OK, I give up ...

What the fuckity fuck does this mean?

Privately educated with an MSc in contemporary urbanism from the London School of Economics, Trenton Oldfield makes an unlikely agitator against elite society.

Apparently:

He describes himself as "rich, open-minded, multidisciplinary, efficient, focused, intelligent, honest, unique". Oldfield is listed as having worked in project management roles for various charities and non-governmental organisations, including as a co-ordinator of a project to regenerate the Thames between Kew and Chelsea.

You forgot 'wanker'.

Wait, there's more ...

He writes: "This is a protest, an act of civil disobedience, a methodology of refusing and resistance." Oldfield's blog dismisses the Boat Race as a "pseudo competition" that allows the elites to "reboot their shared culture in the public realm".

"Most standing alongside the Thames today are in fact the pumped-up though obedient administrators, managers, promoters, politicians and enforcers; functional, strategic and aspirational elites," he writes. "The transnational-corpo-aristocratic ruling class (invisible) haven't turned up today and would never consider doing so, despite the best endeavours of Bollinger, Xchange and Hammersmith & Fulham's mayor."

Make that 'complete wanker'.

Funerals

Things will be quiet here today, as I will be at the funeral of a close family member. I was speaking to the guy at a family occasion in November and he was not well. Investigations were under way. By Christmas he was in hospital, and he died last week. It seems that the medics were so intent on finding what was wrong with the first complaint that they missed the cancer that was poised to rage through him somewhere else. The speed of his decline has been utterly shocking for everyone.

That's two in a month. And it's starting to be 'my' g-g-g-generation.

In Wales, solemn black is still de rigeur for funerals. It is quite a shock to attend a funeral in England and to see the men dressed in pale lounge suits and bright comedy ties or, even worse, patterned jumpers and chinos. "It's what he would have wanted."

"Grotesque double standards"

One. A gang of Muslim girls kick a white girl, who is lying on the ground, repeatedly in the head and pull her hair out, leaving a bald patch, while shouting "kill the white slag" and "white bitch". As the court deems the attacks out of character because the girls were "not used to drinking", they are given suspended sentences. The attack, which was caught on CCTV, was not held to be racially-aggravated. The victim has since had to give up her job due to panic attacks and flashbacks.

Two. A white woman on a tram delivers a foul-mouthed and ignorant tirade against "blacks" and "Polish", which is captured on video by another passenger and out on YouTube. Although her remarks were hostile and unpleasant, no-one was physically harmed during her outburst. She is currently being held on remand until 3 January - effectively already serving a sentence of over a month's imprisonment- and has had her child taken away from her. She is being held in a prison with the highest security rating, along with the most serious female criminals.

I'm trying to make sense of this. It would seem, in the words of Dr Sean Gabb in an excellent summary of the situation here, to be an example of "grotesque double standards". The perpetrators in both cases were young and female, so there are no 'gender issues' to take into account. Both cases involved racist attitudes, expressed openly - one as the justification for the attack and one as the basis of a verbal tirade.

There are only two differences between the cases to justify such disparate treatment, as far as can see. One is that the first case involved physical violence, whereas the second was merely a verbal rant. In any sane society, the violence would be punished far more severely than the verbal attack, but this appears to be reversed in these cases. The second is that one set of perpetrators were Somali Muslims and the other was a white working-class woman. Apparently, your racial origin is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Which is racist, but never mind that.

We're in a looking-glass world, folks.

More on swearing

Last night, I wrote a post about the rights and wrongs of swearing, and I have had some interesting and thoughful responses. I ran out of time (and didn't want the post to be over-long), so I kept some things back for a later post. Tonight is quieter, so I'm back on the topic. Two anecdotes, both perfectly true and from my own experience, which amused me greatly at the time and which I hope will provide a small distraction for my readers, although any great further insight into the difficulties of the topic is vanishingly unlikely.

1. Leeds, 1972

I was working in the summer as a hospital porter in St James's Hospital. My first proper, paid job and, curiously, one that I would happily go back to if circumstances decreed it. I was part of a portering team of about ten men, all much older than me and, on average, rough as fuck. I loved it.

One was called Ray, a gentle six-foot Yugoslav with a massive frame and huge, sad, cavernous eyes. He had come to England during the war as a refugee, I think, and on his arrival spoke no English. He immediately got a job in the hospital and learned his English there - amongst the portering team. Bad mistake. He swore like a sailor on shore leave, but there was no logic to it.

Hey, fucking you lend me that trolley, bloody.
I not coming fuck to work tomorrow bastard am I?

I liked the guy and we had many long conversations on the long night shifts, and gradually I worked out what had happened. He had picked up the meaning of most English words and could use them successfully. But he had also picked up that there were some words - perhaps 8 to 10 - which were essential to meaningful speech (at least as far as he heard it) but which appeared to have no semantic content whatsoever. I reckoned he worked on a quota system - shovel them in at random points in the sentence, and if there weren't enough, take a few on the end.

Looked at logically, from a language-learner's point of view, this is completely reasonable. Here we have some words that carry meaning and people understand, and here we have other words that seem to have no actual meaning (OK, what does the 'fucking' in 'fucking hell' actually mean?) but which everyone uses with great regularity. What to do, but put them in with the approximately correct frequency and hope for the best? Oops, I didn't use enough this time, fucking.

2. Hull, 1983

Teaching English in a very rough comprehensive, in the shadow of Hull Prison. Parents' Evenings were a quiet affair, as 90% of them never came within a mile of the school gates. But one night Darren told me that his parents were coming in to see me. Oh good, I thought, perhaps I can have a quiet word about Darren's language. Darren was 13 or so, and swore enough to make a docker blush. Nice lad, rough diamond, etc. His parents come along at the appointed time and were equally pleasant, not quite forelock-tugging, but certainly a little deferential, which was a rare treat.

I told them about his work and what progress he was making, and as they were about to leave I told them there was something else I wanted to mention. His swearing. Now it's OK, not a big problem, boys will be boys and all that, but he does it quite a lot, and at the most inappropriate times. He'll find it a problem when he starts going for jobs and so on. Can you ... er ... have a word?

The response was muted. The mother looked embarrassed, and the father crestfallen. "We know he does it, but we're decent people and we don't know where he gets it from. I mean, if I ever hear him swearing at home I fucking belt the little fucker, but he never seems to learn."

He caught her eye, they both caught mine, and we all laughed for a good five minutes.

Public profanity

This post contains swear words. Be warned.

I'm very ambivalent about swearing. On the one hand, I do it all the time: the amount and the severity depends on whom I am with, from merely the thumb/hammer thing when in extremis, right up to potty-mouthery with certain characters at work, who wouldn't understand a word I said without regular interjections of oaths and curses. On the other hand, I was brought up not to do it, and I feel slightly cheapened whenever I find myself cursing. I suppose that's the point: swearing is intentionally transgressive, but in a harmless way, so from letting off steam to emphasising one's point in an argument it's a handy tool in the linguistic locker. I try to limit swearing on this blog to times when nothing else will do, as I simply don't know who might be reading it, and I have no desire to offend anyone unintentionally. But I don't buy the old headmaster's line that swearing is evidence of a poor vocabulary. A heartfelt utterance, laced with some ripe profanities, can be very expressive and also extremely funny.

I have no problem with swearing when it's done amongst people one knows will not be offended, although the degree will change with the audience. But I have to say that I find swearing as it is practised in 2011 - i.e. mouthing off like a docker no matter who is within earshot - pretty uncomfortable. The other day I walked by a car in a supermarket car-park, which had a sticker in the rear window saying (in a very jocular script) "Shit Happens". My first reaction was one of despair - it's such a banal thing to say, and I imagine is what passes for philosophy in the minds of some people. And the child seat in the back of the car made me depressed too. And then I wondered how I would have felt if my late mother has been with me. She wasn't a prude by any means, but she was a decent person and seeing that would have made her day that little bit worse. That's quite a mild example. I saw a youngish man the other day in town with a t-shirt that said, baldly, "Fuck You". I wouldn't be likely to approach him to ask the time, that's for sure. And perhaps that was his point.

Maybe he was a nice guy, and he wore the shirt as a joke. But that, in a way, is even more depressing. If I spoke to him and said that I found his t-shirt hostile and unpleasant, it's likely he wouldn't have a clue what I was on about. I should lighten up, learn to take a joke, perhaps even learn to let people 'express themselves'. I'm glad that we are a freer and less uptight society than we were in the 1950s, but people shouldn't confuse civility with deference, or good manners with emotional frigidity.

I was prompted to write this by an article in the BBC online magazine, entitled "Should swearing be against the law?" It's quite a good one, and delighted me because one of the commenters used the word 'phatic', which was an unexpected treat.

The problem with swearing is that it is highly dependent on context. What is said by a friend while chewing the fat over a pint can become very hostile, even threatening, when said by a stranger. And people don't like to feel threatened by strangers. It spoils your day.

It seems that people no longer realise, or even care, how their actions affect those around them. This issue of public swearing is only one example.