Happy death-day tu vous?

Today I must report the imminent collapse of polite society as we know it. That's what certain French social media refuseniks would have you believe, anyway. For it seems that the enfant terrible of the Internet – Twitter – and its users, have adopted the convention of referring to others online using the informal second-person pronoun tu rather than its more formal and polite equivalent, vous.

To monolingual English readers, this issue may be about as interesting as watching fifty shades of grey paint drying; but to anyone with even minimal knowledge of foreign languages, it's a huge deal. It's so important that when, aged 21, I was living in Germany and had joined a choir, an older singer asked earnestly and in perfect English:

"Can I say you to you?"

How could I refuse? I explained that English no longer had German’s distinctions in its pronouns and she was free to address me using you. We laughed about it. But back then, everyone knew their place and the Internet had yet to sound the death knell for deference and politeness. Fast-forward to 2012 and this current debate merely signifies – online, at least – the obsolescence of the distinction.

The use of tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German is predicated on certain key criteria: the age of the people involved in the interaction; their respective statuses relative to each other and the degree of familiarity between them. The article even asserts that tu is used as a form of violence between two drivers who do not know each other. But the prevalence of familiar forms online would suggest that, notwithstanding other contextual details to the contrary, no such offence is intended. Anyone offended is simply applying mutually accepted social norms from one social sphere in another – where no such norms exist. Or do people preface their online posts with phrases such as: "I am a mature person with a high-powered job. This makes me considerably richer than you. Hence I would never meet the likes of you in real life and you shall address me accordingly."? Alternatively, unless you were interested in dating your correspondent, would you request their age/sex/location/status before agreeing to engage with them at all?

Magazine director Laurent Joffrin may bemoan the perceived lack of respect that tu signifies. But can we demand it from the outset? Respect has to be earned. Status alone cannot confer it. There is also no mention of the confusion that may arise in French given that vous is also the second-person plural pronoun. The same pronoun may, context permitting, refer to one person and many people simultaneously. We often 'broadcast' online to as many people as possible. Equally we may address one person but hope that others read what we write. We may even wish to blur any such distinctions. But how do people tell the difference? Universally using tu for one person and vous for more than one person may make this Internet-specific distinction clear.

We must concede, however, that while a move from the formal to the familiar is possible by mutual agreement; the reverse is impossible. Maybe it’s this irreversible trend that Joffrin despises. But without the smokescreen of respect and deference, his attitude merely demonstrates a refusal to accept the egalitarian ethos of the Internet itself.

The naked truth about swearing

In the UK, it is not a criminal offence to be naked in public. An offence is only committed when an onlooker lodges an official complaint if they themselves are shocked and offended. The complaint can only be pursued if it can be proven that the person stripped off with the intention of offending others. Following recent high-profile events involving public figures, I would argue that the UK has a similarly relativist attitude towards swearing.

Swearing is readily – though not exclusively – invoked to express anger, negative emotions or outrage. Psychologist Steven Pinker expertly outlines the physiology of swearing and identifies the various reasons why we do it, though I'm more interested in the social perceptions of swearing. For example, if we believe that swearing is more prevalent now than in some nebulous era in the past, we might conclude that people today are angry about everything all the time.

Allow me to take the Swiss German usage of the word Hure (whore) as an example. This word appears to have been universally accepted as an intensifier, such that if gut means good, hure gut means very good. The intensifier is used with both positive and negative adjectives. As youth language remains the breeding ground of linguistic creativity, at some point in the past, young people must have recontextualised this word as an intensifier, and it has since been adopted to a greater or lesser extent by other sections of the population. This situation will prevail until such time as the signifier becomes too clichéd, loses its power in this new context and is replaced by a new word fulfilling the same function.

I sense a shift in public attitudes towards weaker notions of acceptability and appropriateness in this area, accelerated by social media and online activities. Firstly, without the bygone cultural and linguistic bottleneck of a few TV channels and a radio, we now encounter a much larger amount of unfiltered material likely to offend. Secondly, the Internet allows us to date and retrieve everything. We can be repeatedly offended regardless of whether we heard the utterance in context at the time or not. To construct a lazy, apocalyptic picture of profanity, I could display links here to Kenneth Tynan's famous utterance in 1963, the Sex Pistols' contrived outbursts in 1976 or Elton John's breakfast-show blunder on BBC Radio 2 on 28 January 2011. If we ignore the circumstances and the communicative intentions of individual instances of swearing, we are condemned to make emotive yet unfounded accusations with reference to the inferior speech styles of 'other', more lexically challenged people.

In reality, language – including swear words and youth language – displays our inexhaustible capacity to recontextualise existing words and invent new ones to accurately reflect concepts. But with such a relative concept as swearing, in public as well as private life, caution is advised. Unless we know that our intentions will not be misinterpreted, we should be acutely aware that the instantaneous yet permanent nature of modern media means that the boundaries between private and public are blurred. Similarly, what used to be 'tomorrow's chip paper' is now a web link passed between millions of strangers indefinitely. There is also no such thing as the watershed anymore. So if you're in public life and you're seen as a role-model in any way – you'll mind your language at all times. Little brother is watching!