R D Kernohan
Drawing by Bob Smith
By happy chance I’ve never seen or heard the Glaswegian comedian who won a libel action after his counsel argued that his patter might seem vile, tasteless, and offensive. But the wee comic – the dialect expression applies regardless of stature – did contribute an insight into the condition of the language when he said in the witness box: ‘Being called racist is not like being called vile; it’s an extra serious thing’.
Similar unintentional insights into the state of language and opinions which shape it have been contributed by the former Conservative chief whip, by footballers in email and onfield dialogues, and even by the last prime minister, if it is true that some Downing Street conversations were conducted in an idiom never learned in the manse. They are, however, insights into much confusion and even some linguistic chaos. As with much else in contemporary society, people find it easier to abandon old rules of decorum than to establish new rules of behaviour.
That applies most obviously to newspapers, once unacknowledged legislators of the rules of standard English and guardians of propriety in print. Scotland’s two leading newspapers reported a court case in almost identical terms recently – I suspect an agency source – but in one a witness was allegedly called a p**f and in the other a poof. There are also occasions, especially in weekend journalism, when the most assertive keyboard character in pieces for the Times, and even in a more respectable paper like the Daily Telegraph, seems to be the asterisk.
More progressive papers adopt the franker and increasingly monotonous styles of the progressive theatre and pulp fiction. But even the plain-speaking Sun is confused. It blanches at w****r but will call a perv a perv, provided his sexual orientation is mainly for underage girls or boys.
But amid this confusion I identify two trends, one deplorable tendency, and an opportunity to edge towards a new and useful propriety.
The more established trend is for real, imagined, or presumed racial, ethnic, and perhaps sectarian and sexual insults to be reckoned more serious than the old obscenities, even the crudest of which – those which demean the act of love and the female anatomy – risk becoming as monotonous and meaningless as they once became on the drill-square and in barrack-rooms.
In the English football exchanges which produced different verdicts in court and from football’s holy inquisition it seems assumed that ordinary obscenities count for little but their association with skin-colour matters a great deal. I suspect we have edged that way even in ritual exchanges of Scottish sectarian insults: if I am called an Orange or (still more inaccurately) a Fenian bastard I’m expected to take more offence at the adjective than the now slightly archaic noun. Yet when I was on broadcasting standards quangos some of our most vexing arguments over apparent trivialities were derived from the intensity and sensitivity of reactions to broadcasters who used ‘bastard’ in either an aggressive or light-hearted way.
The more recent trend involves resentment involving perceptions of class, as in the allegation that a Tory t**f called a police constable a p**b. I’m not sure how far this tendency will go, as the decline and fall of the ill-mannered Mr Mitchell was determined by the temporary conversion of media people and MPs to the doctrine of verbal infallibility in police notebooks. A similar trend to the one on the great goal area controversy became apparent: the allegation of swearing at the police yielded second place to real or contrived outrage because a plod claimed to have been called a pleb.
The now backbench Mr Mitchell may deserve the benefit of some doubt after he belatedly stated what he thought he actually said. But I have no doubt that he is an example of a deplorable tendency – the erosion of two assumptions that once governed the use of ‘bad language’. One was that educated people ought to be able find more expressive words than common obscenities to convey strong feelings. The other, once widely spread among all social classes, was that even those inclined to ‘strong’ or foul language – and very many working-class people were not – recognised situations in which it was not be used, for example in remonstrating with people who were ‘only doing their job’ or in sexually mixed company.
That, of course, was before we became accustomed to some emancipated women and female novelists exploring the same vocabulary – and, more important, before public expectations had been shaped by changing standards at the BBC (for Kenneth Tynan remained for a while a very odd man out) and from American films after the collapse of old-style film censorship and self-censorship on both sides of the Atlantic.
Such uncouthness among the upper classes tempts me to echo the words of Orwell’s Winston Smith: ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles’ – or rather in the civil tongues which survive in many plebeian heads and in attitudes which the literary intelligentsia tends to regard as petit bourgeois, which I think is left-wing French for lower-middle class. For I’m sure there is some hope of a reaction against that degradation of language which, through a mixture of affectation and repetition, has made the literary and social intrusion of obscenities so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.
Maybe David Cameron should forget about the Big Society (never a convincing phrase for anyone who remembered Lyndon Johnson’s waffle about the Great Society nearly 50 years ago) and campaign for the Civil Society, which would at least be a useful play on fashionable words. For our society would benefit from a new civility. Civility, if widely enough accepted and practised, would ease many problems now only partly contained by heavy-handed laws on such ill-to-define concepts as racism and sectarianism. The tone not only of political debate but of much media discussion and private behaviour has become much too strident.
Too many people are too ready to give and to take offence; no doubt on occasion I’ve been one of them. And much contemporary use of language, instead of using common courtesies to widen common ground in a very mixed society, reflects and sometimes exacerbates our divisions.
No-one can expect language to stand still or revert to ancient patterns reflecting vanished lifestyles. I no more expect today’s female novelists to write like Jane Austen than I expect disc-jockeys and TV presenters to resonate like Shakespeare or Milton. Nor do I expect any language to be frozen by social rules about what may be said when. But when some trends are in the wrong direction, and when such role models as chief whips, rich footballers, and wee comics set a bad example, it is time to change direction.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
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