Filthy English Read online

  Filthy English

  The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing

  Peter Silverton

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction: Foreplay

  1 Sexual Intercourse and Masturbation

  2 Vulvas, Vaginas and Breasts

  3 Penises and Testicles

  4 Anuses, Faeces, Urine and other Excreta

  5 Mother, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers

  6 Homosexuals, Male and Female

  7 Popular Music

  8 Around the World

  9 Coloured People and People of Colour

  10 *********, Bleeps, Censorship, –--––– and Euphemism

  11 The Couch, the Football Match and the Romantic French Poet

  Postscript: Afterglow

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Foreplay†

  It was early evening, a December Wednesday, a time of homework deferred and dinner (or tea or supper) made (or eaten or cleared). In a TV studio at the base of a glass and green granite tower on the northern edge of central London, Steve, then 21, faced his questioner and said to him: ‘You dirty sod; you dirty old man.’ Then: ‘You dirty bastard.’ And: ‘You dirty fucker.’

  In that moment – broadcast live on the first day of the last month of 1976 – things changed. Language – bad language, filthy English – jumped out of the shadows it had inhabited pretty much all its previous life and began its journey toward the light. It happened shortly before 6.30 p.m., on Thames Television’s Today, a commercial channel’s nightly magazine show, with all the usual local news items – weather reports, traffic updates, charity eating competitions, skateboarding ducks. It happened in a Britain in which there were only three TV channels and families did sit down together to their evening meal in front of the early evening local news.

  Oh, there had been swearing on TV before. In sitcoms and kitchen sinkers, there had been bloodies and damns and randy scouse gits. And famously, in 1965, Ken Tynan had said ‘fuck’. But he was a theatre critic, an intellectual, a great writer, a future director of the National Theatre. His fuck appeared with forethought and deliberation. It wasn’t swearing at all, really. It was a societal intervention. As Kenneth had become ‘Ken’, so Ken’s fuck was not fuck but ‘fuck’ – a symbol, a weapon in a war of liberation, part personal, part global. What it wasn’t was fuck.

  Steve’s was. It was his own language, not a word on display like a brocade waistcoat. Steve Jones was a guitarist, in the Sex Pistols. He’d been a thief and still was sometimes. He was from Shepherd’s Bush – a short, unpleasant walk from the BBC studios in which, eleven years earlier, Ken had ‘fuck’ed a late night TV audience, but a world away really. Steve wasn’t making a point. This was how he talked. This was how lots of people talked. Had talked. Do talk.

  Even then, even with a drink or two inside him, Steve saw the TV camera as a mother of sorts, not something to be sworn openly in front of. He had to be pushed into it by his questioner, Bill Grundy, from ‘sod’ to ‘bastard’ to ‘fucker’ – from male homosexuality via illegitimacy to sexual intercourse. Old walls don’t tumble that easily.

  At a distance of thirty years, it’s an odd encounter. There’s a strange formality to it. It’s as if everyone involved is performing in a play they don’t quite understand but which takes them by the hand and walks them towards its conclusion with classical inexorability. They are players in a drama, speaking their own words but someone else’s lines. Or rather, something else’s. These are the lines of social change. You rarely catch social change actually happening, let alone in a two-minute segment at the tail end of an early evening TV show hosted by an almost stereotypical male presenter of the period: regional accent, wide tie, big sideburns and a deft ability to charm and enfold just about anything into the pleasing simplicities of the local news magazine format. But social change in action it was.

  When Ken Tynan said fuck, he thought it would change things – censorship, social relations, taboos. It did, a bit – although certainly not as much as he wished or dreamed for. When Steve said fucker, he wasn’t thinking of change or anything like it. He just said it. I knew Steve and was friends with Glen Matlock, the bassist in the Pistols. There was nothing considered about it. It just happened, the way things happen, particularly when they’re things waiting to happen. Which is why Steve’s televised fuck changed things far more than Tynan’s did a decade earlier.

  The immediate fuss about the Pistols’ tea-time swearing was splenetic and sweet in its details. A man named James Holmes, a forty-six-year-old lorry driver, kicked in his TV. Evangelical Christians marched and placarded against it. The Daily Mirror delighted in decrying it – with, of all things, a reference to the final couplet of Macbeth’s despair at his wife’s suicide, his own vanities, the inevitability of life’s vicissitudes. ‘The filth and the fury’ boomed the Mirror’s headline, punning on Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5 – ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. When again would a pop group, a tabloid newspaper and William Shakespeare so lusciously collide?

  Less noticed, then and now, was the real and powerful process of change this brief burst of televised swearing set underway. It was a first fuck – that phrase used by modern couples to date a relationship’s definitive start – that led to many, many more, on TV and in print. Like it or not, approve or not, those few words on a Friday tea-time were the starting point of a revolution in language, of real and profound change in the way we speak and the words we use. All kicked off by a sometime thief and future junkie from Shepherd’s Bush.

  It’s a commonplace that swearing – in public, anyway – has increased since the Sex Pistols’ 1976 encounter with Bill Grundy. Nor is there any real argument with that statement. Nor can there be. The evidence is evident. Starting my researches in my kitchen, I found a mug with one phrase repeated all over it: ‘Fuck this fuck that’. Maybe I bought it. Maybe I was given it. Mostly, I don’t give it a thought. Occasionally, if I’m making someone a cup of tea, my hand will pause over it. Generally, I use it anyway. I’ve never had a complaint. In my office, I found a greeting card from a few years ago, hand-drawn and coloured by my elder son who is now in his twenties. ‘Happy fucking father’s day’, it says. I laughed then and I laugh now. On my desk, there’s a badge which says, in many colours, ‘FUCK BOLLOCKS WANK ARSEHOLE SHIT BASTARD KNOB TOSSER’. My daughter, who is also in her twenties, gave it to me – though only because I was writing this book.

  In the middle months of 2008, I kept a loose, informal swearing diary. On a Friday night BBC1 panel show, I heard a comic, David Mitchell, refer, quite casually, to a ‘fuck-up’ and his ‘pile-of-shit’ week. It was after the 9 p.m. watershed, the time when all good little boys and girls are meant to be in bed – if only in the archaic imagination of unworldly regulators and worldly TV executives who, cynically, affect to believe what the regulators tell them about children’s bed-times. It was only just after that 9 p.m. curfew, though. Arbitrariness is always amusingly arbitrary. I find it hard to believe that, even a couple of years earlier, the comic wouldn’t have been edited out or bleeped.

  On a Saturday morning, I read an interview with a Hollywood actress, Keira Knightley, in the Guardian Weekend colour supplement. The Guardian, not coincidentally, is the undisputed world leader when it comes to newspaper swearing. Most papers are extremely cagey about printing swear words, avoiding them if at all possible, asterisking or euphemising them if essential. The Guardian, though, prints the whole word, a lot of them, very often. ‘There must (surely) be occasional editions that are, so to speak, fuck-free,’ its reader’s editor, Ian Mayes, wrote, wearily, i
n 2002. ‘On average, however, each edition contains at least two articles in which the f-word is used.’

  In the piece on Knightley, the Guardian journalist recorded that, in the course of their conversation, she told him to ‘fuck off’ six times – four of these suggestions made it into the piece as printed. She also told him: ‘I’m a shit person and no-one likes me. I’m an absolute cunt.’ A joke, I assume. Even if it wasn’t, I doubt it would have hurt her career. She was, as she spoke, the second highest-paid actress in Hollywood – i.e. the world. I also doubt that an actress of similar stature from an earlier generation – a young Helena Bonham Carter, say – could have made that kind of comment without her career and earnings taking a serious hit.

  It’s also possible that the actress thought that by using fucks and cunts she was using the ‘authenticity’ of swearing to dilute the public perception of her as some kind of hoity-toity princess, among liberal-socialist newspaper readers anyway. It’s certainly true that her swearing was more like Ken Tynan’s – deliberate and knowing – than Steve Jones’ – unconscious and … natural, I suppose. The sons and daughters of the well-behaved English middle-class often try this ‘authenticity’ one on. It’s why Tony Blair – and many, many others – drop into Estuary English. They believe that if they talk the way that honest sons and daughters of toil talk – or rather, the way they believe the working class talk and swear – they will osmose some of their authenticity. It’s true that class is a big factor in swearing – not just in England either. But it’s not, as you’ll see, that simple.

  Nor is this rise in both swearing and its acceptability an exclusively Anglophone thing. In the spoken language of every western culture I know even a little about, swearing is not just more widespread but more open, too. Listen to Polish workers on a bus. Or the Australian judges who ruled that ‘fuck off’ is not offensive and that a defendant calling the judge a ‘wanker’ was not in contempt of court.

  But the British do seem to be leading the way. When Gordon Ramsay’s cooking-and-swearing TV show The F-Word was shown on Australian TV, a local politician made quite a fuss. Jerry Springer, whose TV show is sometimes a mess of bleeped-out words, remarked on how much the British swear. A BBC poll in early 2009 found that 68 per cent of people felt swearing had increased in recent years.

  But then the British have long been known for their swearing. Joan of Arc called them ‘Goddens’ – for the ‘god damns’ that laced their speech since c. 1300. (Damn is from the Latin word, damnum, meaning damage – the church had taken it over, giving it a religious twist by 1325.) In his 1784 play, Le Mariage de Figaro, Beaumarchais states that goddamn is the basis of the English language. ‘The English (it must be owned) are a rather foul-mouthed nation,’ wrote William Hazlitt – philosopher, writer, Unitarian, grammarian – in 1821. The very same year, on his first day in the country, Don Juan learned that, too, in south-east London. The man from Seville was on Shooters Hill at the time. He’d stepped from his carriage for a view of the city and a little philosophising – on, amongst other things, Bishop Berkeley’s view on the nature of reality. He was interrupted by four highwaymen (hence the name Shooters Hill). Unfortunately, ‘Juan did not understand a word of English’, except one phrase which the robbers used repeatedly – ‘God damn!’ At least, that’s the way Byron tells it, in Canto XI of his epic poem on the Latin lover – which also introduced the idea that truth can be stranger than fiction.

  Shooters Hill is, as it happens, just up the road from where I went to university. I studied psychology. Often, when you tell people you’ve studied psychology, they say something like: Oh, you can look right into my mind, can’t you? Usually, I say: Yes, I can. Sometimes, though, I tell them the truth: academic psychology is a dry discipline, with lots of statistics, biology and sometimes brutal animal experiments. Not many jokes or even witticisms. I remember just two, in fact, and they provide a good marker for the shifts in offensive language over the past three decades or so.

  The first gag was about the hypothalamus. In my memory, it came in a lecture by the head of course, a professor of gathering years whose tutorials were enlivened with small glasses of sherry. The hypothalamus is a small thing, about the size of an almond, which sits pretty much in the middle of your head. The gag was about its function. ‘What does the hypothalamus do?’ the professor asked rhetorically. He answered his own question: ‘It controls the four Fs.’ Which are? ‘Feeding, flight, fight and … sexual behaviour.’ I could barely believe I’d heard it. An ageing, crustyish professor had just alluded to fucking, in a lecture. Some of the younger, less worldly girls looked genuinely shocked. Remember this is a third of a century ago. A different world, even in New Cross. It’s not the whole story of the hypothalamus. It has other tasks, too. But the gag stuck those four f-word functions in my memory.

  The other gag concerned Mendelian genetic theory. It was a limerick:

  There was a young woman from Tring

  Who had an affair with a darkie

  The result of their fling

  Was not one but four offspring:

  One black, one white and two khaki

  Which is how genetic inheritance works – in the case of skin colour and other things, though not everything: 50 per cent of children will be a mix of their parents’ stuff and 50 per cent will be a copy of one or other of their parents. What was the reaction to this limerick, in particular to the word ‘darkie’? Amusement, surprise and perhaps an acknowledgment that it was maybe a little racist, though not in a really bad way. Complaints or outrage? None.

  How things have changed. I suspect that, today, any psychology or biology lecturer using that limerick to teach genetics would be sacked before the end of its third line. The hypothalamus gag? Well, that can be found in How Babies Think, a parents’ guide to the science of babies’ cognitive and emotional development, published in 2001 and written – beautifully and excitingly – by eminent psychologists who probably learned the 4F mnemonic exactly the same way I did.

  Like all language, bad language changes and evolves. Right now, it’s changing and evolving at a new pace. In twenty-first century Britain, words which were, until very recently, only uttered in privacy or on football terraces, are regulars on reality TV and in broadsheet newspapers. Sometimes they’re bleeped or asterisked. Sometimes not. Other words, meanwhile, have made the journey in the opposite direction. Words which were once staples of prime-time sitcoms are now relegated to the outer darkness, banished from TV altogether.

  Swearing still isn’t exactly unlimited, though. Even on television – no matter what some campaigners might say. It’s true that American cable programmes can be extremely swearful. The neo-western HBO series Deadwood, which ran from 2004 to 2006, was clocked at a record-breaking 92.4 fph (fucks per hour). I think it’s fair to say that HBO is to TV what the Guardian is to newspapers. It’s always first with the dirty words – certainly in the US – and it uses more of them than any other station would dare. It was HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show which introduced ‘cunt’ to US TV viewers.

  Two other HBO shows, The Sopranos and The Wire, would both be lesser affairs without their constant profanity, blasphemy and obscenity. The Sopranos’ New Jersey mafiosi would barely be themselves without the word ‘cocksucker’, and the entire stoical philosophy of the Baltimore police in The Wire is contained in their loving embrace of ‘clusterfuck’. It’s a word, as it happens, which shows the perverse polymorphousness of meanings. Clusterfuck has been around since the 1960s. It’s been a US swinger’s term for an orgy. It’s meant a gang-rape. It’s referred to ‘a group of indecisive people, unable to decide what to do next’. And, it’s taken on the deadly, random violence of its brother word, cluster bomb. A clusterfuck is something pointless, stupid, incompetently and uncaringly violent. It’s what soldiers in Vietnam felt was being done to them or on their behalf. Baltimore police, too. Not just a swearword, more an entire worldview. It’s not the only swear with that kind of back story, either. There are many wo
rds like that, as I found out.

  Yet regular network TV in America is still as swearing-unfriendly as British TV was perhaps forty years ago – and beset by the same problems of line-drawing. As Steve Jones’ swearing on tea-time TV was a turning point in British swearing – and attitudes to it – so the American equivalent took place in 1973 when a complaint was lodged by a radio listener about an uncensored lunchtime broadcast of stand-up comic George Carlin’s routine, ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’. These words were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. ‘The heavy seven’, he called them. The shakedown from the complaint about Carlin’s brief routine has been at the centre of modern America’s debates about obscenity, language and the media ever since. More than that, the actual rules and regulations which entangle those three have been primarily shaped by the succession of court cases about George’s heavy seven – up to and beyond the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) case against Bono’s language at the 2003 Golden Globes. ‘This is really, really fucking brilliant!’ the U2 singer said, live on TV, as he picked up his award. The case against this – non-sexual – use of ‘fucking’ took four years to make its way through various courts, with Carlin’s 1973 routine always in the background.

  The borderline of language acceptability has shifted, too. Where once ‘bloody’ was, well, bloody rude, now it’s bloody not. This borderline is still shifting, of course. There are rules, though – just ever-changing ones. Rules and restraints, both overt and covert, public and private. Swearing is cultural and situational. What’s fine in one country or language is not in another. Even regional differences remain. Vicky, a Yorkshirewoman in young middle-age, has lived and worked in London for a couple of decades or so. She told me she couldn’t believe how many cunts and fucks there were in London English. ‘Though somehow,’ she said, dropping into imitatory Lahndan, ‘fahk and cahnt just don’t seem as serious or hard as fook and coont.’