A curse on all our children?

WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE (QUITE A LOT OF IT.)

IF SWEARING OFFENDS YOU, YOU'RE JUST LIKE ME.

MY 14-year-old daughter is doing a play at school and asks if I’ll help her with her lines. Sure, I say.

“Thanks,” she replies, “but you have to let me say the lines and promise not to complain.”

“Why would I ever complain about helping you with homework?”

“Because you wouldn’t normally let me say …. Oh, never mind. Will you help me?”

“Of course,” I beam. “Where do we start?”

“Here,” she says, pointing. “My first line’s the one that begins ‘Shit!”

“What??”

“You promised you wouldn’t complain.”

Actually I didn’t promise. I didn’t promise at all. What I am doing is being a bit shocked that as a parent you bring up your kids to be polite and respectful, and you send them to a school which gives them detention for wearing the wrong type of trousers or colourful socks, but lets them unnecessarily scream the word “shit”. Excellent.

Not just one “shit”, either. Only one is daughter’s, but there are three in all, in this ten minute play, as well as an “arse” and even a “fuck”. And this play wasn’t written by one of her teachers, but is one in general use around the country, meaning it’s encouraging hundreds, thousands of kids to, well, not give a shit about giving a shit. How did this happen?

Bad words can be good for you

Now let me say up front, I have no issue with swearing per se. It’s an extremely useful device, and not only from a linguistic point of view. The release of profanities is scientifically proven to relieve physical and mental stress. Researchers at Keele University, for instance, found that when volunteers plunged their hands into a bowl of iced water (and who wouldn’t volunteer to do that?), they could stand the pain longer if they were allowed to eff and jeff.

And it’s a valuable tool in communication, because it offers an opportunity to up the ante, to bring impact, underline a point, even sometimes add some humour – and I’m all for that. To be honest, I’m not so keen on its overuse as general part of conversation – “so I drove my fucking car into fucking town and fucking went to the fucking shops” – but swearing in a cause, for a reason, yes, it has its place.

But in a school play? To be performed by 14-year-olds for fellow students and parents?When, flicking through the script, those words were indeed unnecessary? Really? But then I thought about it, and although I reserve the right to be outraged, I ought not to be surprised.

That’s because we are all as a society cursing more than we used to. A recent survey by the British Board of Film Classification found a third of us are more likely to use stronger words than we did five years ago – and because 18-34 year-olds are the age group least offended and more desensitised to its impact (45% of them swear as part of “their daily life”, compared with 10% of my fifty-something generation), as the years go by we’re only likelier to get swearier.

We all have a new f-f-favourite curse

This is already happening in the types of swearing we do. According to more profanity professors, this time at Aston University, the very British cuss “bloody”, which was our favourite naughty word for generations, is no longer our curse of choice. In fact over the past 20 years it’s fallen to being our third most used. Number 2 is, appropriately, the sh word for a Number 2, and I don’t think you need me to spell out our new f-f-favourite.

Curiously, the Aston team found we swear less than we did 20 years ago – although this may not actually be because we use fewer naughty words but because as a society we no longer consider many of them to be swearing. This may well be true – when I was an infant school child learning many new words in the early 1970s, I remember being reprimanded by teachers for saying “blimey” because of its blasphemous etymology “God blind me”. Similarly “bugger” seems to have evolved in my lifetime from a taboo word to a very light-hearted cuss or amiable reprimand – possibly because of a societal shift in attitudes to homosexuality.

We seem to be more and more accepting of previously very potent words. Of course there are exceptions – unless society goes dramatically into reverse, there is obviously no place or excuse for any words of racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious discrimination or any other form of hate speech. And at the moment, the most unacceptable general swear word out there is a four-letter vulgar description of female genitalia, which is unlikely to lose its power to offend and disgust any time soon.

But “fuck” has evolved in a couple of generations into, well, common parlance. For example, the movie industry had been going over 60 years before the first use of an F-bomb in a full-length mainstream picture, when Barbara Jefford spoke it as Molly Bloom in the 1967 adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But since then it has gradually peppered more movies more frequently, appearing 300 times in 1990’s Pulp Fiction and peaking with its extraordinary overuse in 2014’s The Wolf Of Wall Street, in which it is heard on no fewer than 506 occasions, or once every 22 seconds.

Now even younger kids can join in

And as it’s become an unsurprising, ‘acceptable’ common cuss in grown-up movies, inevitably the age bar for its usage has got lower. The British Board Of Film Classification now permits it in movies to be watched by children of any age, 'depending on context, frequency and tone'. Which is why The King’s Speech, originally released in 2010 as a 15 because of its “fuck”s, was almost immediately reclassified after a distributors’ appeal as a 12A and therefore theoretically viewable by any child with its parent’s consent – the explanation being that that nice Colin Firth used “strong language in a speech therapy context… (which) was not aggressive and not aimed at any person”. That may be so, but I’m not sure Nanny McPhee would approve.

(The BBFC, incidentally, also permits PG films – ie with no age classification at all – to contain in some circumstances the words “shit”, “arse” and “bastard”. Even film with a U certificate – universally suitable for all – can include the exclamations “damn”, “hell”, “God” and “Jesus Christ”. Blimey.)

It's a similar tale in other popular culture. The UK singles charts, which began in 1952, managed over half a century of profanity-free No1 records until Outhere Brothers’ Don’t Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) featured an eff in 2004. That opened the floodgates: Of the last 30 chart-toppers from 2019 to the present day, half appear on streaming sites with warnings of “explicit” lyrics.

(Again, though, it’s about context. Most songs don’t actually need those words, of course they don’t, but I do readily acknowledge some would actually be poorer without them – many rap artists, for instance, would be compromising the authenticity of their heritage and communities if they sang about “flipping melon farmers”. Eamon’s infamous No1 single Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back) would be a completely forgettable R&B-by-numbers dirge if it didn’t have an expletive in almost every line. And I sincerely believe other songs would actually be improved by the addition of profanities. For instance, wouldn’t Westlife’s dreary chart-topper Swear It Again be much more lively if they’d followed their own advice and halfway through, all climbed off their stools at the key change and shouted “bollocks”?)

How TV times have changed

And of course television has similarly evolved. We’re now a long, long way from the BBC’s first ever F-bomb – Kenneth Tynan on a live broadcast in 1965 – and from British TV’s first scripted eff (Edward Woodward in a 1972 episode of Callan). We’re not quite at the stage where Huw Edwards or Clive Myrie are introducing a news report with the words “so what the fuck’s going on, Laura?” but TV drama is now full of the things.

It's inevitable I suppose, this increased swearing as society changes, and even, yes, inevitable in school plays if they’re going to reflect real life. As far back as 1982 an episode of The Young Ones mocked parents’ outrage at children’s school drama Grange Hill, with a young Ben Elton telling a teacher the show wasn’t a bad influence because “don’t be silly, we’re the only kids in Britain who never say f….” (Grange Hill is currently being remade, so we’ll see if that’s still the case.)

Which brings me back neatly to my daughter and her, well, literal shitstorm of a play. Maybe the world is moving on, and I get that. In the next couple of generations, these words may so regularly infiltrate normal polite conversation that they’re not even considered offensive – in which case we’ll have to find new ways to swear. I understand language evolves, and society moves on.

But for the moment, I don’t need to be comfortable with it. I’m not sure I’ll take my mother to see the play, as it would horrify her. I myself, I suppose I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. I could complain I suppose. I never promised I wouldn’t. But it may be that if I did, younger parents, younger teachers, younger society leaders – well, they may just tell me they don’t give a fuck.

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