Read With Mother
Hands up who sought out the dictionary in the school library to find the ‘dirty’ words. Somehow, their presence in such august pages seemed to legitimise them and also contradicted the stance of teachers when admonishing pupils for using them in the playground. I even remember, prior to that, stumbling upon the verb version of the F-word in one of David Niven’s autobiographies that my dad was reading on holiday. The thrill of seeing a word in print I uttered every day in the company of my peers (bur daren’t in the presence of my parents) was quite liberating, showing that literature had the freedom to say what prime-time television and non-X certificate movies didn’t.
I wasn’t to know then that this was a relatively recent development, stretching back only as far as the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 – though the written word had enjoyed similar freedoms two-hundred years previously, before a puritanical rot set in and quietly swept those pox-ridden rakes of the Georgian era under the Victorian carpet. I suppose the blunt eighteenth century wordsmiths never envisaged a future time when their bawdy honesty would be censored, and I’m equally certain the radical novelists of the 1960s and 70s never anticipated that another century would see their libertine gains rolled back yet again.
Perhaps proof that the arrival of the eBook isn’t quite the great leap forward that those with a vested interest in it would have us believe came last week with the introduction of an app called ‘Clean Reader’. What this cyber nanny does is essentially Bowdlerise the book you’re about to read and replaces any word considered ‘offensive’ with something that would be suitable for your mum, you gran and little Junior. And we’re not just talking so-called profanities either; we’re even talking proper non-slang terms for body parts as well – censorship imposed without the consent of either the author or the publisher. An author can labour over one whole paragraph for days to ensure the rhythm of the prose is precisely how they want it, and that is especially important when it comes to dialogue. One wrong word and the passage just don’t work in the same way. This is why the gestation of a book can stretch from months to years.
Anyone who lived through British broadcasting’s first moral clampdown in the late 80s will remember those unwatchable TV versions of movies that were badly redubbed so the films could be broadcast for all the family; this situation eventually became so ridiculous that even movies that were never intended to be mainstream fare, transmitted well after the watershed on BBC2, were butchered. I particularly recall an edit of Alex Cox’s ‘Repo Man’ in which the F-word was reborn as ‘Flippin’; a word those of my generation associated with Tucker Jenkins being put in the mouths of American actors was at least bizarrely entertaining, but when Channel 4 left the language alone, their even odder compromise was to place a permanent red triangle in the left-hand corner of the screen. What seemed ludicrous at the time seemed utterly laughable within a year or two, and the famous pre-emptive announcer’s warning concerning ‘Strong language and scenes of a sexual nature’ took over – though this itself was a throwback to the 1950s, when ‘Quatermass’ was preceded by advice that the programme was ‘not suitable for children or those of a nervous disposition.’
Not suitable for children? Good Lord! That’s discrimination, isn’t it? We couldn’t allow that now; children have to have access to everything – and in order to enable this access, age equality comes into the picture, where every reader or viewer is treated as though they are the same age, roughly roundabout ten-years-old. If you don’t have any children, tough shit (sorry, I meant tough poo); your opinion doesn’t count. Pornography must be banned because it’s not suitable for children; adult books must be doctored because they’re not suitable for children. Of course they’re not bloody suitable for children! They’re not for children! Whatever happened to books specifically written for them? Oh, yes – they’re read by adults now, thanks to Harry bloody Potter.
Call me a paedophobe, if you like; but I actually believe there should be a clear division between art intended for children and art intended for adults. For one thing, it serves to preserve childhood for its proper duration; for another, the allure of adult art, whether books containing rude words or films containing sex scenes means there’s something exciting to look forward to once you grow-up – something a little more exciting than a mortgage and a pension plan. A book aimed at a children’s readership wouldn’t feature any rude words, anyway; and what child would want to read Irvine Welsh?
When the PMRC launched the moral backlash against the music industry in the mid-80s and initiated parental advisory stickers on albums, the thought that something similar could happen in publishing would have seemed inconceivable; in fact, it has taken technological advances to bring this situation about, emanating (perhaps inevitably) from the US Bible Belt. There may not be any profanities in the Good Book, but there are some pretty horrible things that happen in the Old Testament, as far as I can remember, far more horrible than the odd swear word. It would appear we’re back to that old chestnut again – a small minority of people within a society deciding what the majority receives; only, this time they’ve been very sly about it.
Prior to the advent of international intellectual copyright, authors such as Dickens lost a small fortune thanks to pirate copies of their works being sold openly in foreign markets, particularly America. One could argue an app essentially rewriting an author’s book without his or her permission is a modern take on such an artistic liberty, with the notable difference being it doesn’t alter royalty payments; what it does is worse. It bastardises a work of art and presents it to an oblivious ingénue as the actual article. This is the literary equivalent of a fig leaf on Adam and Eve’s naughty bits. And it’s not the publishing industry or even a broadcaster butchering art: it’s the people – or a self-appointed select group of people forcing their own blinkered agenda on those who didn’t ask for it.
When free speech is bandied about by politicians who spend most of their time undermining it, the context tends to be in relation to newspapers or magazines, not so much books. There was a bit of fuss surrounding a novel called ‘The Satanic Verses’ just over twenty-five years ago, lest we forget; but a piece of technology that can substantially alter the text of a book against the wishes of its author is as effective in judging which words are acceptable and which words aren’t as any headline-grabbing bonfire organised by Nazis or Radical Islamists. And one cannot help but wonder how Clean Reader will be utilised by those who have the authority that its inventors do not. How long before an Education Secretary decides to make it a tool of the national curriculum?
If the internet had been around in the age of Mary Whitehouse, one shudders to think how she and her disciples would have exploited it. But the spirit of the clean-up-TV housewife has outlived her lifetime and is slowly filtering into all facets of public life, and in ways that would have been pure sci-fi during that lifetime. She may have begun her campaigning by targeting television, but she quickly widened it to theatre, cinema and literature; she would no doubt have wholeheartedly approved of Clean Reader, just as she would most likely have approved of the equally outrageous ‘Trigger Warnings’. And in an age in which virtually anything is accessible via the click of a mouse, the scary thing is that some will think Clean Reader is a lot of fuss about nothing, a silly irrelevant novelty that can be ignored. I prefer to regard it as the thin edge of an extremely worrying wedge.
Petunia Winegum
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March 30, 2015 at 10:25 am -
A splendidly bilious article, Petunia!
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March 30, 2015 at 10:25 am -
I’m trying to imagine a child-friendly version of “The Thick Of It”, which amused partly by way of its imaginative profanities. It’s not an appealing vision.
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March 30, 2015 at 10:35 am -
I disagree! Profanity has spread like wildfire in film and television and what is supposed to pass for music these days.
My DVD collection contains films from the 1920s onwards and you can easily see a continual worsening of language, laziness of dress (almost every man wore shirt and tie, even out of the office), a dumbing down and all manner of subliminal messages to enforce political correctness – or just PC rubbed in your face constantly.
The ‘entertainment’ fodder given to children is even worse, seeking to sexualise them as early as possible.
No; “entertainment” today is generally far from puritanical. That’s why my DVDs are mainly of older material (I should have a black and white set, really), although you can pick up some of the subliminals in them, for example there was a time when the tobacco companies paid to have women smoking.
Entertainment has been harnessed to direct the masses, so anything which gets in the way cannot be all bad.
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March 30, 2015 at 3:08 pm -
All videos, DVDs and Internet access was edited for offensive material when I was there and I guess still is. When I saw “A Fish Called Wanda” for sale in the video shop, I bought it out of curiosity. It was about 30 minutes long and completely incomprehensible. Might have suited your taste!
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March 31, 2015 at 12:04 am -
Don’t think so. The full-length version wasn’t so great.
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March 30, 2015 at 10:52 am -
Stop your female dogging! You’re getting 49 Shades of Brown. No more and no less, so hard effluent!
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March 30, 2015 at 10:59 am -
I quoted from a site yesterday upon which the word God was rendered G-d.
What a bunch of c-ck…..-
March 30, 2015 at 1:06 pm -
I have come across this too, mostly on Jewish sites where it is a protection against taking the Name in vain.
Personally, I think Himself must have a wonderful sense of humour; He said as how good women would be found in every corner of the earth, then He made the earth round….
And laughed
And laughed…..-
March 30, 2015 at 2:56 pm -
Personally, I think Himself must have a wonderful sense of humour
He does indeed. If you read more accurate translations of the OT then you can quite often catch the humour and wordplay, even at this distance in time and language. There was a very good and readable transliteration of parts of the OT which I recommend to anyone interested in the origins of the bible. https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-j.html
You can stop yawning now, I’ll shut up.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:08 am -
I may well be getting this wrong, I seem to get most things wrong these days. But is not the intention of this “app” to give the user or parent the choice as to whether they impliment it or not, as is the case with software designed to give parents control over what their children can and can’t access whilst using the internet?. From what you say in the blog, as I understand it, this only applies to e-books. We have already witnessed numerous atempts to re-write many of the classics of world literature so as not to offend those who wish to be offended, for instance the alterations to Huckleberry Finn.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:11 am -
“Hands up who sought out the dictionary in the school library to find the ‘dirty’ words.”
Finding & reading a copy of Leslie Thomas’s “The Virgin Soldiers” in the school library more than made up for it. Especially the references to Fuk Yu, the Chinese laundryman. Cue all NUT PC-activists immediately instigating search-and-destroy operations within every school in the land.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:54 am -
I think that was the only thing dictionaries were used for in school.
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March 30, 2015 at 12:07 pm -
I can recall being too embarrassed to use the word “pregnant” when reading to my mother from one of my dad’s Readers Digest Condensed books. I think she was amazed and impressed that I could read such a book. I bowlderised the word “pregnant” into “a woman who was going to have a baby”… Impressive app I was back then…
The supreme irony is that the book I was reading the passage from was a popular tale of a British policeman in Kenya, helping to fight the terrorist threat of the Mau Mau and the context of the pregnant woman was the Mau Mau warriors slitting open her belly and ripping out the foetus. The English-speaking world has always inculcated the oddest sensitivities in it’s young people…
PS… Hopefully the Mau Mau involved in this incident has since received full compensation from the UK government.
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March 30, 2015 at 12:29 pm -
You reminded me, Moor, of an incident from when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, working on a summer job. I was having a tea break with the permanent workers, and one told me of his National Service, spent in Kenya. He had seen an incident such as you describe, with the victim also crucified. He said that before that, most of his mates thought being in Kenya was a bit of a jaunt, afterwards, they shot at every African they saw.
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March 30, 2015 at 6:26 pm -
The library of my rather strict religious school contained several volumes in which offending words/phrases had been obliterated by black pen. At my university interview, I unintentionally brought the house down by explaining that, although I had several ideas about the classic novel extract under discussion, some of it had to be guesswork because the rude words had been carefully blacked out in all our class copies.
In the same spirit, although the school regularly showed us film versions of set texts and Shakespeare plays (this was back in the days of projectors), the merest hint of naughty goings-on meant that the screen would be blacked out by a giant hand descending in front of the projector lens – Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, I seem to remember, had quite a lot of that. Meanwhile, rather counterproductively, the sound was still on, leaving fevered adolescent imaginings to fill in the visual gaps…
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March 30, 2015 at 11:21 am -
“Hands up who sought out the dictionary in the school library to find the ‘dirty’ words.”
*puts hand up* Me! Me, Miss, Meeeee!I also scoured the bible for the ‘naughty bits’ …. all the spilling seed untos and upons, unclean discharges and twin deer under thickets.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:25 am -
” twin deer under thickets”… um, for the Biblically ignorant (me)… enlightenment please?
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March 30, 2015 at 11:33 am -
Song of Solomon 4:5 (KJV) Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies
Basically the whole book of the Song Of Solomon is an erotic poem.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:38 am -
The writer was obviously looking at some very strange breasts.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:42 am -
and also some very underage ones…by modern understandings…
We have a young sister,
and her breasts are still small.
What will we do for her
when a young man comes courting?
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March 30, 2015 at 11:54 am -
Of course, the Atlantic exists so that those on each side of it can play pranks on those on the other side, including making sexual innuendoes. Surely, J K Rowling was fully aware that ‘Berk’ is a contraction of ‘Berkeley Hunt’ and thus rhyming slang for the last great unsayable-in-polite-society four-lettered Anglo-Saxon obscenity that begins with ‘C’ (PS: the word is not ‘crap’!)? (In Harry-bloody-Potter, no less: “Ron, you ginger cnut!”]. Then, an American can wear a fanny-pack in public, unaware that in English a fanny is a front-bottom! Oh for the days before the smoking ban when a Brit could put a fag in his mouth, or an English woman on holiday could in all innocence ask a newly-made male acquaintance to knock her up in the morning so that they could breakfast together. Americans certainly do not, by and large, understand what a twat or a quim is, but then a long time ago I innocently read Goldfinger unaware that Pussy Galore’s name was a sexual innuendo. Before Austin Powers, did Americans understand ‘shag’?
I guess that these words may, for a while, escape the Bowdlerisation of this bit of software. One lives in hope.
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March 30, 2015 at 2:59 pm -
Whilst working in America in the early 80s, it was common to arrive early and have breakfast in the canteen. Shortly after I started working I popped in for breakfast and spotted a very pretty young lady having an iced Chelsea Bun and innocently noted “Ahh, sticky buns for breakfast.” When I asked my English colleagues why she slapped me I was advised that sticky buns means something completely different in the US. Happy days.
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March 30, 2015 at 6:21 pm -
@WF I see your embarrassing anecdote and raise you : I’m the *insert politically correct term for congenital idiot here* who walked up to two big black US Marines at a train station in Germany , when he was begging on the streets, and asked if he could ‘bum a fag’ off them.
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March 30, 2015 at 6:43 pm -
Intriguingly, bumming is probably scrounging in the US, so this is mixing it. In the time of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie were described as ‘tramps’, the British term, but nowadays that probably means loose woman, with Hobo or Bum replacing it (or maybe even the weird ‘bindlestiff’ word that I read once and had to look up).
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March 31, 2015 at 9:07 am -
Bindlestiff! Havent heard that in years! Because the pack of all his worldly goods is a ‘bindle’ and a ‘stiff’ in Murca is an ordinary person.
Yor useless fact of the day!
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March 31, 2015 at 3:48 pm -
I want to be gay again.
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March 31, 2015 at 3:58 pm -
Don’t be so cavalier
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March 31, 2015 at 4:11 pm -
And I want to be queer.
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March 30, 2015 at 12:06 pm -
The genie is well out of the bottle – no amount of ‘Clean Reader’ will ever sanitise the content of the ‘net, and any curious kid worth his testosterone (or her oestrogen) will easily manage to side-step it anyway. It was ever thus with dead-tree pornography – my parents would have been horrified at the stuff I read at school 50 years ago, but they were kept blissfully unaware, so weren’t troubled by it.
Nonsense like ‘Clean Reader’ is not about protecting kids, it’s about protecting parents from the awkward realisation that their precious offspring have learnt things far earlier than they ever did. Mummy implements ‘Clean Reader’ and is thus comforted that Tarquin and Arabella are safe from the nasty suff – oh yeh – Mummy’s not been in the playground recently, but as long as she stays remote from reality, all three of them are happy. The fact that it compromises the work of an author is just a sad fact and a price that Mummy is happy to pay for her own selfish comfort.
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March 30, 2015 at 12:14 pm -
I recall one of makers/writers of ‘Deadwood’ explaining why there were so many gratuitous uses of the F-Word in their, serious, screenplay. Seems back then that when cowboys swore then that swearing was more blasphemous than copulative, more ‘God damns’ than ‘ FredyUncleCharlieKate’. As they didn’t want to have a story populated by Yosemite Sams and wanted to keep the ‘feeling’, the shock feeling, of the true-to-life swearing, they decided to go with words that would offend a modern audience….as most people would now not find ‘Jesus H Christ’ offensive…if they even knew who Jesus H Christ was.
Chaucer would probably be amused to learn that the ‘C-Word’ is now considered the most offensive word in the English language and you daren’t even call a rabbit ‘cunny’. The residents of Horsley Down Rd SW1 ….will probably campaign to have the word ‘down’ removed from the street sign and replaced with something non-offensive to mongoloids.
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March 30, 2015 at 1:10 pm -
Why is the word ‘fanny’ almost considered a childish insult, even though it refers to the same thing as the, uh, c-word?
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March 30, 2015 at 2:26 pm -
I’m still waiting for the Mongolians to take offence.
Down in Sussex they have Downs to the north of them and Downs to the south of them… Requiem for England itself perhaps that there are no Ups…
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March 30, 2015 at 3:08 pm -
Down comes from some ancient contributor language to English and is the root for dune, and ‘dun’ and ‘don’ names, apparently (but not ‘Dunroamin’).
In Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, there is a street called Downside, but then there’s also ‘The Pitts’ in nearby Bonchurch, and I think the folk who live there are just delighted that it isn’t Butt Hole Lane, or Minge Street, or Pratt’s Bottom or St Thomas’s Passage any one of a myriad of places where the changing nature of language has left a changed meaning. Many of them can be found on the internet.
Interestingly, Wikipedia tells us of ‘dirty words’ in Latin, plus euphemisms, so that the medical terms for penis and vagina are descended from the euphemisms ‘tail’ and ‘scabbard’ or ‘sheath’. Also, the word for ring (anus) was so debauched to mean arsehole, that the word annulus had to be invented. Apparently, the filthiest was ‘landica’ (clitoris) – so much so, that a Senator was reproved for using the phrase ‘illam dicam’ (they said) which sounded like the forbidden word, and the Yoda-ish ‘dicam illam’ had to be used instead! On the other hand, ‘cunnus’ (no translation probably needed) seems to have been in everyday use.
Oh Tempora, Oh Mores.
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March 30, 2015 at 3:27 pm -
Down comes from some ancient contributor language to English and is the root for dune, and ‘dun’ and ‘don’ names, apparently (but not ‘Dunroamin’).
In the case of Horsely Down Road though I was making the point that a street which was originally called ‘Whores Lay Down’…..
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March 31, 2015 at 5:51 pm -
Anybody notice the imaginative cursing in ‘Wolf Hall’? “By the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!” is a phrase i shall most certainly be using one day!
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March 30, 2015 at 12:42 pm -
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March 30, 2015 at 1:00 pm -
I’ve never been able to post on Guido’s site – it is terrified of mention of ‘coon’ and thus refuses Anna Raccoon…!
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March 30, 2015 at 7:27 pm -
Guido had some odd paranoias at one time or another. Some rude words were picked up by the Mad Modbot, but there were plenty that were cheerfully waved through. He had a spell when ‘rice’ and ‘peas’ were banned, following a meme started by one incumbent of the site against Diane Abbot. She apparently roundly objected, which subsequently meant that posting comments with words like ‘price’ and ‘peace’ became fraught; awkward on a politically-based blog. For a Libertarian, Guido could be oddly censorious at times; there again, he did fly mighty close to the libel line on frequent occasions.
No idea what things are like now. I’ve not been there since it came to light that the Brookes Newmark sting was the work of one of his junior minions. I felt their time would have been better spent exposing genuine political corruption and wrongdoing.
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March 30, 2015 at 1:00 pm -
Some obscenity filters aren’t happy with the town in Lincolnshire or Humberside or wherever it is these days. I’ve seen it rendered as S****horpe. and there was a motorcycle forum I used to frequent that bowdlerised a security product so that it came out as Smar****er*.
* Smartwater, in case you were wondering.
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March 30, 2015 at 2:33 pm -
No wonder Cameron’s twitter joke met with such aghastness a few years back…
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March 30, 2015 at 3:03 pm -
Yet Word spellcheck invariably replaced peninsula (which featured in my address) as “penis vulva”. Goodness knows how many innocent souls I inadvertantly offended.
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March 30, 2015 at 3:42 pm -
That’s still no comfort to the residents of Penistone.
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March 30, 2015 at 4:54 pm -
Or Peniscola up the coast from Valencia. I’m sure I’ve seen it hyphenated. A pleasure to see the name on signposts & roadside garden centre hoardings.
Absolutely no relevance, but every time I drive through the Guildford area, I pass an estate agents called Gasgoine Pees. I’m sure he does.-
March 30, 2015 at 7:32 pm -
The residents of Cockermouth have similar problems.
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March 30, 2015 at 7:47 pm -
Don’t know about Gasgoine Pees, but I’ve often stood there idly wondering if it is true that Armitage Shanks.
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March 30, 2015 at 10:04 pm -
Ah, Mudplugger the rich vein of double meanings that is the plumber’s catalogue.
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March 31, 2015 at 11:09 am -
Oh, how we sniggered in metalwork when the teacher informed us that a particularly rough file was a “bastard”….
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March 30, 2015 at 1:55 pm -
I’ve never been able to post on Guido’s site – it is terrified of mention of ‘coon’ and thus refuses Anna Raccoon…!
I bet the bloggers from Fucking, Austria and Wank, Germany, sympathize.-
March 30, 2015 at 2:32 pm -
… they get to sprinkle their blogs with ficken instead, rather than f-cken…
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March 30, 2015 at 3:11 pm -
… and please don’t let us forget the innocent Robert Browning, who thought that a twat was a nun’s headgear, and used the word in his poem ‘Pippa Passes’ …
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March 30, 2015 at 3:41 pm -
But then, ‘pippa’ is Greek slang for a blow-job, so Browning was accidentally pretty close with ‘headgear’.
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March 30, 2015 at 6:15 pm -
But then, ‘pippa’ is Greek slang for a blow-job, so Browning was accidentally pretty close with ‘headgear’.
and ‘Latte’ (pron. “Latt-er” is German for an erection, something to be borne in mind when ordering a Grando creamy…with sprinkles.
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March 30, 2015 at 3:29 pm -
Off topic, but readers may be interested to learn that Slater & Gordon have purchased part of the insurance firm Quindell, described by the FT as the ‘UK’s largest ambulance chasing law firm,’ albeit for accident and industrial deafness.
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/30/2125246/dear-slater-gordon-shareholders/
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March 30, 2015 at 3:42 pm -
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March 30, 2015 at 3:45 pm -
I said ‘ALBEIT FOR ACCIDENT AND INDUSTRIAL DEAFNESS’.
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March 30, 2015 at 3:46 pm -
Come, come.
While I’d agree that the enforced use of this would be well beyond the pale, for years the pro freedom of expression lobby has been telling the mightily offended that there is always the ‘off switch’.
Leaving aside the possible concern already mentioned, it crosses my mind that the clean reader faction might just as readily say to the less sanctimonious that they aren’t forced to press the ‘Buy Now’ button
Or are they your personal vision of the trolls from afar?
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March 30, 2015 at 4:36 pm -
This sort of nonsense is nothing new.
Here is a load of crap about ‘twat’, a description that few north of the border, or maybe just north of the border between civilisation and intellectual decadence, would turn a hair at, knowing that, in context, that phrase means nothing more than a load of rubbish being pontificated about someone who is a congenital idiot
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/21/jacqueline.wilson
But those wading in the stench of the mortal offence arising from the unknown limitations of their own ignorance, because of the prima facie appeal of the merits of their case to, and the resultant sympathy arising from, the great mass of the unlearned and ignorant, will win every time over those who may have broader vision, know better, and might well be profoundly annoyed by such utter stupidity.
It’s not some optional app you need to fear…
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March 30, 2015 at 6:59 pm -
Perhaps the noble Jaqueline should have insisted that the offending word be replaced by the hair-curling ‘nou-nou’ or ‘front bottom’ if referring to female genitalia, or to the wonderful ‘fuqwit’ or even ‘Berk’ for a stupid person. As I understand it, ‘twatting’ someone is unrelated to the sexual use of the word, being onomatopoeic and describing the impact of (for example) a cricket bat.
North of the border, all manner of strangenesses may be found, notably the villages named Twatt, or it’s use as a surname, especially in conjunction with forenames starting with ‘A’ (Alec, Anne, etc) so that when the person gives their name, it is … Oh God, save us from this, but there really are such names. Don’t let us forget south of the border, (or east or west of another!) the blighters are just as odd ….
What will the program do to ‘Swallows and Amazons’ where three of the child protagonists are Titty, Dick and Roger, even if the title remains unchanged?
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March 30, 2015 at 7:35 pm -
“‘front bottom’”
If i were a female then I would find that horribly naff and twee term more offensive than the C-word, implying as it does that it is an organ of excretion.
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March 30, 2015 at 10:49 pm -
Dear Dwarf,
Surely you recognise it as an attempt at humour? Like you, I find the term ‘front bottom’ nauseating – it was regularly used by the Mary Whitehouse puppet in ‘Spitting Image’.
However, women excrete do from it far more frequently than using it for any other purpose, even if they are nymphomaniacs or prostitutes:
Urine – half a dozen or more times per day (and ‘Ooops moments’, if you believe the Tena adverts)
Menstruation – all day for around a week a month for over forty years
Unfertilised eggs
Own sexual secretions and excretion of male partner’s seminal fluid – at least as often as the other main use in the case of heterosexual women while sexually active, more often for the others and other times.Giving birth is so infrequent as not to count, despite its importance.
So, come on, Dwarf: I challenge you to list other normal non excretionary functions of the organ, and please don’t list the old chestnuts like catching coins rolled towards it by sailors in a bar in Valetta, drug smuggling, or the physically impossible ones like blowing a flute!
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March 30, 2015 at 7:46 pm -
Re unfortunate names; true story – a child at my son’s playgroup had a name beginning with R. Unfortunately for the infant’s future wellbeing, their surname was Sole – some parents have no imagination….
As for Titty et al; Arthur Ransome’s novels are far too middle-class to be permitted anywhere near today’s impressionable youngsters.
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March 30, 2015 at 8:06 pm -
Ah, yes. Ransome – was it he who wrote about the adventures of Fanny and Dick, thus giving palpitations to modern childrens’ librarians?
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March 31, 2015 at 8:30 am -
Macheath, can I refer you to ‘Potty, Fartwell and Knob: an anthology …’ by Russell Ash which contains a large number of such names, although it failed to include the unfortunate S. Hagger (f.) with whom I was at school.
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March 31, 2015 at 9:14 am -
Richard Head being another classic of the genre.
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March 30, 2015 at 5:59 pm -
Tallulah Bankhead (I think) was introduced to Norman Mailer, who was then basking in the attention paid to ‘The naked and the dead’, said (it is reported) – “Ah! you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell ‘fuck’…”
The publishers had edited the MS to ‘fug,’
Also, see ‘Her privates we”. by Frederic Manning, where ‘cow’ is used to replace another c-word.
So, little changes.
Good piece, though, PG…
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March 30, 2015 at 6:23 pm -
Thanks. I think the main concern for me is that while one would expect publishers, especially before the 60s, to exercise a degree of censorship, this is even out of their hands, never mind the authors.
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March 30, 2015 at 7:53 pm -
And by the way, my calling you PG was a rather limp attempt at a censorship reference. Peter Wyngarde was known as PW in his circle. And I did not imagine that you are he…
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March 30, 2015 at 7:02 pm -
Perhaps Al Fayed got his use of the the word by having ‘the naked and the dead’ as the set book in his English class! Fuggin’ hell!
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March 30, 2015 at 7:49 pm -
I think you might be right. Most Arabs of my acquaintance are fully able to use the ancient ‘f’ word with great articulation, accuracy and frequency…
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March 31, 2015 at 11:15 am -
A particular bugbear with me is when newspapers censor words by replacing all but the fist letter with hyphens or astrisks, which oftern leave one wondering which “c—” they mean.
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