by Lynne Truss
There is one positive aspect to all this. It’s quite a feeble one, but worth mentioning. Even though there were hundreds of complaints from BBC viewers about the swearing at the Live8 concert, the word Eff every day loses some of its shock power. I would still be horrified to hear my mum say it, and I always apologise to her if I let it slip out when I’m talking to her, but it’s clearly the case that through sheer constant over-use, “Effing” is becoming a meaningless intensifier and will soon hardly be worth saying. There is a hilarious section about gossip in Watching the English, in which the three ways an English man can react to news are anatomised:
with surprise
with anger
with elation and triumph
In each case, Kate Fox explains, “expletives” must be used. In other words, he can say:
“Effing hell!”
“Oh, Eff that!”
“Eff, yes! Effing fantastic!”
And they say the language of Shakespeare and Milton is dead. Television, as always, delights in accelerating the process of social change by normalising the entertainingly shocking. In the first five minutes of a recent Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the famously robust chef said:
You are Effing useless, this is Effing disgusting, this is Effing frozen in the centre, it’s as authentic as an Effing Chinese takeaway, that was Effing dire, you’re giving the customer Effing food poisoning, I am so Effing glad the customers can’t see what’s going on, I don’t know where to Effing start.
Well, strike that man’s head a glancing blow with a frying pan, but I suppose he is ultimately serving the greater good, even if he doesn’t know it. Blue Peter viewers wait for the day a children’s TV presenter says with a big smile, “And now it’s time to make an Effing model car park out of an Effing corn-flake packet!” At that point, all-clear sirens will sound throughout the land and the reign of Eff will be officially over. By great good fortune, the word that is far more shocking than Eff – you probably know the one I mean – can’t really step up to take its place, being an incontrovertible noun with far less scope for use as a verb, adverb, adjective and intensifier. Tee hee. Those Effing Eff people may know Eff All about grammar, but grammar will ultimately Eff them in the end.
Wasn’t it amusing, incidentally, that when Jerry Springer briefly visited the UK to make a British version of his show, he was reportedly astonished by the amount of foul language he heard? Perhaps, in common with many other Americans, he thought that in Britain we talked like something out of Mary Poppins. He thought we said things like, “Stripe me pink, I am proper peeved and no mistake. Do you know, I’d like to give that scallywag a piece of my mind. Heavens, yes indeedy.” In fact, of course, it’s easier to shield yourself from bad language in America than it is here. There is an old joke about an English tourist asking a New York taxi-driver, “Excuse me, can you tell me the way to Carnegie Hall, or shall I just go and Eff myself?” Nowadays the joke works better with an American asking the way to Piccadilly Circus.
In the meantime, however, the Universal Eff-Off Reflex looks set to stay and I am clearly destined to keep running foul of it. Each of us is inside a bubble, after all. Most of us grow more grumpy and misanthropic every day. Pascal said, “I have discovered that all human misery comes from a single thing, which is not knowing enough to stay quietly in your room.” Sometimes I have a little dream that it is eight o’clock on a fine wintry morning, and as I leave my house to walk to the station, I notice I’m feeling rather light-hearted. No one about. No cars. No noise except the faraway hum of a milk float. Mm. Nice. The street is clean as if washed by recent rain. I walk briskly, humming to myself, cross a quiet road and arrive at the station in good time for the 8.49. As I buy my paper (putting coins in a slot), I notice that the concourse is empty, utterly empty, and I begin to think well, this is a bit too good to be true, but never mind, they cleared Times Square for Tom Cruise that time, didn’t they? And Vanilla Sky was rubbish. I buy a ticket (no queue), board the train (no other passengers), and feel blissfully happy.
Now, this may be a dream, I think, as the train begins to move. This may even be – and that distant milk float was rather a giveaway – a long-forgotten episode of The Avengers that has somehow lodged in my brain and is now repeating itself as a kind of benign near-death experience as I lie unconscious at the bottom of some stairs. Either way, I don’t care. Somehow, overnight, other people have been eradicated, expunged, annihilated, or just ordered to stay indoors and keep out of my bloody way. And you know how it feels? It feels right.
THE FIFTH GOOD REASON
THE FIFTH GOOD REASON Booing the Judges
A young woman of my acquaintance once wrote to Tommy Steele. You may remember him from such films as Half a Sixpence and such chart-topping songs as “Little White Bull”. For many years, he lived in a rather grand eighteenth-century house behind a high wall on the main road between Richmond and Kingston in Surrey, near to where I grew up, and we council-estate locals were jolly pleased to have him in the neighbourhood, even though we never actually saw him. Whenever the song “ ’Old it flash bang wallop what a picture!” was played on Two-Way Family Favourites, we turned up the volume with a glow of pride. Anyway, one day, about fifteen years ago, this young woman wrote to him, but it was not a fan letter. It was an accusation, expressed in quite belligerent terms. “I have been past your house on the top deck of a bus for years and years,” she wrote, “yet I have never seen you. As a famous person, don’t you have a duty to appear for people? You’d be nobody without us, you know.” Unbelievably, she received a reply. Tommy Steele wrote to say that, if she cared to catch a bus on Sunday afternoon between two and three, he would be in the garden and would give her a wave. “Well, was he there?” I asked, when she told me about it, some months later. She snorted with laughter. “How should I know?” she said. “I didn’t go.”
When people applaud the “end of deference” in our society, they tend to evoke the old British class system, with its sepia-coloured peasants clutching cloth caps to their waistcoats and refusing to make a fuss about dying of industrial chest ailments. Words such as “servile” and “repressive” crop up, as the bad old days are given a glad good riddance. People will even resort (as I did, earlier) to the slightly dubious argument that posh people are quite unworthy of special respect, in any case, being genetically stupid from the in-breeding, laughably out of touch with popular entertainment, apt to pelt each other with bakery products in London’s club land, and absolute bastards where foxes are concerned. The end of deference is presented as politically progressive and therefore a good thing. Nobody “looks up” to anyone any more: Hooray! The media don’t allow anyone to get too big for their boots: Hooray! In the bad old days ordinary people often had to cope with feelings of inferiority, which sometimes drove them to exert themselves: Boo! But now we have relativism and entitlement: Hooray! Oh yes, everything is grandy and dandy. Hooray, hooray, hooray!
What a brave new world we have, then, that glorifies rudeness in the name of egalitarianism. The British have always enjoyed the sport of abusing public figures; we regard it as hilarious as well as cathartic. I was once at Madison Square Garden in New York, to report on a heavyweight title bout between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield, and yes, I know how odd that sounds, but this isn’t the place to explain. The point is that, before the fight, the ring announcer made a fatal error: addressing a crowd with a large, rowdy British element, he listed the celebrities in the audience. He evidently thought we would be impressed. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have Paul Simon in the Garden tonight!” he said. And what happened? “Booo!” yelled the Brits. “We have John Kennedy Junior!” “BOOOO!” “We have Michael Douglas!” “BOOOO!” Only two people were given a cheer by the British contingent: Jack Nicholson and Keith Richards. I felt embarrassed by my chippy countrymen. Abuse is the weapon of the weak. But at the same time, I did feel very proud. I mean, I like Paul Simon. I have nothing against him. But nobody deserves uncritical acclaim
just for filling a ringside seat at a punch-up.
This traditional weapon of the weak is, however, becoming heavier and more blunt. There seems to be an avid and self-righteous movement to make public figures pay the price for too much deference in the past. It is getting a bit bloody. The royal family is brutally cut down to size whenever the opportunity arises, and you certainly don’t have to be Jeremy Paxman any more to be rude to a politician. In fact, if you see John Prescott in a motorway service station, the accepted MO seems to be that first you insult him, then you go and get a bunch of friends in hoods with a video camera so that you can perform a “happy slap” (i.e., a filmed assault). As for famous people – well, who the hell would want to be famous any more? You’d have to be insane. People demand you appear for them in your garden, and then they don’t even show up to give you a wave. On a recent Have I Got News for You, Les Dennis told the story of a celebrity (whose name meant nothing to me) being struck in the street by a woman with an umbrella, who then said, “You see? I told you it was him!” There is a well-worn dictum that, in Britain, “they build you up and then they tear you down”, but it’s getting to the point where the tearing-down is far too much fun to hang about for. There was once a story in Private Eye about a bloodsports enthusiast so excited by the delivery of some pheasant chicks that he shot them in the box. This is, I think, a pretty good image for the way public life now works in this country.
All this would be all right if it actually served the cause of egalitarianism, but it plainly doesn’t. Look around. We don’t even have social mobility any more. Just because newspapers refer to HRH The Prince of Wales as “Chazza” (and everyone feels free to say vile things about his uncomplaining wife) does not make him the same as you and me. There seems to be an idea that the more disrespect you show towards the rich or famous (for example, squirting water in the face of Tom Cruise), the nearer you move towards achieving equality, but the effect is quite the opposite: rudeness highlights difference. In a truly egalitarian society, everyone would show respect to everyone else. It is very bad news for our society that overt disrespect is such a big game these days, because it just stirs people up without enlightening them. Mass entertainment that demeans public figures satisfies popular base instincts but leaves nobody better off. Besides, at the same time as it’s become fashionable never to look up to anyone, it has become nastily acceptable to look down.
The “end of deference” is about a lot more than the flattening of class distinctions, in any case. This is where the baby has been so thoughtlessly poured down the drain with the bath water. Respect and consideration are traditionally due to other people for all sorts of reasons, some big, some small. Here are twenty (mostly lapsed) reasons to show special politeness to other people that have nothing to do with class.
they are older
they know more than you do
they know less than you do
they got here first
they have educational qualifications in the subject under discussion
you are in their house
they once helped you financially
they have been good to you all your life
they are less fortunate than you
they have achieved status in the wider world
you are serving them in a shop
they are in the right
they are your boss
they work for you
they are a policeman/teacher/doctor/judge
they are in need
they are doing you a favour
they paid for the tickets
you phoned them, not the other way round
they have a menial job
The utter bloody rudeness of the world today is about a lot of things, as we have already seen, but I think what most dismays many honourable people is the way “deference” has become a dirty little demeaning word, while its close relative “respect” has become a cool street-crime buzz-word mainly associated with paying feudal obeisance to those in possession of firearms. Both words have lost their true meaning. Deference is not about lying down and letting someone put their foot on your head. It is not about kow-tow. It is about assessing what is due to other people on all sorts of grounds. The dictionary definition of “in deference to” is: “out of respect for; in consideration of”. To show deference does not mean “I hereby declare I am inferior to you.” But that’s what people seem to think it means, so they refuse to defer to anybody, on any grounds at all. The same misunderstanding prevents people from apologising. They think that if they say “Sorry”, it means “I am 100 per cent to blame. And now that I’ve admitted it, you can sue the pants off me.”
! # * !
Contempt is the word. Although I don’t know why I bother continuing with this; most of you are too stupid to follow it, let’s be honest. All right, I suppose I’ll have to spell it out. Contempt, also known as “attitude”, is the new behavioural default mode. And what breeds contempt? Oh, come on, you muppets! I’m working with idiots here. What breeds contempt? Familiarity! Blimey, I thought you were cleverer than that, mate. Although judging by the way you’ve been moving your lips while you read this, I don’t know where I got that idea.
It goes against the grain just to sit here applauding the sagacity of a proverb, but I find that I have no choice. So here goes. What breeds contempt? Familiarity breeds contempt. I used to be confused by this saying, incidentally, because I thought it meant “familiarity” in the sense of being familiar with the lay-out of Exeter, or familiar with the problem plays of Shakespeare, and I thought, “Hang on, the more I know about Measure for Measure, the more I admire it! When Claudio pleads so eloquently for his life at the expense of his sister’s chastity, I am absolutely fit to be tied. And that Cathedral Close in Exeter is lovely. Familiarity really boosts things in one’s estimation. What on earth are these proverb-coiners talking about?”
But it isn’t that kind of familiarity. It’s the sort that has you call your maths teacher “Jeff”. It’s going up to the Prime Minister and saying, “Nice jacket; how much?” It is using someone’s loo without asking, and leaving the seat up as evidence. It is calling someone you’ve never met, on their mobile, to settle a dispute about punctuation. Few issues divide generations more than the issue of familiarity. It is one of the main rudenesses cited by older people, and it is easy to see why. People who have spent their whole lives as “Mr Webster” or “Mrs Owen” do not want to find, at the ends of their lives, that younger people who don’t know them are calling them “Alf” and “Joyce”. To them, it is sheer impertinence (and usually takes place when they are in a weakened state, which makes it all the more insensitive). Sometimes you really do have to admire the French. They would never stand for this kind of thing. An American writer-friend who is quite proficient in French once attempted to use a slang term with a record-shop owner, and the chap did not let it pass. “Have we met?” he asked, horrified at the breach of decorum.
Several of my Daily Telegraph correspondents objected to being called “mate” or “love” by strangers, and one particularly loathed being served in restaurants with the words “There you go.” Which for some reason, always makes me laugh, because I can picture the scene: man waiting for roast dinner to be served, pouring wine for wife, practising deep breathing. “He might not say it, dear,” whispers the wife, patting his hand. “I know. Don’t go on about it,” says the man, biting his lip. Along come two plates of dinner. “There you go!” says the waiter. “Aaaagh!” yells the man. I would include “No problem” alongside “There you go” under the heading “Unacceptable Insouciance”, incidentally. I always want to administer a clip round the ear to people who accept my thanks with “No problem”. The “There you go” man and I ought to go out together, I realise. We could spend most of our time jumping up and down, ranting. “Where do I go? Just tell me, where do I go? Did I ask whether it was a problem? Was a problem ever mentioned?”
It is tempting to blame the parents and the teachers for
this end-of-deference state of affairs, and do you know what? I am not going to resist that temptation. As a non-parent, I naturally feel I am writing with one hand tied behind my back: after all, many of my best friends are parents, and I know they have done their best. But if I had both hands tied behind my back, I would be obliged to type this with my nose: those damned breeders know they should carry the can, so why pretend otherwise? They have let their kids manipulate, insult and bully them. They have taught them to demand respect, but not to show it. And by doing this, they have failed the kids as much as they have failed the rest of us. There is a great exchange in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman when Willy says proudly of his sons, “Two fearless characters!” and Charley dryly remarks, “The jails are full of fearless characters.” Many parents nowadays seem to share Willy’s view – that if a child has reached maturity and is not intimidated by anyone or anything, a fine job of parenting has been done. Who cares if the result is a generation of unhappy sociopaths? Just so long as the unhappy sociopaths regard their parents as their pals.
However, there is a big plus side to the breakdown of formality. Every day I have an encounter of some kind that is friendlier than it would have been ten years ago. The painter who decorated my living room chatted to me about his cats, which was nice. At the station, the person selling tickets says, “That’s a nice bag.” Not standing on ceremony softens the edges of a sharp world, perhaps? As someone who sits at home all day, banging a keyboard, I am quite grateful for a bit of friendly contact on the phone, even if the chumminess is ultimately empty of meaning, and even if I leap on it with disproportionate gratitude. For example, I give my address to a ticket agency man and he says, “Hey, I know that street. I used to live just round the corner in Buckingham Place!” and I say, “Were you at University down here?” and he says, “No, actually, I worked at the dog track” and I say, “That’s really interesting” and he says, “That’ll be £88 including the booking fee” and I say, “What’s it like at the dog track? I’ve never been,” and he says, “These tickets are non-refundable, and your booking reference is 127565,” and I say, “Great. Well, nice to talk to you. And if you ever find yourself in Buckingham Place on a visit to old friends, or just to see the sea, ha ha, there’ll be a cup of tea waiting for you at my house, absolutely, just quote booking reference 127565, hello, hello, oh he’s gone, oh well.” And I’m not making it up; that’s the sort of fleeting human contact that can really make my day.
