person, a parish clerk who had just seen a locomotive for the first time: ‘That was a sight to have seen; but one I never care to see again! How much longer shall knowledge be allowed to go on increasing?’
Godwin, in a lament echoed by those attempting to encourage acceptance of the Internet today, implored the working classes to be open-minded and positive towards technological changes. ‘We would strongly and sincerely urge every individual of the society to lend his utmost aid in establishing and increasing their effectiveness,’ he wrote, ‘not merely to maintain the prosperity of the country, but greatly to increase it.’
Tony Blair’s ambition to get everyone on the Internet by 2005 came and went. Five years later there were still 9.2 million adults who had never been online in Britain. More than a quarter of UK households had no access to the web, with 59 per cent of those saying they either didn’t want or didn’t need it.
The digital divide is partly a generation gap, with older people more reluctant to engage with new technology. But it is also a feature of a profoundly worrying aspect of British society: the sizeable minority of citizens who are increasingly disconnected from the mainstream. While just 3 per cent of graduates have never used the Internet, for those without any formal qualifications the figure rises to 55 per cent. There is a clear link between social exclusion and digital exclusion, and government advisors have warned that people they label as ‘resistors’ risk cutting themselves off still further.
Reading official documents on the subject, one is struck by the frustration of those charged with getting Britain online: they bemoan the negative knee-jerk reaction of some groups to the potential benefits of technology. ‘These people,’ the government’s key Digital Britain report advised, ‘need to be clearly shown how digital services could benefit them.’ But when resistors were shown a five-minute video designed to do just that, most people still said no — even if offered access for free.
Ministers were warned that those deeply socially excluded, with no meaningful Internet engagement, accounted for 10 per cent of the population and that Britain was at a tipping point in its relation to the online world. ‘It is moving from conferring advantage on those who are in it to conferring active disadvantage on those who are without.’
The early dramatic claims for the Internet, that it would either create a virtual utopia or destroy physical community, forgot the importance that people give to real socialising; to sharing a meal or juicy gossip, to handshakes and hugs, to looking people in the eyes and occasionally glimpsing their soul. Emoticons or colon/bracket winks and smiles are no substitute. Facebook, Hotmail and Twitter don’t replace conversation and friendship: they build on what is there — just as the railways, the postal service, the telephone and the motorcar have done.
The evidence suggests that a large majority of the social interactions that occur online involve people who know each other offline: the Internet therefore magnifies the connectedness of those who are connected and the exclusion of those who are already excluded. The solution is not simply about access to the web, providing high- speed broadband to remote villages or IT suites in old folks’ homes, important though those may be. The challenge is to give the marginalised in Britain — the illiterate, the vulnerable, the desperate — the skills, support and social confidence to cross the electronic frontier.
X is for XXXX
Explaining the alphabetical structure of this book, the question I have been asked more than any other is, of course: ‘What are you going to do for X?’ In his famous dictionary, Dr Johnson described ‘X’ as ‘a letter which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language’ and, despite every British child being introduced to the xylophone and the X-ray fish at an astonishingly tender age, it is true that the twenty-fourth letter is regarded as an exceptional, perplexing and exotic character.
‘X’ exerts an emotional force greater than the rest of the alphabet put together: it is a simple kiss and an ancient battlefield; the signature of the illiterate and of democracy itself; it marks the spot of hidden treasure and the source of forbidden pleasure; it symbolises Christ and the unknown. We react to the dramatic crossed strokes of the ‘X’ because they imply something extraordinary, mysterious or dangerous. ‘X’ is camouflage for taboos: the X- rated; the X-certificate; the XXXX!
It is that last aspect of Britain’s X-factor that I wish to explore: the place of curses, oaths and swear words in British culture; the expletives that tell us far more about our status, our values and our heritage than simply whether we have a foul mouth. How one swears and how often are as indicative of class as top hats and shell suits.
The middle classes (who swear the least) are sometimes prone to cite pervasive working-class coarseness as evidence that Britain is bound for hell in a handcart. The commentator Theodore Dalrymple, a cheerleader for such views, recoils at the way he sees popular culture increasingly pandering to proletarian crudity. ‘In Britain we have completely lost sight of the proper place of vulgarity in the moral and cultural economy,’ he wrote recently. ‘We have made it king when it should be court jester.’
Certainly, the media’s access to and search for mass markets has seen the exploitation of the common curse: TV chefs marketed as much on their profanity as their profiterole; the clothing label French Connection selling its wares in Britain cheekily stamped ‘FCUK’; beer marketed to lager louts with the boast that Australians ‘wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else’; music and video releases so riddled with potentially offensive language that the industry has felt obliged to introduce a Parental Advisory Scheme.
All of this has encouraged new interest in the amount of swearing there really is in British conversation. Linguists recently assembled the wonderfully named Lancaster Corpus of Abuse, a huge collection of expletives filtered from the 100-million-word British National Corpus of written and spoken English. The average Brit, it emerges, uses eighty to ninety expletives every day, but some individuals are measured swearing more than 500 times a day. Ten taboo terms make up 80 per cent of swearing (you can work them out): the words ‘bloody’ and ‘god’ are most frequently employed by women, among men the most common expletive is ‘f***ing’.
If there is air in cyberspace, it is probably blue: online chat room conversations have been found to include at least one obscenity every minute. The anonymity of the Internet, coupled with its separation from grounded cultural norms, frees consumers to express themselves in terms they would never use in face-to-face conversation.
Swearing has always been an international phenomenon and, with the spread of global communication, is likely to become more so. There are a handful of places where you are still unlikely to hear expletives: traditionally American Indians don’t swear, nor do the Japanese, Malaysians and most Polynesians. But the use of taboo words crosses continents and cultures. Tracking the origin of two of the most offensive English swear words, for example, involves a journey around Europe and back through centuries: the Old Norse
The British, however, seem to have tapped the power of swearing more enthusiastically than other nations. There are no truly robust international comparisons, but one study looking at the word ‘f***’ in British and American conversation found it to be much more prevalent in the UK than the US. Analysing tens of millions of spoken words used on both sides of the Atlantic, the research found the f-word being employed twenty-eight times as often in Britain as America. What also emerged from the same study is a difference in the way swear words are utilised: the Americans chuck around expletives more forcefully; when they engage the f-word it tends to be violent. In Britain, we often employ taboo words with gentle insouciance; sprinkling them into our conversations in much the same way we splash vinegar onto our chips.
Swearing is part of British culture, with a rich historical and social back story. Long before there was an America, we were honing our skills. As a young boy, like millions who preceded me, I was caught sniggering at Chaucer’s fruity vocabulary, juicy rebellious words that seemed at odds with the chalk-dust desiccation of a strict grammar school classroom. In
