Apathy Sketchpad

Since I’ve been working on But Sir…, I’ve seen a lot of petitions asking for a total ban on swearing on TV. To those people I say ‘fuck off’.

The problem I have with it is that there’s no difference between a word that is swearing and a word that is not other than how people react to it. I’ve been over this before. The actual meaning of the word is irrelevant, as demonstrated by the relative offensiveness of ‘poo’, ‘crap’ and ’shit’. So if the words aren’t offensive because of what they mean then why is it? It’s arbitrary. It’s made up. Someone decided ‘fuck’ was offensive, so you started taking offence at it. So now it’s offensive because you take offence rather than the other way around. That’s self-reinforcing nonsense. It’s basically a religion. So if you want to legislate based on some arbitrary list of words you’ve decided you don’t want to hear, I see no reason to listen to you.

Here’s one:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make urgent representation to the Broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, the broadcasting institutions operating in the UK and film regulators, asking them to stop the use of unnecessary swearing and bad language in their productions (including those available for downloading from websites) and to urge providers of user-generated content to take similar action.

…

 

In May 2008 the Radio Times conducted an opinion poll, which found that 69% of people believed there is too much swearing on TV. In November 2008 the Sunday Express launched a Clean Up TV Crusade focusing on the excessive use of swearing and the Sunday Telegraph conducted a poll which found that 56% of people thought the f*** word should never be used on TV. The Office of Communications (Ofcom) in its Communications Market reports for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 found that the majority of people believe there is too much swearing on TV.

…

John Beyer of mediawatch-uk

 

Haha, ‘the f*** word’. You won’t even use the word in its correct context. Even when there’s ambiguity. You might mean ‘fart’. Or ‘feet’. And let’s leave out the question of what percentage of Radio Times readers are grannies. Of course they’ll say there’s too much swearing.

But that’s a sensible one — reduce swearing. Fair enough. This one is madder:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban swearing on TV and Radio.

Too many ‘F’ words. Why? Whats the point? Get back to good pubic standards of decency. Stop the Ross-dross and promote proper use of the English language. Stop swearing on the Radio and TV!

Chris K

It’s saddening that people genuinely think that this is appropriate language in which to petition the Prime Minister. It’s also a bit of a worry that they equate ‘talking like I do’ with ‘proper use of the English language’.

And this one is even madder:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban all Swearing in public places .

Ban all swearing in public places and especially on the British Broadcasting Corporation, to bring back a standard of decency and set an example to the younger generation.

Mrs Margaret Elward of housewife

This has six signatories, including a ‘Mister Why on earh is the PM being petitioned for this?’ and someone claiming to be called ‘because we care about standards in our Country, you obviously don’t’. Well, they have a definition of ’standards’ which means arbitrarily excluding certain words from our vocabularies (but not ‘knowing how petitons work’), and I’m sorry but I have bigger things to worry about than that, and that’s before we get onto the bigger issues with allowing the government to ban words they disapprove of.

Really, who are these people? “Set an example to the younger generation”? Do you really think that the biggest problem with young people is that they (we?) swear too much? It just doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone stops us swearing, we’ll just make up some other words and shout those in exactly the same context, and then presumably half of them will try to get the new words added to the list and the other half will say ‘well, that’s not the f-star-star-star word, so that’s okay by me,’ and go back to watching Father Ted.

It’s ridiculous. Why do people insist on acting stupid?

Oh, wait. I think I know the answer to that one.