so when surrounded by school kids at a bus stop. My word how our youth can curse, the air at an average Brighton and Hove bus stop as the schools kick out is bluer than Thatcher’s wardrobe. I shrink at what I hear – and I can swear like the proverbial trooper.
So in advance I would like to apologise for any bad language, cussing, effing or blinding that I might engage in without thought and I leave you with this – “****** * ********* *** ****!”.
