My husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson have much in common — not a poetic soul, it is true, but a tendency to reach for the decanter and to mutter offensive comments.
My husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson have much in common — not a poetic soul, it is true, but a tendency to reach for the decanter and to mutter offensive comments. At a dinner attended by Gladstone, Holman Hunt, Francis Palgrave and Thomas Woolner in 1865, conversation turned to the rebellion at Morant Bay, Jamaica and its repression. As Gladstone expatiated on the cruelty of the white man, Tennyson was heard to provide a sotto voce obbligato: ‘Niggers are tigers; niggers are tigers.’ No doubt the poet laureate was moved as much by the sound of the words as their meaning. But it would be impossible to relate this incident on radio or television if some of the respondents to a new Ofcom study on offensive language had their way. They found nigger and Paki the most offensive discriminatory words and ‘thought they should not be used on television or radio in any context’.
The 300-page report on audience attitudes to offensive language is not easy to write about because of the amount of offensive language it contains. Nigger is used only 47 times; but f— appears 75 times and c— 39. W—er is used 13 times but oddly enough w— not at all. Twat, a currently fashionable word, is used 25 times.
It is worth mentioning that the language of the Ofcom report is itself offensive in quite a different way. It mangles grammar in pursuit of a dialect that might be known as executive summarese. It speaks for example of: ‘material broadcast pre-watershed and post-watershed across a range of channels’. Why not ‘before the watershed and after the watershed, on a range of channels’? Sometimes this executive summarese obscures meaning. In terms of is used 39 times, mostly incorrectly.
There are other problems too. In discussing the well-known incident on Big Brother in 2007 when Miss Emily Parr, a drama student from Bristol, was evicted for saying to a black housemate Miss Charley Uchea, a failed lap-dancer, ‘Are you pushing it out, you nigger?’ the report refers to Miss Parr as a girl. Many women find it offensive to be called girls. But you can’t win. The report’s compilers went to the trouble of convening a group discussion of male-to-female transsexual people in Manchester, and one of them said: ‘I find the transgirls are their own worst enemy… “You can’t say this, you can’t say that”.’
The report’s findings grouped Jesus Christ with lezza as a well-known and generally acceptable word. No consideration, however, was given to the word Mohammed.
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