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.

Word up

In a telly programme he did some time ago the TV critic (he writes about television, he doesn't wear dresses. Actually he might do, but I've never seen it. Anyway...) Charlie Brooker was explaining that he had seen a programme so terrible it had moved beyond the dictionary's ability to describe it, and suggested that two words be combined to try and imply the level of awfulness. With his usual scatological style he described it as 'shittifying'.

This notion, of mashing up who words with negative meaning to somehow create a word describing negativity squared, appeals greatly. This week I was asked to describe how something had gone and, to be honest: 'shitastrophic' was the only thing that fitted the bill.

This tickled colleagues so much that I have heard somebody use the term ‘shitastrophy’ to describe a recent incident, unfortunately I think it might have been in reference to something I had done.

The expansion of the lexicon is not restricted to negative things; certainly one of my favourite terms is ‘geekgasm’; used to describe a successful shopping trip to a comics or gaming shop, or a particularly excellent episode of Doctor Who. In fact you can prefix ‘gasm’ with just about anything to describe a rushing gushing feeling of joy at experiencing something rather lovely ‘bookgasm’, ‘foodgasm’, ‘decentpintgasm, although the last one might be stretching it.

I am expecting to see more mashed up words appearing in the media. The first place you will see them is in weather forecasts. This is because weather forecast presenters have that sort of psudo-science aura that allows them to use terms that sound made up, but are actually true, like ‘occluded’. Having shot their bolt and exhausting the thesaurus so early in the year trying to find frightening words to describe snow, they are going to have to invent new climate terms.

Until new terms to describe things we should be afraid of or outraged by are coined, newscasters will have to rely on using the existing vocabulary, but delivering them in increasingly emotive terms. Fox news is leading the field in this, rightly concluding that their viewers do not want to see a rational, measured explanation of what’s happening in the world delivered at a reasonable volume but instead want to watch the sort of rant that’s a combination of a toddler throwing a tantrum, an evangelical preacher and a maniac with tin foil wrapped round his head standing on the street corner screaming abuse at cats.

Postcard from Corsica – Language

The first French I learned at school was the French for ‘a bottle of lemonade, a bottle of milk, a bottle of wine’. Needless to say, this was a state school. If I had been privately educated the first French I would have learned would have been ‘I do not speak French’ and then off for Latin lessons and some light buttered buggery. At the very least it would have been ‘red wine, white wine and a charming little rose please. Milk? Er, no thanks.’

In the 1970s, when a small Macnabbs was parroting this odd grocery list, we were being prepared for life in the Common Market, the town twinning epidemic and exchange visits. I think our teachers thought that we would be a credit to the country, chattering away to the locals in their native tongue. This was very different to their experience of foreign travel, which usually began with an opposed landing on a beach and where all the language training you needed was ‘hands up Fritz’.

In the seventies and eighties of course, Brits didn’t need to speak foreign, we were all visiting the Costa del Sol and they spoke English there, with an amusing accent allowing us to feel superior and get sunburned. No, French was not really useful until later on in the eighties, when the posh kids at school used to go on ski-ing trips. As I listened to them chunter on about how great it was going to be, I hoped that they had learned the French for ‘my friend has been eaten by a yeti’ or ‘the fondu has given me the most terrible shits’.

The French text book I had later on in my ‘education’ was most instructive. This was because some artistically gifted deviant had gone through it adulterating all the illustrations in a way at once amusing and alarming. I remember in particular that ‘Celine goes for a pony ride’ contained images so graphic that it took twenty years and the invention of the internet before I saw anything like that again. I didn’t learn much at all from that book, except that French boys called Xavier wear striped tee shorts and like to suck cock. Apparently.

I was terrified of my French teacher. A gnome like man, he was the deputy headmaster at my school. Jesus, if ever there was a thankless position in teaching, deputy headmaster is it. I bet you have to do all the work and get none of the perks. Even head of house is a better post, at least then you get first pick of the fresh boys. Deputy headmasters have nothing to do except resent the headmaster, simmer in their own bile and take out their frustrations on boys who can’t conjugate. I think those lessons helped contribute to my hatred of the French, although to be honest the French themselves have to bear most of the responsibility for that.

On holiday however, I always like to give the local language a thorough mangling, Corsica was no exception. Except that the Corsicans had beaten me to it. Ruled for a long time by the Genoese, their French had been corrupted by a strong Italian influence. I was easily the best French speaker on the island, which instantly made me a figure of hate so I quickly adapted my schoolboy French to something just this side of ‘Allo ’Allo, with pleasing results. They still laughed at me, but the scoffing had stopped. The great thing about Corsican is that people speak just like schoolchildren. When they say ‘Bonjour’ in the morning, it really is in a sing-song way that makes you smile when you say it.

Mostly I was using my vast linguistic skills in shops (lesson one, at the bakers…now what’s the French for baguette? Loaf?) so while it was great fun to try out the language, the risk of ballsing it up and coming back from a grocery shop with a boules set, a harpoon gun and a budgie was considerable. Luckily, I am a master of the art of pointing, grunting and rubbing my belly. Which is all French is really in any case.

Word de jour

I came across an excellent term on the interweb the other day: ‘geekgasm’. The definition was unavailable but it was in reference to the making of your own TARDIS birthday cake. Surely, the perfect term for geekiness (Dr Who) and ‘gasming’ generally (cake).

‘gasm’, unlike ‘ism’ is just not applied to enough words. The only previous adaptation I could think of was ‘wargasm’, a 1990s computer game but these days probably better a description of the mental state of the sort of person who spent most of 2003 glued to the shock and awe invasion of Iraq and mouthed the words ‘oh yea’ whenever there was a geen-tinged shot of a Bagdad building going up in smoke.

Less sinister adaptations could be ‘foregasm’: a really good driving shot at golf, ‘moregasm’: multiple ‘gasms’ of any type or indeed ‘Oargasm’: the sensation of ecstasy occasioned by being pleasured by the movement of the seat on the rowing machine at the gym.

As ‘geekgasm’ makes clear, the ‘gasm’ does not have to be preceded by something that rhymes with ‘or’. ‘Teagasm’ can be the expression of satisfaction of a really good cuppa, ‘beergasm’ normally happens around the ninth pint and ‘garmentgasm’ is the occasion of the little shriek of joy given by somebody who has found an outfit that makes them look young, thin and desirable.

As for ‘blogasm’ - I suspect it’s a word in search of a definition.

Mobility

Why is it that with so many many many options for communication, what people actually say is dross.

The other morning on the commute (not quite hell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Virgil and Dante were in the seat across from me, Virgil explaining that this is the Hell of the Procrastinators), a young woman spent the entire journey, and I mean 20 minutes, telling her friend that if the friend left the friend’s boyfriend, she’d ‘f**king dump her, right, because, right, it’s not right to treat people like that, right’.

I suspect that she’s actually shagged the friend’s boyfriend and that this is exactly the sort of thing that comes up during break-up conversations and our shouty mouthy phone fool doesn’t want that, as the last thing she needs is an assault from a former friend, powered by 20 bottles of WKD blue, holding the last two, broken, in each hand and about to try out some moves she learned from ‘Tekken’.

What struck me, other than that somebody can spend so much time on a conversation of so little import, was the poverty of the language on display. I think that this girl must have had a lexicon of about 200 words. No kidding, in her personal dictionary the entry for ‘right’ must be chuffing enormous, because it appears to cover just about every conversational possibility.

I’ve little doubt that to her, this was, right, really important right. I also suspect that I now know why mobile phone executives can afford such large yachts.

Right (!), off to what the Council term the ‘recycling centre’ but which I am still pleased to call the dump, to get rid of accumulated sacks of garden waste. This will be a bit tricky, as some of them have been in the back garden, basically composting in the rain. Oops. This means I’m going to have to try and transport sacks of stuff that are one step away from being declared ‘wetlands’ and protected as a habitat for damp and twigs.