BANNING SWEARWORDS

Banning Swearwords

Corrupt government, Judiciary, and law makers always assume that "LAW" is only something that the 'common people' must obey; whilst they flout and breach "LAW" all of the time. Thus, they readily always assume, that they have the right to deny the NATURAL LAW inherent in the Gene.

They blatantly ignore the truth, fact, and reality that "LAW" is naught but the consent of all of the people; consenting to live by the, "Rule of Law"

Here, SALFORD COUNCIL assumes it has the right to ban and abolish the free expression of the right to use swearwords. This therefore is my reply

Gordon J Sheppard


Chief Executive,
Salford City Council
Civic Centre
Chorley Road
Swinton
Salford
M27 5FJ

Dear Sir or Madam
In response to the widely published intent of the council to ‘ban swearing’; I respectfully advise you that FREE EXPRESSION, the right to DISCRIMINATE and to OFFEND, are fundamental rights fully established, in ‘NATURAL LAW’ inherent in the gene. Man made rotten and corrupt ‘LAW’, has no right whatsoever to intervene. I respectfully submit a superb defence of the “F-word.

Sincerely
Gordon J Sheppard


In defence of the F- word.

THE F-word slips easily, it seems, from the lips of the modern mandarin: Sir Richard Mottram in all other aspects infinitely forgettable as a manager of the Bradford and Bingley in West Wittering, has carved himself a niche in history, not for his pusillanimous part in the disgrace of Stephen Byers, but for a sentence that will surely be discovered in the next edition of Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

It was a cry of despair. It expressed the dark night of his soul, the anguish of a man irrevocably excluded from celestial bliss, the misery of a man who has done with hope and honour. The prophet Isaiah, thumping his breast like a circumcised gorilla, put it very well in the elegant English of his Jacobean translators with: "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips."

Mottram, however, put it thus: "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked" - lines of Gilbertian scansion that they quite certainly appear in a revised version of Sullivan’s Mikado at English National Opera.

I have some sympathy with Mottram. Fuck has the energy, explosiveness and brevity to be the unsurpassable expletive. The bottom lip is bitten by the upper teeth with just a hint of pain, air at higher pressure trapped within the mouth is suddenly released, and the brief procedure concludes with the sharp kick of the final consonant. As a letting-loose of tension it is very physical and it is an infinitely satisfying sound with which to assuage a bate of rage. I use it daily on the Underground. Damn and blast simply will not do; Heavens to Betsy and Lawks‘a Mercy went out of fashion with the parlour maid; and the Shit and Molasses favoured by my first sergeant-major was too surreal and often too resigned to have quite the same affect as the crescendo of F- words shouted in my ear by his minion corporal. There is, I fear, for those who deplore them, no substitute for F-words, nor for their derivatives, some of them gentle and affectionate.

I witnessed its affectionate use in hospital some years ago – fuck and fucking used by a dying man for his wife as what were, in the circumstances, expressions of love not matched in tenderness by any words put by Shakespeare into the mouths of Romeo and Antony - even Gielgud could not have matched the manner of their saying. They were his natural language, the only language at his command, and on his lips they were the purest poetry. I doubt if on my deathbed I shall conjure feeling quite so eloquent, even for a dog.

It is all very well for righteous columnists to deplore the range of F-words as, on the one hand, the yob chic of the elite, and on the other as evidence of the breakdown of society, the unmarried mother, the irresponsible father, the broken home and the delinquent adolescent, but those of us who have the advantage of more than Winston Churchill’s 600 words of Basic English must allow the uneducated to use what words they have. Would we rather have them mute? If our education system is so impoverished that it does not extend the vocabulary of children, if it gives them no alternative to the language of the street, if it leaves them hampered with illiteracy and a patois unintelligible beyond the county boundary, we have only our politicians and our educationalists to blame, not them, when we hear an F- word alternating with every noun and verb. At that level it is not the F- word that offends, it is that after so many years of state-regulated and mismanaged education, we are a nation that can barely speak its native tongue. Education or no education, however, we need expletives. There may be men so calm in temperament that they never need to swear, but I do not necessarily respect them for being so strait-laced. I prefer an honest show of emotion. Christ came nearest to humanity when he drove the traders from the temple, and if he then used whatever was the Jewish equivalent of the F- word 2,000 years ago, it would not one whit have diminished his purpose or his argument; a niminy piminy Christ is no man for the Day of Judgment. I fancy angry saints, not willing martyrs.

If nothing else, the word should be respected for its age and originally dignified status. It has an ancient Greek parent, a Latin one too, futuere, from which come the Italian and French fottere and foutre; we got it from the German ficken. It is both noun and verb, transitive and intransitive. Strictly it is a term for sexual connection and has been a vulgarism only since the 16th century. It has subsidiary meanings as prefix to beggar, finger, fist and hole, and in the 1960s an American lexicon listed no fewer than 82 variations on the theme. In the interest of scholarship I must record that the insult fuck-face, absent from this lexicon, was common in my school throughout my unhappy years there in the 1940s. And we must not forget the adjectival form described half a century ago by the great Eric Partridge as "a qualification of extreme contumely”.

All this suggests that F-words are so established in our language that they deserve recognition as more than obscenity and slang. I am inclined, like DH Lawrence and James Joyee, to give the simple unadorned noun and verb respectability, to use it at least instead of the coy euphemisms to go to bed and sleep with that are so contrary to the sweating, gasping, grunting, draining and exquisite activity of the real thing. Even to have sex is in some contexts a misleading lessening of the fact.

Fuck is a fine, no-nonsense word, precise, even nice, for it is quite unmistakable in meaning; it has spawned some remarkably amusing imagery and metaphor, even a saying, that neatly encapsulates a moral message - "Fuck you, Jack, I’m all right" is a bitter reproach, laden with meaning and much more likely to change a man’s mind than a lecture on moral philosophy. Let us use the word without fear of Mrs Grundy. Let us use it in a translation of the Bible instead of all those carnal knowings and begats. Let us use it in law and literature. Let us use it unselfconsciously as the one accurate word for what it is. And let me use it as an expletive too, for I know no other that so immediately acts as a release and restores the normal sweetness of my temperament. In bringing F-words into the open, Mottram has done us all a great good turn.

Brian Sewell

www.thisislomdon.co.uk/briansewell