Britain Etc.

classes, the swearing that came out of the throat of the gentry and of those in office, was the outcome of class rule, of slave-owners’ pride, and of unshakeable power.’ He encouraged Russian workers to ‘do away radically with abusive speech’.

In France, the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu argued that, since French lower classes had neither the time nor the money to acquire refined speech, verbal gentility was used by the bourgeoisie to maintain the social hierarchy. But he also suggested that the working classes were, in a sense, complicit. ‘Groups invest themselves totally, with everything that opposes them to other groups, in the common words which express their social identity, i.e. their difference.’

In pre-war Britain, the same things were happening. The middle classes were using their educational and financial advantage to clip their accent and vocabulary to shape their status. The working classes were asserting their identity by proudly demonstrating rich and often fruity vernacular. Swearing was recruited to the class struggle.

Key battles would be fought in the 1960s. The uncensored edition of D. H. Lawrence’s explicit novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in 1960, three decades after it was written, included repeated examples of the f-word and the c-word. The obscenity trial that followed saw the jury return a ‘not guilty’ verdict.

In 1965, on a late night television arts show called BBC-3, the critic and literary manager of the National Theatre, Kenneth Tynan, was asked if he would allow a play in which sexual intercourse took place. ‘Oh I think so certainly,’ Tynan replied nonchalantly. ‘I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word “f***” is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.’ He was wrong. The BBC’s switchboard was jammed with indignant callers and, as Tynan’s widow Kathleen noted later, ‘the episode for a few days eclipsed all other news, including the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia and the war in Vietnam.’ There were motions in the House of Commons demanding Tynan be prosecuted for obscenity and calls for the BBC’s Director-General Sir Hugh Greene to resign. Despite the vehemence of the outcry, however, no heads rolled and the 1960s carried on swinging. In the Guardian, the journalist Stanley Reynolds asked why ‘that one simple word of four letters can provoke a greater reaction in us than long and complex words like apartheid, rebellion, illegal, police state and treason’.

Deference to the Establishment and its bourgeois values was disintegrating. The alarm of the conservative middle classes was personified in the redoubtable Mary Whitehouse, a Shropshire schoolmistress who founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and accused the BBC’s Sir Hugh of being, more than anyone else, responsible for the ‘moral collapse in this country’. But the wave of liberalism sweeping over Britain ultimately washed such protests aside. The taboos of the old order became the freedoms of the new; obscenity was, once again, employed as a weapon in the battle for social change.

In the February 1970 edition of the subversive Oz magazine, Germaine Greer described the fight for women’s rights in deliberately provocative terms: ‘The c*** must take the steel out of the cock and make it flesh again.’ Feminist groups employed what were called ‘semantic shock tactics’, using acronyms like SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and advocating revolution by ‘f***ing up the system’.

In his Anatomy of Swearing, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu noted:

Until recently swearing in women was negatively sanctioned as unfeminine and bypassed by the resort to emotional expression through weeping. With the growing emancipation of woman from her inferior status she has now altogether abandoned the privilege of swooning and has reduced the potential oceans of tears to mere rivulets. Today, instead of swooning or breaking into tears, she will often swear. It is, in our view, a great advance upon the old style.

Swearing had become the argot of political and intellectual defiance, employed by a wave of British poets and writers including Philip Larkin, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson. As well as being stockpiled in the armoury of the liberals, expletives also became ammunition in a generational struggle.

The 1960s had given a voice to teenagers and from their young mouths poured some ancient oaths. When the Sex Pistols appeared on television in 1976, the band was encouraged to demonstrate their ‘punk’ credentials by presenter Bill Grundy. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘say something outrageous.’ When guitarist Steve Jones replied by calling him a ‘dirty bastard’, Grundy urged him to go further. ‘Go on, again,’ he goaded.

‘You dirty f***er,’ Jones duly responded.

It was a sign of how the balance of power had shifted that Bill Grundy’s career was effectively destroyed by the incident while the Sex Pistols went on to have a string of hits and a number one album, Never Mind the Bollocks. Vulgarity was in vogue, an easy way for those who made money from the teenage market to connect with rebellious youth.

In the United States, where the language of the ghetto had a more aggressive tone, taboo words were increasingly exploited by the rap and hip hop groups of the 1980s and 90s. Members of the Miami-based band 2 Live Crew were arrested by a Florida sheriff on charges of obscenity after performing songs from their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. Among the tracks were ‘Get The F*** Out Of My House (Bitch)’ and ‘The F*** Shop’, the lyrics of which were defended at the trial by the prominent literary critic and black intellectual Henry Louis Gates. He argued the profanity had important roots in African-American vernacular speech and should be protected. The band was acquitted.

The assertive use of explicit American street vocabulary in the music charts pushed the boundaries in the UK. The f-word was losing its power to shock: when the mainstream romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral opened in 1994 with Hugh Grant using eleven ‘f***s’ and a ‘bugger’ in the first few minutes, it was given a 15 certificate. Instead, the most potent taboo words were those which challenged the values of tolerance and liberalism that had licensed them.

When broadcasters and watchdog groups looked at British attitudes to swearing in a 2000 report entitled ‘Delete Expletives’, they noted ‘an ever-increasing, but grudging, acceptance of the use of swearing and offensive language in daily life’, but increasing concern at words used against minorities. ‘Abuse — and especially racial abuse — is at the very top of the scale of severity and was felt to be unacceptable in today’s society,’ the report found. The c-word remained at the pinnacle of the offensiveness table, but the terms which had moved up the ranking were ‘n****r’ and ‘P**i’, ‘whore’ and ‘slag’. Racist and sexist words were assuming the potency once found in excremental and religious obscenities.

Recently, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom conducted further research into public attitudes. ‘There were mixed views on the use of the word “f***”, which was considered more acceptable by some participants (e.g. younger people and male participants) but less acceptable by others (e.g. participants aged 55–75).’ However, abusive discriminatory language was only seen as valid in an educational context and by some of the participants as ‘unacceptable in any context’.

With that exception, cursing has become almost conventional, a quality that diminishes its strength like kryptonite on Superman. All but the most offensive terms may now be heard at a country house shoot, suburban dinner party or East End knees-up. The aristocracy and the working classes never gave up swearing — it is the middle class that appears to be changing its mind about profanity. Partly that is because sensibilities have changed, but perhaps it is also a reaction against the idea of being bourgeois. Casually dropping the odd f-word is thought by some to indicate street cred or classless cool.

As that expert on middle-class manners Charlotte Bronte put it: ‘The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile.’

While I have felt compelled, with respect to the age and sensitivity of those who might stumble across this book, to disguise those words regarded as most offensive, the fashion is for exposure, to discard the camouflage granted by XXXX. To some that merely reflects the times, to others it is further proof that Britain is bound for hell in a handcart.

Y is for Youth

When the angry young man kicked me, I couldn’t help but think of the irony. His mate was busy punching my cameraman as others stamped on and smashed up his equipment. But despite the panic and the pain,