Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  TV Humour and the Curse

  When uttered at the right moment, a rude word can suddenly bring an otherwise dull and lifeless sentence dramatically to life. In the rather dry world of humour research, this is known as a ‘jab line’. It adds emphasis and a touch of the unexpected, a necessary component of humour. It is often particularly funny when coming from an unlikely source, such as the mouth of a sweet old lady or a seemingly innocent child.

  One of the best-loved comedy sketches on British television is The Two Ronnies ‘The Swear Box’, a masterpiece of innuendo, in which the anticipated expletives from two men in a pub were bleeped out by a volley of increasingly strident beeps. That was in 1980, when swearing on television was still uncommon. There had been a sprinkling of ‘bloodies’ and ‘damns’, including the forty-four ‘bloodies’ repeated in an episode of Til Death Us Do Part in 1967, after which the broadcast standards campaigner Mary Whitehouse declared ‘This is the end of civilization as we know it.’ And, of course, there was the famous late-night ‘fuck’ uttered by Kenneth Tynan on live TV two years earlier, which caused a national uproar and prompted one Tory MP to suggest Tynan should be hanged.

  Mary Whitehouse, campaigner for broadcast standards

  Today the use of expletives on television after the 9 p.m. watershed is widespread. Nowhere has swearing been taken to such operatic levels as in the BBC’s satirical political sitcom The Thick of It, with its foul-mouthed Downing Street spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker. The Thick of It has been described as the twenty-first century’s answer to Yes, Minister, the gentler but equally witty sitcom of the 1980s. Both programmes satirized the inner workings of British government; their language is very different. ‘Gibbering idiot’ is about the most extreme form of abuse used by hapless MP Jim Hacker in Yes, Minster, whereas ‘Please could you take this note, ram it up his hairy inbox and pin it to his fucking prostate’ is a typical ‘Tuckerism’ from The Thick of It.

  Armando Iannucci is the show’s creator, writer and producer. He says he is simply reflecting the language of the government’s inner circle in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  ‘There was that world which lived off a twenty-four-hour news cycle, it lived off a “we’ve got to control every media outlet possible” and therefore every second was a battle, which is why the language started getting more hot-tempered. But it’s different for different factions. I’ve done a bit of swearing research and [Prime Minister] Cameron’s troops don’t swear as much as Gordon Brown’s troops. When we were doing In the Loop [the film version shot in USA], I established that the State Department didn’t really swear that much, but the Pentagon swore like dockers, they were absolutely filthy, so we injected that into it. So it’s really there to reflect the reality … There is something enjoyably childish about it … it does feel like you’re breaking a rule somewhere, but nobody’s dying as a result, you’re not causing any physical harm.’

  Smooth-talking Permenant Secretary Sir Humphrey, Private Secretary Bernard and hapless Jim Hacker

  Jesuit-educated Iannucci shares the concerns of those who worry that the overuse of expletives devalues the language of comedy.

  ‘The last thing I want is every programme I watch to be like that; that would be boring apart from anything else … I’m not a swearer although I do find swearing funny; I see the funny side of it but I do find it quite tiring. If I’m watching a stand-up who is just f-ing and blinding every other one, I find it a little bit dull because it just becomes sort of incessant and numbing … so I like the creative use of swearing.’

  The Thick of It, with spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, and its creator, Armando Iannucci

  Euphemisms

  If cathartic swearing – the expletive shouted when you stub your toe – is primal, then what about the rest of our taboo language, the euphemisms and minced oaths, the carefully crafted word used to replace the blaspheme or the improper?

  There’s a school of thought which says that it was our very need to find ways of avoiding taboo subjects which propelled humans into developing complex language. ‘Euphemism is such a pervasive human phenomenon,’ wrote linguist Joseph Williams, ‘so deeply woven into virtually every known culture, that one is tempted to claim that every human has been pre-programmed to find ways to talk around tabooed subjects.’

  Euphemisms have been described as a barometer of changing attitudes. In more religious times, the need to avoid open blasphemes was strong, and yet subjects like sex and bodily functions were often not taboo at all. Look at Chaucer’s language – full of vulgar, bawdy expressions. And the earthy richness of Shakespeare. His patron, Queen Elizabeth I, was said to swear like a man and enjoy dirty jokes. In his Brief Lives, the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey recounted the story of Edward de Vere and his unfortunate deep bow to the Queen.

  This Earl of Oxford making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travel, seven years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, ‘My Lord, I had forgot the Fart.’

  Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, made a rather embarrassing faux pas in front of his Queen

  Restrictions on blasphemous language reached a peak under the Puritans. Oliver Cromwell warned his armies that ‘Not a man swears but pays his twelve pence.’ A quartermaster called Boutholmey was condemned to have his tongue bored with a red-hot iron for uttering impieties; one William Harding, of Chittlehampton, was found guilty for saying ‘upon my life’, and Thomas Buttand was fined for exclaiming ‘on my troth!’ The Puritans who left England to settle in America took with them similar strictures. A blasphemer could be put in the pillory, whipped or have his tongue bored out with a hot iron.

  As society became less religious, it began to lose its horror of impious language. But one fear was soon matched and then overtaken by another – that of impropriety. Words to do with body parts, body functions and especially anything to do with sex became increasingly euphemized. The American writer H. L. Mencken dubbed the early nineteenth century a ‘Golden Age of Euphemism’ – on both sides of the Atlantic. The middle classes in particular went to extraordinary lengths to ‘purify’ their language so as to avoid the slightest chance of an improper thought.

  This was the era of the prude, when leg became limb, breast became bosom and belly went from stomach (an old Latin word) to tummy or midriff. Ladies didn’t sweat, they perspired; they weren’t pregnant but in a delicate condition; and people didn’t go to bed, they retired. Trousers were called unmentionables or inexpressibles; underwear was linen.

  The Americans seemed to be particularly squeamish, changing haycock to haystack and weather cock to weather vane. In the farmyard, cockerels were now roosters and bulls – symbols of sexually potency – were male cows, gentlemen cows or cow brutes. Even the English word titbit became tidbit.

  The author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, was the descendant of settlers who arrived in America in 1635 with the surname Alcock. Through the next few generations, as embarrassment over the improper connotations of the name grew, the family changed it to Alcocke and then Alcox. Louisa May’s father went the whole hog in the 1820s and changed his name to Alcott.

  Even a cooked chicken on the dinner plate didn’t escape the prudes. A chicken drumstick replaced the simple chicken leg. Chicken breast was, of course, far too rude to say, so it became white meat, while the sexy thigh transformed into dark meat.

  Winston Churchill fell victim to southern American modesty when he attended a dinner in Richmond, Virginia. The butler came round with a plate of chicken and asked Churchill which piece of the bird he’d like, to which Churchill replied, ‘I’d like breast.’ The hostess sitting next to him blanched and said, ‘Mr Churchill, in this country we say white meat or dark meat.’ The next day he sent her a corsage of flowers with the message ‘I would be most obliged if you would pin this on your “white meat”.’

  Medicine and Euphemism

  Med
icine and euphemisms have long been bedfellows. For centuries doctors and nurses have referred to parts of the body using Latin technical terms that are themselves euphemisms borrowed from another culture. The word penis is actually a Latin word meaning ‘tail’, and vagina is a Roman synonym for ‘sheath’ or ‘scabbard’. Doctors insist that the Latin terms are necessary for precision. So they talk of mammary (breast), cranium (head), metacarpal (wrist) and phalanges (fingers). A British soldier shot in the buttocks during the First World War was asked by a visitor where he’d been wounded. ‘I can’t say,’ he replied. ‘I never studied Latin.’

  Diseases have always been euphemized – indeed the word itself, dis-ease, is a gentler substitute for sickness. Consumption sounded much more romantic, if no less deadly, than tuberculosis. Early terms for syphilis deflected fear by insulting the enemy instead. To the English it was Spanish pox, Neapolitan bone ache or malady of France. The Poles called it German disease, whilst the Russians called it Polish disease. The Turks preferred Christian disease. And it’s only recently that people have felt comfortable saying the word cancer instead of Big C. Or not mentioning it at all.

  One of the most euphemized places is a hospital. We get terribly embarrassed talking to strangers about what our bodies should be doing quite naturally; instead we prefer to say things like private parts or down there or waterworks or, heaven help us, the doings. This can cause all sorts of problems for the nursing staff, especially for foreign nurses.

  The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, runs a course to help disambiguate its new staff. Today’s trainee nurses are all Portuguese with excellent English. Perfect English may not be enough, warns Staff Nurse Julia Saunders, and she illustrates the problems of our euphemism-laden language with stories from the ward.

  ‘We had an auxiliary who was Portuguese. He was on the ward one day, and a lady called him over and says, “I need to spend a penny.” And he said, “That’s fine, I’ll be with you in a moment, I’ll just finish what I’m doing.” So she again called him over and said, “I need to spend a penny,” and he said, “I truly will be with you, madam, in a moment,” being very polite, and then the third time he went over and said, “My dear, the paper lady’s in the next bay and you can spend as many pennies as you like when she comes.” Then the Staff Nurse came in and said, “George, she needs to go to the toilet.” And he was mortified, he said he felt so silly, he really didn’t understand, he wouldn’t have made her wait if he’d realized what that phrase meant.’

  ‘People will ask for a bottle, and I’ve had people running around giving them bottles of lemonade, bottles of juice, bottles of water and actually what they want is a urinal, but it’s the common terminology – a gentleman will ask for a bottle.

  ‘ “Rose Cottage” is a terminology that we use for the morgue or the mortuary here. It’s kind of going out of fashion, but it’s a word that’s used throughout the NHS, and people tend to think it’s a nicer terminology. If you’re standing at the desk and you ring the porter and say, “I have a gentleman for Rose Cottage,” well, that tends to sound better than “One for the morgue”, doesn’t it? And in Paediatrics, they sometimes say, “I’ve got a little one for the Rainbow’s End.”

  ‘I’ve had a lady come in and she’s said, “You’ve lost him, what d’you mean you’ve lost him, have you got a search party out, where is he?” And we’re going, “No, no, no.” And the nurse was getting herself more and more in a pickle, simply because she thought she’d know what she meant. So I said, “I need you to sit down,” and I said, “Your husband has actually died.” And when I said that word, although it was very harsh perhaps, she actually understood what I meant.

  ‘I had a reasonably junior doctor and I think it was probably his first time breaking some bad news to the patient. He sat down with the lady, and I was there obviously to comfort. I knew what the bad news was. And he told her that she’d got a malignant tumour, and I remember, as a young nurse, thinking, oh, this lady’s taking it very well. She asked a couple of questions about treatment, and he said there’s not really any at this stage (I’m talking twenty-five years ago), and he quickly left the room, and I thought, gosh, if I’d been told that news and I was only thirty or thirty-five, I don’t think I’d be sitting there like she is. So I said, “Did you understand what the doctor said?” She said, “Oh, d’you know, I was really worried when he brought me in here that he was going to tell me I’d got cancer.” And I said, “Well, what do you think?” “Well, I’ve only got a malignant tumour.” And I suddenly realized that the key word for her was cancer. Because cancer hadn’t been heard … that’s what she needed, she needed to hear that exact word.’

  Innuendo

  Euphemisms, innuendo and double entendres have long been a mainstay of British humour. In the world of entertainment, they’ve allowed performers to keep their acts clean enough to escape censorship and everyone in the family to enjoy the comedy. While younger members take the statement at face value, older members can enjoy the more risqué meanings. Be it a Golden Classic – ‘A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre, so the barman gives her one’ – or the unintentional bloomer – ‘Ah, isn’t that nice. The wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew’ (commentator Harry Carpenter at the 1977 Oxford–Cambridge boat race), innuendo does seem to be a particularly British obsession.

  Shakespeare frequently used innuendos in his plays. Hamlet taunts Ophelia with sexual puns, referring to ‘country matters’ and Sir Toby in Twelfth Night, describing Sir Andrew’s hair, says ‘it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off’.

  Marie Lloyd accompanied her songs with saucy winks and gestures

  From the mid nineteenth century onwards, the music hall kept innuendo alive through an age of Victorian prudery. Queen of the music hall and the double entendre was Marie Lloyd, whose delivery of a song or a line (‘She’d never had her ticket punched before’) was accompanied by saucy winks and gestures. If her trademark parasol failed to open, she’d quip, ‘I haven’t had it up for ages.’ Lloyd locked horns with a Mrs Ormiston Chant of the Purity Party, who made a public protest against her from the stalls of the Empire music hall in London’s Leicester Square. In 1896, Lloyd was summoned to appear before the Vigilance Committee so that it could decide whether her songs were a threat to public morality. She sang two of her most famous songs – ‘Oh Mr Porter’ and ‘A Little of What You Fancy’ – without her usual winks and gestures, and the committee had to acquit her. The story goes that, after the demure performances, Lloyd stunned the room with a rendition of ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, accompanied by an array of obscene gestures. Another story has Marie getting into trouble with her song ‘She Sits among the Cabbages and Peas’. She continued to sing it but merely changed the lyric to ‘She sits among the cabbages and leeks.’

  On a visit to the United States, Lloyd explained her style in an interview with the New York Telegraph: ‘They don’t pay their sixpences and shillings at a music hall to hear the Salvation Army. If I was to try to sing highly moral songs, they would fire ginger beer bottles and beer mugs at me. I can’t help it if people want to turn and twist my meanings.’

  More than 100,000 people attended Lloyd’s funeral in London. One of her fans, the poet T. S. Eliot, described her death as ‘a significant moment in English history’. As London correspondent of the Dial magazine, he wrote: ‘No other comedian succeeded so well in giving expression to the life of the music hall audience, raising it to a kind of art. It was, I think, this capacity for expressing the soul of the people that made Marie Lloyd unique.’

  Cheekie Chappie Max Miller dominated the music halls from the 1930s to the 1950s, at a time when the office of the Lord Chamberlain was busy censoring plays and scripts for lewdness. Max Miller never swore on stage or told a dirty joke but he took innuendo to new heights of vulgarity. He got round the censors by carrying two pocket books on stage w
ith him, one white and one blue. He’d explain to the audience that they were joke books and asked them to choose which one they’d like. If they chose the blue one, the one with all the risqué jokes, it was their own choice. He’d look off stage as if checking to see if the manager was there today, then he’d beckon to the audience and get on with the rude stuff.

  Miller often used ‘mind rhymes’, which left the audiences to fill in the blanks.

  When roses are red

  They’re ready for plucking;

  When a girl turns sixteen

  She’s ready for … ’ere!

  He’d then say, ‘I know exactly what you are saying to yourself, you’re wrong, I know what you’re saying. You wicked lot. You’re the sort of people that get me a bad name!’

  Max eventually got into trouble with his live BBC radio broadcasts. He was taken off air in 1944 during an unscripted gag about a mountain pass, a girl and a blocked passage and banned for five years.

  Cheeky Chappie Max Miller, dominated the music halls of the 1930s–1950s, taking innuendo to new heights

  In 1949, the BBC produced ‘The Little Green Book’, a guide for comedy writers, performers and producers about what was off limits. Under the heading ‘Vulgarity’, it announced: ‘Programmes must at all cost be kept free of crudities, coarseness and innuendo … There is an absolute ban on the following: jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men [and] immorality of any kind.’ Also forbidden were ‘suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitution, ladies’ underwear (e.g. winter draws on), animal habits (e.g. rabbits), lodgers and commercial travellers’. ‘Extreme care’ should be taken with jokes about ‘pre-natal influences (e.g. his mother was frightened by a donkey)’. Expletives such as ‘God, Good God, My God, Blast, Hell, Damn, Bloody, Gorblimey and Ruddy’ were to be deleted from scripts and ‘innocuous expressions substituted’. Chinese laundry jokes ‘may be offensive’ and jokes like ‘enough to make a Maltese Cross’ were of ‘doubtful value’. Derogatory references to ‘Negroes as Niggers’ was not allowed but ‘Nigger Minstrels is allowed’.