Brendan Hoban: Coarseness in society is getting out of hand                     

Western People 10.1.2024

I’m not too sure who counted them (or how it was done) but apparently 60,000 swearwords were broadcast in Britain last year. It seems a lot but then a columnist in the London Times wrote recently that the English language is ideally suited for profanity. The explanation apparently is that English, with its profusion of strong consonants and versatile syntax, has been designed for swearing.

Well, you tell me, as most of the profane I know don’t know their syntax from their consonants. A Killala bishop, I think it was Peter Waldron (1814-34), once remarked that some Irish-speaking Catholics in his diocese were struggling to become proficient in English while at the same time could swear volubly in that language. So there may be something in it, though I’m not too sure that Shakespeare would agree.

But whatever about the 60,000 British swearwords a year in the British media, I suspect that the Irish media are catching up very quickly. Once profanity was an indication of a limited vocabulary but now it is often used, I suspect intentionally, to claim some kind of street credit for challenging standards of respect that it is now customary to dismiss as prudish.

Using an expletive to provoke shock, horror or preferably condemnation seems to be often part of a policy of creating notoriety or even just attention. Repeating expletives, even in the same sentence, seems not just over-cooked but tedious and wearying. Is there anything more pathetic or childish than to have to listen to some person peppering his or her conversation with obscenities in the belief that they are impressing someone, anyone?

The f-word is often the preferred expletive of a wide range of users from the outrageous to the ignorant to the gullible. Once its use was unusual, even exceptional, indicative that in every medium of communication standards of engagement were important, necessary, significant.

Now it’s being assimilated into almost everyday conversation as a way of expressing any and every (usually intense) emotion: anger, upset, surprise, even wonder. It’s almost as if its constant use as a modifier has rendered all the other usual adjectives redundant. It’s as if banning its use from conversation would have the effect of silencing a significant percentage of the population.

The f-word is everywhere. Tabloid newspapers seem to look forward to opportunities to use it in stark headlines with quotation marks if possible. The more prestigious papers, once priding themselves on not appealing to the lowest common denominator have succumbed one by one to its use. Even the Irish Times now crosses a line that just a few years ago would have been unconscionable and, in the context of its former standards, indefensible.

Yes, I know what people will say. There are bigger problems in the world. And there are. But if there’s no expletive-free zone, have people not a right to protest that the level of coarseness in our society is getting out of hand. That ‘bad language’ now seems to be no more than a mere extension of the general vocabulary. That it’s everywhere. And that some seem to use it so often that it almost seems that everywhere we go there’s a demented Greek chorus chanting f-this and f-that and f-the other. And as those uncomfortable with it don’t want to appear precious or prissy or po-faced or prim or proper or priggish or old and cantankerous and grumpy and grouchy, they bite their nails to retain their equilibrium.

Now here’s the preachy bit. As in other areas of life, the key principle is respect. The late Clive James once defined blasphemy as a form of ultimate disrespect for someone’s religious principles. And profanity and coarseness are ultimately a form of disrespect for other people – and for the person using them, if they had the nous to work it out.

But what do you do? I often feel like stopping someone in mid-sentence and quietly and calmly saying to them that I feel disrespected by their language. But as they can’t see the problem, instinctively they pass on the baton of responsibility – What’s his problem?

Yet if you don’t say something, you find yourself assenting to being carried along on a sea of coarseness and experiencing a sense of diminishment by effectively accepting that it really doesn’t matter anymore. That language changes. That vocabularies expand or retract. That what was unacceptable in one generation can become popular in another. Or simply that most people eventually grow up.

But I care. And I know others care. And if I’m happy to say, as Irish society now says officially, that I’m not happy for people to invade my space with tobacco smoke, why should I have any problem objecting to my space being invaded by someone who imagines that mouthing expletives is a less noxious form of encroachment.

It’s probably no accident that swearing was outlawed in Britain shortly after Shakespeare’s death but then there’s the opposite point that the great and the good of English literature, including our own James Joyce, displayed not just literary genius but a surfeit of expletive-laden texts.

Or is it just about having a bad hair-day?