Double-Speak

I want to highlight a popular mode of contemporary double-speak, exemplified in this short Guardian piece by one Peter Preston. He's bemoaning that John Oliver airs his show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on the US' HBO, rather than on a British broadcaster, from which political satire apparently originates. That's fine. He then suggests this came about because British broadcasters have no stomach for "digging the boot in" & speaking truth to power, which is also fine.

The clever ruse at play here is the attribution of Britain's satirical cowardice to an environment of "huff-puff, humourless outrage", or what we in Australia refer to as "political correctness gone mad". The prestidigitation is to present John Oliver's success as caused (or at least enabled somehow) by American culture's more-relaxed attitude towards politically oppressive speech. He offers some examples of the "problem" at work in recent British discourse:

Jeremy Clarkson receives a "final warning" from the BBC for mumbling the n-word in 2012.

The BBC's apology for Iain Lee's casual racism on his breakfast program.

The Daily Mail lambasting Sandi Toksvig for comparing to Ed Miliband to a terminally ill child.

This is a patently idiotic position to take if one knows anything at all about the cultures of these two places, which is why he doesn't say it directly; his statements refer instead to a more-general absence of "bite" in British political satire that renders it lame next to the likes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His examples, however, all uniformly involve examples of institutional backlash against insensitive speech.

Aside from being factually ridiculous from a cultural standpoint, this shamelessly dishonest commentary paints over Oliver's total aversion to insensitive speech of exactly this sort, and the numerous examples of American satirists - such as Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report - being harshly criticised by the public for insensitive speech. John Oliver has indeed demonstrated a masterful ability to deliver timely and hilarious political satire, but he has done so uniformly without straying into the kind of casual denigration of minorities that has plagued vacuous, irrelevant dinosaurs like Jeremy Clarkson or frat-boy misogynists like Daniel Tosh.

This is the double-speak that ossified champions of lazy mainstream maligning of minorities resort to in 2014. "Look how much I love progressive, popular acts like John Oliver" they announce to establish their connection to a time post-1990, "sure would be nice if Britain allowed casual racism huh" comes the completely non-sequitur follow-up. This is not only utter nonsense when spelled out clearly, it's also a slimy attempt to "claim" John Oliver as one of their ilk of rapidly-aging buffoons. In reality Oliver obviously goes to considerable lengths to avoid speaking insensitively, despite his platform on HBO offering him an opportunity to do so.

Herein lies the actual reason John Oliver is a rising star of political satire and Jeremy Clarkson is Britain's most widely-exported non-lethal embarrassment. While Clarkson clings to a simpler age when the absence of social media protected celebs from the consequences of their toxic casual racism (along with more serious crimes), Oliver instead navigates the new age of public accountability via an ingeniously simple method: he just doesn't act like a disgusting piece of shit. While Peter Preston may share Clarkson's view that refraining from racist or sexist speech is so difficult that "even the angel Gabriel would struggle to survive with [it] hanging over his head," figures like Oliver give the lie to their shrill whine that moving with the times is impossibly difficult whilst still managing to be humorous and critical.

So now they resort to desperate co-option of those who succeed without indulging in the moral shortcomings of entertainers past. Don't fall for this rhetorical misdirection: the downwards-punching cowardice of British (and Australian!) comedy is far more detrimental to its success than the rapidly-burgeoning public insistence on political correctness. The "we just need to convince the public it's OK to be racist again!" crowd of decaying social warriors are on the wrong side of history. Disembark from their doomed bandwagon now, while you still have any credibility left! Complaining about political correctness is going to be the future equivalent of your racist grandparent who complains there are "too many black people on television these days."

On Language Most Foul

It has come to my attention that there's something of a generational gap with regard to swearing, as in those of an older generation seem convinced that folks my age (mid-20s, let's say) just swear all the time for no reason at all and generally don't even give a fuck. I'd like to claim that that's a misunderstanding.

Let's consider some swearing:

Pictured: bad times online

Now, I'm not going to mount a defense of the conduct of "@Soul_James" here. The man is obviously a cretin, and simply out to cause mischief on the line. However, the response by '@infinite8horizo' is something I hear a lot, & this exchange neatly captures the language dispute I want to talk about. Let's break it down:

'@infinite8horizo' (I'm just going to call him Peter) is upset here because '@Soul_James' (I'll just refer to myself in the first person) has sworn at him - eg, used 'offensive language'. In this case, the word 'fuck'. It's a word I use a lot, and most commonly refers to a sex act, the act of fucking. You can check out the etymology of fuck on Wikipedia if research is your thing, but it refers to sex, basically. It's got a lot of diverse, mostly negative or emphatic uses in contemporary English, but it mostly refers to fucking. Let's consider some other exciting modern swears!

• Shit, is another favourite of mine, refers almost exclusively to excrement; faeces.
• Dick, refers to a penis, or the male phallus for those who enjoy classics.
• Arse, or ass for the Americans, refers to your buttocks or anus region in general.
• Cock, penis again.
• Piss, is urine. Not really a swear word in Australia so much anymore, incidentally.

So there's a few. Notice a theme there? All of them are related to bodily functions! That's not a coincidence - swear words are words you're not supposed to say, or at least not in 'polite society'. These words are considered swear words because they refer to unmentionable acts - the necessary functions of the body, the acts that bring out our animal nature. The taboo behind these words stems from an age where we liked to pretend we didn't have to fuck and shit and piss all over the place, so the words describing those terms are taboo (but we can refer to them via their medical euphemisms, like urine, faeces, sexual intercourse, etc).

Now, back to Peter and myself. I mostly use those words as a means of transgression, of calling attention to something other people don't like attention called to. I don't think it's appropriate for people to be ashamed of their bodily functions or avoid referring to them, so to reflect this I refuse to acknowledge social standards of reference to them. I'll talk about fucking and pissing as I wish, & I'll utilise their descriptors in general language as if they're normal words, which they should be. There's nothing intrinsic to those words (or any words) that make them automatically 'bad', it's an association we place upon them as being unacceptable/taboo. I reject that, as obviously Peter doesn't, to the point where he (ostensibly) found my language too pernicious (a fancy word for 'fucked-up') to speak to me.

For a historical example of this sort of thing in action, you can look back to some olde worlde swears, like:

• God damn it!
• Jesus Christ!
• To hell with this!

We pretty much say this sort of shit as we please nowadays, because blasphemy isn't a big deal like it once was. Even folk of Peter's generation, unless they're especially devout, will use these as their go-to for exclaiming irritation & generally expressing the sort of things I use shit and fuck and fuckshit to express. I'll also use these blasphemous options sometimes, but as they lack the transgressive aspect of the earlier examples, they're not as rewarding for me personally.

So having outlined why I say those sorts of words all the time, and why they only really bother prudes who think we should live our lives alienated from our bodily functions as if we're ashamed of being human, are there words I won't say? What are the Swear Words of Tomorrow, if the bodily function ones are out of style? Well, this will vary from place to place obviously, but there are a fair few words I'm very serious about not using, actually. Let's have a look at some, carefully!

• F*ggot, a male homosexual.
• Tr*nny, a transgender woman.
• N*gger, a black person (originally African-American, but has kind of expanded)
• C**n, an indigenous Australian (not sure if this one gets used elsewhere)
• Bu*g, same as above.
• D*ke, a lesbian.
• Go*k, an Asian person.
• Sl*t, a sexually-active woman.

Now, if you don't know some of those words, that's probably good. They're quite common in Australia, though becoming less-so. Obviously, these are mostly concerned not with bodily functions or blasphemy, but with identity. There are a few other words, like b*tch, which I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometime blurt out in a bad moment, but as a general rule I don't say. These are some fucking swear words, because saying them causes actual harm to people. It doesn't just offend them (not that that isn't worth considering), but harms and oppresses them. Just saying those words is a kind of bullying, which isn't true about sex words or poop words. Even if I'm mad at someone to whom these labels apply I won't use them, because I want to destroy them on my own terms, not via reference to some institution that marginalises them. That's chicken-shit behaviour.

This is the point I want to make behind all this: swearing isn't just some generational quirk, or arbitrary collective consciousness, it's a reflection of values. The things you won't refer to or discuss shows the things you're ashamed or for other reasons think ought not to be mentioned 'in polite society'. If someone says to you that's it's fine to call a woman a 'b*tch', & that to say otherwise is 'political correctness gone mad', but they get offended if you call them a 'fucking pile of garbage', then what they're saying is that it's fine to denigrate a woman specifically as a woman, but to refer to sex in their presence is morally unacceptable. If you're like my ancient grandparent who complains about 'so many n*ggers everywhere these days' but acts like you just took a shit on her mat if you say 'god damn it grandma don't say that shit', what you're saying is that you're fine with slavery, but being reminded that everybody poops is an inconvenience you should never have to be exposed to.

So, consider these social ramifications when you choose your words. Despite never being a person who was comfortable with oppressing others, as an aggressive little shit who loves to argue & hurl abuse I found it difficult initially to stop using some of these terms (language habits can be hard to break; f*g, b*tch, and 'gay' as a negative were particularly troublesome to drop entirely). It's not that hard though, ultimately, and you'll be amazed how quickly they disappear from your vocabulary. Just like that, you can stop worrying about inadvertently offending people or making them feel unsafe/unwelcome around you! Your vocabulary will pick up the slack in other ways, believe me.

This guy was actually a lot of fun to talk to and dished it out pretty good.

PS. There's far more that could be said about this subject, obviously, but I just wanted to cover these basics, so don't load me up with comments reminding me about swear words I didn't mention, or the complex linguistic history of taboo language, or side issues like non-verbal swearing (hand gestures etc) unless you have something profound to add. Because otherwise I'll react with scorn.

PPS. I could and will do an entire entry on political correctness, because that's Some Important Shit.

PPPS. Blasphemy is more complicated than I gave credit to here.