tim's experiment

Excuse the four-letter word, but on my last trip back to the ancestral village in the UK I made an interesting discovery. The f-word has come out. Of course in my youth we used it, on occasion. And we all knew what it meant. But there was an unstated rule, even among the most foul-mouthed of us, that it was not to be used in mixed company.

This was not just some bourgeois convention found in “polite society”. Almost everyone who was older than me had been conscripted into the forces for two years. They had there learned a vast repertoire of really obscene songs which were commonly sung in the communal bath after rugby or football matches. We were not prudish in our speech, at least in men-only occasions. But The Word was not used in public speeches, or in the media. A whole generation of publishers had wrestled with the problem of how to handle That Word in books devoted to the War, then of recent vintage. Some used asterisks, some used substitutes which fooled nobody like “frig” or  ” “flick”. Few dared simply to censor the offending word. After all the Other Ranks had won the war as well.

In the 60s the polite convention, like so many others, came under attack. With the abolition of stage censorship it became possible to use the word in plays and this was, at the expense of some controversy, done. The Word briefly appeared on television – I was watching at the time – when it fell from the lips of Kenneth Tynan. Speaking in defence of a show called “Oh Calcutta” which plumbed new depths of indelicacy he maintained that the word, which he uttered, was now no longer controversial. This was not true, at least in my family, where the arrival of the first broadcast f*** caused much discussion, some of it critical. Mr Tynan was not punished for his trailblazing, but it was not – at the time – copied or repeated.

My first inkling that times were finally a-changing in this matter came some ten years ago when I went with my son – then about 14 – to Glasgow for a week. During the day we both attended classes and in the evenings we watched television for an hour or two before going out to eat. We stumbled across a cooking programme which turned out to be Gordon Ramsey exploring restaurant disasters. Mr Ramsey’s reputation as a man with an eff constantly at the tip of his tongue had not yet reached Hong Kong. So we were taken completely by surprise when someone asked the kitchen guru how he could tell if a piece of meat was done. “Remember the old saying,” said Gordon, “if it’s brown it’s cooked, if it black it’s fooked.”  Clearly cooking programmes are not what they were. I was a bit offended at the time. After all this was an hour when kids might well be viewing. But I later discovered that Mr Ramsay uses the same language in front of his wife and children, so no doubt he cannot be expected to refrain in front of other people’s.

On my last visit to the UK there had been further progress – or if you like further degeneration. Reality television is bleep-free but not fuck-free. During one perfectly respectable programme there was a loud conversation going on in the background, from which the word “motherfucker” floated audibly into the soundtrack. Nobody turned a hair. This development has not yet arrived in Hong Kong, where Mr Ramsey’s programmes unleash a veritable blizzard of bleeps. But it is probably on its way, so we may well consider whether it is a Good Thing.

Some people will no doubt say it is. Liberated ladies may dismiss the convention that certain words should not be used in their presence as an old-fashioned symbol of their inferior status, like men opening doors for them or walking on the road side of the pavement. Sociologists – or at least some of them – believe that in the phase of history when self-control and restraint were desirable and badly needed social goals it was useful to have a large range of polite inhibitions, even if some of them were unjustifiable. Now that we feel secure in our ability to refrain from genuinely anti-social behaviour we can take the skirts off our piano legs, as it were.

Arguments against? Well this has gone beyond the stage where people were using the word to discuss sex in public, no doubt a useful liberation. It has now become an all-purpose adjective, often used in insulting contexts. Frequent use will devalue it, so that now we find footballers reduced to assailing each other with racist epithets because “fucking cunt” has become so familiar as to be almost a term of endearment. I suppose in the end it’s a matter of taste, and this epidemic of public effing and blinding is not to mine. Perhaps I’m getting old.