Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  With the entrenching of the class system during the Industrial Revolution, the regional working-class accent increasingly branded the speaker as socially inferior. The development of public boarding schools like Eton and Rugby in the nineteenth century helped establish the RP accent as the ‘standard’ voice of the English gentleman, who went out into the world to build empires and occupied the highest positions in Victorian society.

  The launch of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1922 confirmed the place of Received Pronunciation as the accent of educated, middle-class England. Its first Director General, John Reith, said, ‘One hears the most appalling travesties of vowel pronunciation. This is a matter in which broadcasting can be of immense assistance … We have made a special effort to secure in our various stations men who … can be relied upon to employ the correct pronunciation of the English tongue.’

  RP became so synonymous with the dinner-jacket-wearing radio announcers that it came to be known as BBC English. This is what we would call today ultra posh, the sort of English spoken only by members of the royal family and the upper classes.

  Yorkshireman and BBC broadcaster, Wilfred Pickles

  Wilfred Pickles rolls up his sleeves …

  The BBC did in fact break with tradition during the Second World War, when it hired a Yorkshireman, Wilfred Pickles, as a radio news announcer. They thought that if the Nazis invaded Britain and infiltrated the BBC broadcasts, they’d find it more difficult to impersonate a regional accent. Radio announcers had already begun introducing themselves by name at the beginning of wartime news bulletins to ensure that listeners ‘be able to recognize instantly the authentic voice of BBC broadcasting’. Wilfred Pickles’ news broadcasts caused a furore, although if you listen to the BBC sound archives, it’s rather hard to understand what all the fuss was about; you have to concentrate quite hard to distinguish the Yorkshire burr. Pickles did, however, infuriate southern listeners by ending the midnight bulletin with ‘And to all in the North, good neet.’ London cartoonists took their revenge by drawing him with rolled-up shirtsleeves and wearing a cloth cap.

  Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, making her first of many Christmas radio broadcasts

  U and Non-U

  ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him,’ wrote Irishman George Bernard Shaw in the preface to Pygmalion in 1916. Forty years later, the English were still obsessing about the social classes and their accents. Linguist Professor Alan Ross coined the expression ‘U and Non-U’ in 1954 to differentiate between the English upper classes (U) and the aspiring middle classes (non-U). He argued that members of the upper class weren’t necessarily better-educated, cleaner or richer than anyone else; the only thing which demarcated them was language (apart perhaps from ‘having one’s cards engraved … not playing tennis in braces and … dislike of certain comparatively modern inventions such as the telephone, the cinema and the wireless’). Do you have a bath (U) or take a bath (non-U)? Is your midday meal lunch (U) or dinner (non-U)? Do you wipe your mouth with a table napkin (U) or a serviette (non-U)? And do you use lavatory paper (U) or toilet paper (non-U)? Talking about greens instead of vegetables was very non-U, as was home instead of house and glasses rather than spectacles.

  Ross’s article was published in an obscure Finnish academic journal and might have passed unnoticed if it hadn’t been read by the unabashedly U author Nancy Mitford. She immediately penned an article entitled ‘The English Aristocracy’, in which she expanded on the U and non-U theme and added a few of her own suggestions to a glossary of terms used by the upper classes. The essay provoked a debate about English class consciousness and snobbery. Mitford’s article was reprinted along with contributions from Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and others in Noblesse Oblige. Betjeman had a jolly good dig at the upwardly aspiring middle classes in his poem ‘How to Get on in Society’, which opens with the line ‘Phone for the fish knives, Norman’.

  Professor Ross asked the burning question ‘Can a non-U-speaker become a U-speaker?’ to which he answered no: ‘in these matters, U-speakers have ears to hear so that one single pronunciation, word, or phrase will suffice to brand an apparent U-speaker as originally non-U’.

  In fact, as Professor Ross, Nancy Mitford and Co. were discoursing social language, England’s tight class system was already beginning to loosen. As the distinction blurred, so too did the boundaries between accents. What’s interesting about the lists of U words is that today most of them have been adopted by everyone else.

  The most famous purveyor of U-speak today is the Queen, but even Her Majesty’s accent is showing signs of change. An Australian study of the Christmas broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1980s suggests that the Queen too is becoming less posh. Her vowels, apparently, have flattened slightly over the years, moving towards the modern standard accent of southern England. In the 1950s, her pronunciation of the word had almost rhymed with bed, and the words pat, mat and man sounded like pet, met and men. Today her accent is more like that of a posh Radio 4 announcer.

  So if the accent of the U-class has become much more a standard RP, what of the non-U? Well, apart from RP and local accents, the accent for the non-U of the south-east of England is developing into a so-called Estuary English – somewhere between RP and Cockney. In EE, the th sound is becoming f or v; ts are dropping at the ends of words and the final ls in words are sounding like ws. EE, it’s said, is less posh than RP but not as working-class as Cockney. In its strongest form it’s the ‘Am I bovvered?’ accent of Catherine Tate’s comic character or the ‘yoof’ drawl of journalist Janet Street Porter. Tony Blair is supposed to have adopted a mild form of Estuary English as prime minister when he wanted to appeal to Joe Public.

  We’re in a call centre in Newcastle, one of the boom industries of the twenty-first century. Over a million Britons are employed by companies as telephone agents to deal with customer inquiries or travel bookings or a myriad of other transactions. In this industry, regional accents – most of them, anyway – are prized possessions, and some are gold dust. Survey after survey puts Yorkshire and Geordie accents high on the warm, friendly and ‘pleasing to the ear’ scale. A Scottish accent gets top rating for most trustworthy; Welsh and Irish score highly as well. (Some accents don’t fare so well: poor old Liverpudlian Scouse and Birmingham Brummie languish at the bottom as the most unappealing accents in Britain.)

  The Newcastle call centre manager, Lawrence Fenley, explains that his employees are proud of their Geordie accent.

  ‘Why should they hide it? Everybody in this centre is very proud of where they’re from and their heritage. They will speak to the customers the way that they do to their friends, and it goes down very, very well.’

  Clearly we humans have an emotional need to latch on to language; if you can’t see the face of the person you’re talking to, then the next best thing is their accent, because somehow we feel it’s an expression of their character, their cultural belonging. Something like a Geordie accent has a very particular quality.

  Brand consultant James Hammond makes this very point.

  ‘In the twenty-first century things have changed an awful lot in terms of how we understand, appreciate and fit in with accents. And what we’ve got now is a society which is much more into an emotional connection. And, therefore, this Received Pronunciation, this Queen’s English, is deemed almost condescending to us. We want accents that are much more personable … and we’ve got a celebrity status society now. So people like Ant and Dec and Cheryl Cole have really brought something like the Geordie accent to the fore.’

  James does point out that RP is still the accent of choice when people want to speak to someone in authority.

  ‘It is only when, usually, you have an issue, a problem, where that needs to be escalated up to somebody in a superior position, a manager or whatever, that you then expect a certain kind of accent. And, funnily enough, we then revert back to the Queen’s English, because people fee
l more comfortable with that.’

  Ant and Dec helping develop our love affair with the Geordie accent

  Until relatively recently people thought having a posh accent was the key to success in life; that you’d be trusted and believed if you spoke like that. It’s just not the case any more.

  Yorkshireman Wilfred Pickles would have been delighted. As he wrote in his autobiography in 1949: ‘May it be forbidden that we should ever speak like BBC announcers, for our rich contrast of voices is a local tapestry of great beauty and incalculable value, handed down to us by our forefathers.’

  The last word must go to Barnsley poet Ian McMillan, a man who believes he is defined by his language and accent.

  ‘Barnsley’s what I think with. I think with its history, I think with its culture, I think with its hills that you walk up and get out of breath, I think with its wind that stops me talking in big words, big, big mouth openings. So yes, I think in the end, no matter how I try to write on the page, it will always come out with Barnsley’.

  CHAPTER 3

  Uses and Abuses

  Language is the most versatile of tools, far exceeding the uses for which it was first designed. We humans probably began to talk to each other about the best places to hunt or which plants to avoid eating as a means of survival, but the way we use words has evolved into something much more complex. Our language can be playful and shocking and witty and dangerous. It allows us to express our anger verbally rather than physically, with expletives, and to profane the sacred or confront taboos; we hide behind the language of doublespeak to conceal truths, and cover our embarrassment with euphemisms; groups create secret codes for their protection or disguise or uniqueness; professions develop their own language for efficiency and accuracy; sometimes we use language simply to cover up the fact that we haven’t a clue what we’re talking about.

  Like all complex tools, language can go wrong. It’s when words erupt from us wildly, uncontrollably or don’t come at all that we are given tiny insights into the mystery of how language works.

  George Carlin backstage, March 1976, Pittsburgh

  The Seven Words

  Those of you with a sensitive disposition might like to skip the next few pages, for this is a chapter about bad language – whether it’s jargon, slang, terms of abuse or, of course, swear words. If you choose to read on, be warned. The most offensive words in the English language are about to get an airing.

  Let’s cut to the chase and get the words down on the page. American comedian George Carlin was the first to list the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television in a radio monologue in 1972. He reckoned they were: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. ‘Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.’

  According to linguist Steven Pinker there are five swearing distinctions: dysphemistic (I have to take a shit); abusive (Fuck you!); idiomatic (I was pretty fucked up last night); emphatic (I’m not going to do a fucking thing); and cathartic (Fuck, I’ve spilt my coffee!).

  The fact is, lots of us swear. It’s become part of everyday life for more and more people, especially those under the age of thirty. People who count such things estimate we swear anything between fourteen and ninety times a day and half the times we use fuck and shit. So should we be bothered that it’s now okay to repeat these most offensive of oaths on air and in print without retribution? Was Oscar Wilde right when he said, ‘The expletive is a refuge of the semiliterate’? Or did Shakespeare get it right when he wrote: ‘But words are words. I never did hear / That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear’? Is there such a thing as good or bad language, and is it advisable, or even possible, to control it?

  Taboo or not taboo, that is the question.

  Taboos

  The word taboo derives from the Tongan word tabu, meaning ‘set apart’ or ‘forbidden’, and was first used in English back in 1777 by the explorer Captain James Cook. After observing the eating habits of the people of the South Pacific islands, he wrote:

  Not one of them would sit down, or eat a bit of any thing … On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said; which word has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden … When any thing is forbidden to be eaten, or made use of, they say, that it is taboo.

  Hunters with their dogs corner a bear in its cave: the first taboo

  And so taboo entered the English language, meaning something forbidden. Taboo subjects in almost all societies tend to involve religion, sex, death and bodily functions; things that frighten us or make us uneasy. The first taboo word in the Proto-Indo-European language was apparently for the animal we call the bear. It was so ferocious, so feared that people were scared to give it a name. It was referred to as the honey-eater or the licker or the brown one (bruin in Old English, from which we get bear).

  Societies have developed a raft of words and expressions to deal with taboo subjects in contrasting ways: either to avoid mentioning the taboo subjects at all or deliberately to use the taboo words to inflame, to hurt, offend and shock. Sometimes it’s simply for emotional release.

  Take the subject of death. Given that it’s the only certain thing in life (apart from, perhaps, taxes), we’re remarkably coy about using the d-word. Instead, we say he’s passed away, passed on, given up the ghost, gone to meet his maker, shuffled off this mortal coil or joined the choir invisible; we use euphemisms (from the Greek word meaning ‘use of good words’) to sweeten the harsh reality. If we want to laugh at death or be brazen about it, we use dysphemisms (Greek for ‘non-word’). He’s croaked, pegged out, pushing up the daisies, bitten the dust, popped his clogs, cashed in his chips, kicked the bucket, called it quits or (quite awful) taking a dirt nap.

  We do the same for bodily functions. We fart, break wind, pass gas, let rip, toot, poot, pop, parp or trumpet; rather than defecate, we poo or do a number two, have a shit or a dump, shed a load, test the plumbing or – if you’re in the medical profession – have a bowel movement. As for urinating, our replacement expressions are endless: we pee, piddle, piss, slash, wee, widdle, have a jimmy riddle, go for a tinkle, take a leak, spend a penny, strain the potatoes, water the garden/tulips/tomatoes, and, if you’re a man, point Percy at the porcelain or shake hands with an old friend.

  There’s a lovely expression: to mince one’s words, to mince meaning to soften or moderate. The way society has got round the problem of using outright profanities is to express a minced oath. We take a four-letter expletive, add a bit of rhyme or alliteration and come up with a softer, inoffensive version. Flipping, frigging, fecking, sugar, shoot and shucks – so innocent-sounding and yet so not. And if you thought you were being mild calling someone a berk instead of an idiot, think again: it’s from the rhyming slang ‘Berkeley Hunt’.

  In our more pious past, words were altered to avoid blasphemy. Some of the euphemisms – zounds (God’s wounds), gadzooks (meaning God’s hooks, perhaps from the nails of the cross) and God’s bodkins (God’s body) – have fallen out of use. But our language today is still littered with expressions originally used to avoid taking God’s name in vain. We say good gracious, golly, gosh, by gum, begorrah, strewth (God’s truth) or cor blimey (God blind me). We make a detour round Christ or Jesus by uttering cripes, crikey, for crying out loud (for Christ’s sake), gee, jeepers or Jiminy Cricket (did anyone tell Walt Disney?). Instead of hell and damn, we say heck and darn or darnation, dang or doggone. And what the Dickens! isn’t alluding to the author but substituting the devil with a minced oath.

  Why We Love to Swear

  Professor Timothy Jay is a naughty words expert (what a great line to put in your CV). He’s a psychologist at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and for the past thirty years he’s been studying the role of dirty words in linguistics. Jay himself was exposed to swearing from an early age. His father was a carpenter, and the young Timothy would visit him at work on th
e building sites. ‘I would hear things. The carpenters were planing a piece of wood, and the guy would say, “Take a few more cunt hairs off of that,” or “I gotta cut that tit off there.” So I would hear this language. If these guys came over to the house and they were with their families, you wouldn’t hear any of it. But on the job – constant.’

  Professor Jay calls swear words emotional intensifiers. ‘It’s like using the horn on your car, which can be used to signify a number of emotions,’ he says. ‘Like anger, frustration, joy or surprise.’

  Swearing is so deeply rooted in the brain – both literally and metaphorically – that it stays with us longer. Jay claims that children learn swear words at a very early age and also learn the taboos that society places on them. ‘As soon as kids can speak, they’re using swear words,’ says Jay. ‘That doesn’t mean they know what adults know, but they do repeat the words they hear.’ His team’s research revealed that children learn and use swear words as young as two or three. Because they’re learned so early, they’re deeply ingrained and like nursery rhymes are retained longer than other language forms.

  Children learn that swear words are powerful; they often hear them during arguments when people’s emotions are running high, and when the child repeats the word, they get an emotional response. It’s the emotional link of swear words that gives them their psychological potency. Anything that is forbidden is powerful.