For chutney's sake

This post is about profanity.  Naturally, I have no wish to cause offence unintentionally and so have decided on a simple substitution system to keep things just the right side of filthy.

So, for the ‘F’ word, I shall be using the term ‘chutney’.  For the ‘C’ word, the term ‘pillow’ will be employed.

For the milder profanities, I have come up with something I think is quite ingenious.  ‘Bugger’ will be used for ‘bloody’, ‘bloody’ will be used for ‘bastard’ and ‘bastard’ will be used for ‘wanker’.  Hence, using the term ‘bloody bastarding wanker’ makes it a grammatical nonsense, robs it of its potency and rather neatly defuses the chance of somebody taking offence once the whole profanity substitution thing has been properly explained, probably in court.

The development of profanity has, by and large, been stagnant since the Middle Ages when a short life of miserable toil interspersed by war and plague provided all the inspiration one needed when one needed to find expression through expletive.  Today, an office drone may reach for the swear box when their database crashes, but the word they use was probably coined by some Anglo Saxon type who had just dropped a newly completed cathedral on their toe, or been careless with their scythe.  The latest addition to the lewd lexicon, the ‘M’ word (we’ll use, let’s see…’pantomime horse’), was coined in Viet Nam, I think.  At least, it was certainly used in a lot of films about the Viet Nam war, and as war movies are like documentaries for lazy people, that’s all the authority I require. 

Viet Nam was the right place for a whole new profanity to be coined, because the draft ensured that people who did not want to be there, often from rural communities so having a rich heritage of swearing around cheeky threshing machines, were put into an extreme situation, involving shooting.

If you have even played Medal of Honour on your console with the ‘team talk’ option enabled, you will know that nothing gets young men more excited in a sweary way than combat, and that’s just sofa combat, where the worst thing that will happen to you is picking up a DVT from all the sitting your backside is doing.  Still, it allows people from all over the world to scream obscenities at one another and indulge in the sort of homophobic abuse rarely seen outside the Premiership.

Why do people swear?  Chutney knows.  English is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Churchill. There are, and I went on Wikipedia so I’m fairly sure about this, well over a thousand words in the English language, so why is it that when reacting to pressure we reach not for the magnificent cathedral of expression to express our emotions, but simply reach into the shed of profanity for something juicy kept on a metaphorical high shelf out of the reach of children?

Possibly it’s because of the importance of the right tool for the right job and sometimes that tool is a blunt, simple one.  Want to stir paint before decorating?  You don’t reach for your blender, you reach for a stick.  If you are a bloke, this will be a stick you have kept, in your shed, for this specific purpose.  It is simple, it is blunt and it does the job, a bit like an F bomb.

I have recently graduated from swearing at the television whenever the news or ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (chutnying how much?’) is on to swearing at the radio.  In my defence, I was being sorely provoked, as the Jeremy Vine show was on.  This is a show that somehow manages to contrive to be more offensive than me, even though I am the one screaming ‘you chutnying pantomimehorse’ at an innocent little box with sound coming out of it.

F Bombing is called F Bombing for a reason.  Profanities, like munitions, should only be used by a responsible adult who knows what they are doing and who has had training, or an over-excited X Box wielding teen, crazed on Red Bull, Haribo, or occasionally by over-excited X Box wielding adults.

Do you mind?

I woke up during a meeting the other day to discover that I had apparently been possessed. At least, that’s the most rational explanation for my subsequent behaviour.

The subject under discussion (TRANSLATION: the excuse for the meeting and hence ordering of biscuits at office expense) was a code of conduct to be implemented when we move from our current proper grown-up offices into open plan (TRANSLATION: through what medium do we tell Sweaty Dave, currently confined to his own lead-lined office, that he stinks? Face to face? Post-it note? Interpretive dance?).

There’s no doubt that some sort of regulation will be needed in open plan, the same sort of rules that confine me to merely eating all the chocolate biscuits at meetings rather than my preferred behaviour of taking them, licking off the chocolate and then replacing them.

There are two types of open plan citizen; those with annoying personal habits and those who are going to be medically retired at 40 because they have been driven insane by somebody’s annoying personal habits. Annoying personal habits can be: humming, singing, muttering, stinking like a landfill site in summer, coughing, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, repetitive sniffing or making a curious tooting noise because of a semi-blocked sinus - C minor on the inhale, major F on the exhale. Unchecked, these can lead to a build up of tension in neighbours until the annoyed party starts to consider ‘breathing’ as one of their colleague’s nasty little habits and plots to remedy this.

A code of conduct may be a good way to start but I’m concerned that just about every anti-social quirk I have will be banned, a problem as collectively these form my personality. I know for sure that there will probably be a ban on swearing. I do enjoy a good swear, or a bad one, I’m not fussy. It’s a way of releasing tension and so it’s either swear or start drinking even earlier in the day and currently that would mean getting up before the sun. If swearing means you’re tense then Gordon Ramsey must be the tensest man in Britain but it’s not actually him who’s provided me with my sweary phrase of the moment. Rather, it’s another chef, Jamie Oliver. Normally clean of mouth and limb, seeing him swearing on the telly was like seeing an oil painting by Michelangelo - not what he’s famous for, but still a work of art. The phrase in question is: ‘fuck me ragged. Right up the arse.’ And I use it far more than is healthy.

So my great idea to promote open-plan harmony? ‘Why not have a one month amnesty where, for four weeks after we move into the new office, you can tell people that something they are doing is annoying you and they can’t take offence?’ Even as the last syllable of ‘offence’ was out of my mouth I know that I’d lit the blue touch paper of a truly shit idea. You could see half of the faces round the table light up as people thought ‘at last, I can have a go about Phil’s garlic and dung sandwiches’ while the other half, the irritating people with the self-awareness of a sea-sponge, thought ‘sounds reasonable. Hummmn, am I humming out loud again? Oh well.’

It’s a monumentally shit idea and if it doesn’t totally destroy office harmony, I’ll be bloody surprised. We’re a quirky bunch, which means we’re not wealthy enough to be considered eccentric and are not weirdly bearded enough to be considered insane. We need lies to get along, we can’t be honest - honesty is like hemlock to office workers! If we have to be honest to others provoking anger and tears then we are going to have to start being honest to ourselves and that’s when they start making up Jack Daniels and Prozac in gift sets.