A word in your ear

Last Tuesday, I was sitting on the bus shortly after 7am, on my way to a day of teaching at school. The bus always stops at a certain place and the driver gets out and has a five-minute break for a cigarette. It's at this time each morning – after most passengers have got off at the train station – that the rest of us get to hear the breakfast show on the driver's radio. So far, so good.

The bouncy, booming voice of Cee Lo Green could be heard. I think he's great. But the radio was playing the expletive-laden original version of his 2010 No.1 'Forget You'. This made me laugh. Was I laughing because the only other people now on the bus besides me were two pre-teenage schoolchildren? No – I just couldn't believe that a popular Swiss radio station would decide to play the song in all its profane glory at 7:11am at all!

Given the rules governing the broadcasting of similarly offensive content on the UK airwaves – and how even an inadvertent slip-up can cost a DJ his job – I was curious enough to write to the station's Programme Manager for clarification of the Swiss radio station's policy. After all, I also noticed that on the station's playlist, the song was listed as 'FU'. I'm well aware of English swear-words losing some or all of their impact when they're used in other languages, though I was still interested in the response. I've translated it as follows:

"As a rule, we at [name of radio station] play songs in their original versions, not in their 'clean' versions made for the English or US markets. I am sure that English native speakers listen to the songs in a very different way compared to people here. It's significant that our listeners do complain about all sorts of things. Though no-one has taken any offence at inappropriate song lyrics yet – at least not in writing.

We've taken the 'FU' label directly from the cover of the single [cover image sent as an attachment]. Following your query, I've also had a look around at other [Swiss] radio stations. With the exception of a few small, private stations [named], they all play the original version."

I've removed the names of the stations mentioned. My intention here is not to point the finger. I made it clear that my e-mail was a query to satisfy my own curiosity. It was not a complaint. I admitted that hearing the song made me laugh.

So there you have it. You live and learn. I'm now prepared to accept that sometimes, apart from me, maybe no-one gives a f.... .

Much ado about nothing?

Along with other commentators such as popular etymologist Mark Forsyth, I've been amused this week by reports of eyebrow-raising over the German language's inclusion of the English neologism der Sh**storm in its somewhat sacred Duden dictionary. Here in Switzerland, the term was also voted Word of the Year in 2012. The term denotes uncontrollable public outrage, usually online in the context of social media posts – and often insulting in its content. As I have mentioned in previous posts, neologisms interest me, since their ability to gain currency demonstrates a social need to construct a new term for a new concept. As such, they show that a language is healthy and can adapt to the culture it expresses.

But just in case we are at a loss to understand the kind of public outrage that might warrant use of the term, the torrent of excrement gushing forth in the wake of the plagiarism row engulfing Germany's erstwhile defence secretary Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, and then more recently, use of the term in a speech by German prime minister Angela Merkel are cited as examples. An interesting piece in The Guardian seems to highlight German's preference for swearwords with faecal rather than sexual origins, though quite how or why the term has managed to float to the top of public consciousness and usage is not really examined. Predictably, there is no shortage of verbal diarrhoea in the comments sections attached to these articles.

In this particular case, I think we are once again witnessing the Internet-driven obsession with quantifying and describing everything anew. We clearly need to find new ways to feel anger and to display it, now that previous profanities and practices so obviously date from a time when media outlets defined outrage. These days, I increasingly find that the same outlets are now more than happy to solicit public commentary, stir gently and watch events unfold. But surely this is journalistic laziness masquerading as legitimacy.

I had never heard of the term until I read it in a Swiss newspaper a few weeks ago. I do not believe it is used widely in English. As such, any attempts to cite the word as further evidence of an English assault on the German language are misplaced. Other popular pseudo-anglicisms – das Handy (a mobile phone), der Showmaster (the host of a TV show), der Beamer (a projector) among others – are then used wrongly by German speakers, who believe the term to be an English loan word. In my own experience abroad, I have occasionally used one of the above words as a kind of shorthand to aid another person's understanding. However, I then always point out that the word is a purely German invention. I believe the same is true of this latest addition to the language.

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!