By Jeremy Clarkson
Today there are bare naked ladies in the newspapers, homosexual men in the woods, homosexual bare naked transsexuals on the internet, and I’d like to bet you have no plans to visit church any time soon. Time moves on, habits change and as a result what would once have shocked the nation to its core is now considered normal.
And yet, while you’re happy to watch a televised autopsy, you would be astonished and amazed if Michael Howard were to make a speech this afternoon in which he described Tony Blair as a “f***wit”.
Why? You use the f-word all the time, and so do your children. Buzz Aldrin used it on the moon and we know it nestles in the vocabulary of both Prince Philip and Princess Anne. We think Alastair Campbell uses it, too, while addressing the Newsnight team, but we can’t be sure because journalists can’t use it in print. Don’t you think that’s weird?
I can say a couple copulated, or that they had sexual intercourse. So obviously it isn’t the act itself that causes offence, just the word. And I can’t quite work out why.
We’re fast approaching the 40th anniversary of the first time it was ever used on British television — by the critic Kenneth Tynan — and at the time four motions were tabled in the Commons, with one Tory MP suggesting the foul-mouthed perpetrator should be hanged.
Eleven years later Bill Grundy was suspended because some of his guests used it during his show, and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne was denied the editorship of The Daily Telegraph because on one of his television appearances he’d used it, too. And things haven’t changed. According to the last set of BBC guidelines I saw, it is still more likely to cause offence than the word “nigger”.
Nigger is a good case in point. When I was growing up, it was no more shocking than “cauliflower”. You didn’t see Bill Grundy being escorted from the building because you were watching Alf Garnett on the other side, roaring with laughter as he peppered the screen with his racist abuse.
And yet now, just 30 years later, it’s gone. In fact it is just about the only word I simply would not let my children use. So why, if words move into and out of common parlance so quickly, has the f-word been a taboo since the dark, muddled dawn of the English language? You may argue that this isn’t the case. People with pipes and bifocals will certainly claim that in the not too distant past, words of an anatomical or scatological nature were not frowned upon at all, and that the swearwords of the time were religious: Jesus Christ, goddammit and so on. So they would tell you that there has most definitely been a shift in the nation’s choice of profanity.
Really? Well let’s take the worst word in the world as a case study. You know what I’m talking about and you’ll know why I can’t even camouflage such a thing behind a mask of asterisks.
We know it was used, in various forms, since before the Norman conquest, and we know it was in common parlance from the 13th century. But if it had been socially acceptable, then why, when Ophelia says Hamlet cannot lay in her lap, does Hamlet reply: “Do you think I meant country matters?”
By beating about the bush, so to speak, Shakespeare is getting a titter out of the worst word in the world, same as he does in Twelfth Night. And he couldn’t have done that if it wasn’t the worst word in the world back then, too.
Even earlier, Chaucer wouldn’t come out and write it, hedging the issue by saying “Pryvely he caught hir by the queynte”. Mind you, this might have something to do with the fact old Geoff couldn’t spell.
In 1961 it finally appeared in a dictionary, but despite this it’s still a massive no-no. In fact it’s probably fair to say that this one word is the most enduring taboo in the English speaking world. When Johnny Rotten used it on I’m In the Jungle, Send Me a Big Cheque, there were 100 complaints — and that, speaking as someone who presents one of the most complained-about shows on television, is a lot. And who can forget the furore when the BBC recently screened Jerry Springer, the Opera.
This word, then, is Custer’s last stand for the morally upright and the tweedily decent. The Guardianistas and the foul-mouthed have crossed the moat, scaled the walls and traversed the bailey. But so long as the keep is held up by the C-word cornerstone all is not lost.
Frankly, I’m delighted because those of us who use it need it to be socially risqué. Or it ceases to have a point.
My wife is especially glad because it’s a word she uses all the time. She loves it. Sometimes, when the children are listening, she combines it with “bastard” to create the word “custard”, but mostly it’s the full uncensored version that’s hurled in the direction of anyone she doesn’t like. Local radio DJs cop for it a lot.
She’s even developed it into a test at parties, using it as soon as practicably possible, whenever she’s introduced to someone. Her argument is that those who fall into a dead faint and need to be brought round with smelling salts weren’t worth talking to anyway.
I think she has a point, because many years ago my grandfather told me that those who swear are simply demonstrating they have a limited vocabulary. That can’t be so because when Tony Blair comes on the news you feel naked and underequipped if you don’t have some choice profanities in your quiver. Sometimes only the c-word will do.
Jeremy Clarkson
From The Sunday Times
February 13, 2005
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