Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey UK comms regulator Ofcom has taken the unusual step of employing survey company Ipsos MORI to swear 186 times at 368 different members of the public and record what they thought about it. The survey was the latest in a series of four-yearly polls used to discover how the public react to different words and how the …
I believe it was,
"She dragged me all the way across London to play about the weakest practical joke since Cardinal Wolseley stood in the corridor at Hampton Court Palace with his knob out and pretended to be a door."
"(snigger)"
"Oh, shut up Baldrick. You'd laugh at a Shakespeare comedy."
From memory. Which makes me very worried.
Oddly enough, at one house we lived in in England, the knockers[0] were both shaped exactly like a thingy. A short and stubby thingy, but a thingy nonetheless.
Knockers shaped like a thingy. Only in England.
[0] Both of them, one in the front, and the tradesman's entrance out back. Oh, errr ...
When my kids were young it always really pissed me off that half the f***ing games they wanted were bleeding age rated to stupid levels coz they contained swear words. Going around gratuitously killing people was considered OK. Violence was acceptable to the f***ing people controlling these things.
All sorts of bad shit was allowed, but swearing No F***ing Way.
Anyone who thinks that kids don't swear at each other in the playground has forgotten their own childhood.
My approach was "I don't want to hear it, if I hear the game swearing you'll lose it for a while, if you use that language to your mother the game is history"
There are a lot more things to worry about than the language kids pick up.
Back when the BBFC used to rate games you could download the full report from them and see what the restrictions were based on. Half the time the censor would add a comment in the summary along the lines of "it's probably OK for most XX year olds but because the language I have to give it a YY rating" Maybe that's why they stopped the BBFC from doing the ratings.
may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Swear at me all you like, just don't touch me, don't touch my things, and stay off my property. To this day no one has ever been hurt by hearing a word, unless maybe it was so over-amplified as to cause hearing damage. I believe the H&S/OSHA folks already regulate sound pressure levels and that should suffice.
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As one who, in high school, was uncoordinated, had few muscles, and had an intellectual bent, I suffered more than my share of verbal abuse, spaz and faggot being the most popular, I fully agree with you.
Taking ownership of the slurs, from James Brown declaring "I'm black and I'm proud" to gays chanting "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" has done more for society than the cancel culture.
* Regarding knob, it is obviously not nob as Nanny Oog's song, "A Wizard's Staff has a Knob on the End", will tell you.
Everything about Cancel Culture is evil.
You can't get your message across by attempting to shut people up, and you can't include everybody by excluding folks you don't like.
I am not claiming to have a fix for all the sins of society (and look with suspicion on anyone who does!), but one thing I'm certain of is that hypocrisy isn't the answer.
Depends on the situation.
Inidividual words don't hurt. Some people find them more offensive or intimidating than others, but that's as much about the aggression behind the words as the words themselves.
Sustained verbal abuse can cause significant psychological issues. That's the difference. Bullying isn't just physical.
they'd surveyed where I attend for 8 hrs
We've raised insulting to an artform, one of the operators left 3 months ago and the first words out of everyone mouth were "You need help packing?" although the manglement were someone nicer with "Take your outstanding holiday now and dont worry about the weeks notice"
Although the tone changed when he went out of the door with everyone doing a variation on
"So glad the <redacted> has <redacted> left, he was one <redacted> useless <redacted> who couldnt <redacted> operate a <redacted> tap, anyway you lot <redacted> off back to <redacted> work"
We need a show after 9pm where for 1 hour a week, Brian Blessed just repeats a word over and over again until it loses its edge.
Those of us that deem swearing to be a perfectly valid way to express ourselves can have an hour of entertainment and those that feel shock when hearing said words can desensitise themselves.
I'll start the desensitising effort now.
Bollocks.
*pauses and clears throat*
Bollocks.
"We need a show after 9pm where for 1 hour a week, Brian Blessed just repeats a word over and over again until it loses its edge."
I have a little gift for you!
Enjoy!
The problem I feel with this kind of treatment of words (briefly hinted at in the article) is that context is everything.
Some swear words have shock value almost whenever they are heard and that is generally because there is no current context in which they are not used to cause offence or discomfort.
But even that most currently offensive of words "n*gger" have contexts where they are perfectly acceptable language (not that I personally agree that we should draw lines across race in terms of the types of words that are acceptable to use, a pattern which is divisive in itself).
"Bullshit. that's only an offensive word when caucasians use it."
I'm not caucasian, but my skin is white. Is it offensive if I say it?
What if I'm more of a minority than the offended are?
What is truly offensive are the fuckwits who presume to be offended on the behalf of others. It's getting to the point where nobody can say anything about anything without somebody pretending to get upset about it in somebody else's name. Frankly, I find it grossly offensive that somebody might presume to be offended in my name. Be offended for yourself, by all means, but keep my good name out of your fantasy.
@Jake
"What is truly offensive are the fuckwits who presume to be offended on the behalf of others"
I wish I could give you a thousand upvotes for that comment. We are getting close to that time of year when customers will send me cards wishing me "seasons greetings" or, please God grant me patience to deal with it, "Happy holidays". I long to send therm a card saying "which fucking holiday would that be?" They are of course talking about Christmas. I am not a fucking snowflake. For crying out loud, we do the full Christmas thing* including the booze.. My teenage brats, sorry, children, would murder me if we didn't.
A pox on all the fucking virtue signallers.
/R over
*Except for Turkey. It's bloody horrible stuff.
...sensitive souls out there.
My lad went to a birthday party recently and my lad made up a terrible knock knock joke that he told his mate.
His mate then went on to tell it to his mum and she was absolutely mortified.
For the record, I thought it was sheer genius.
The joke was:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Garbage.
Garbage who?
Shit garbage.
I mean the poetry speaks for itself, but is it offensive? No.
Because for some reason certain people seem to think that adding asterisks somehow mutes the badness of the word(s) that they self censor, despite the fact that their actual meaning is blatantly obvious to anyone with native intelligence greater than that of a flatworm. It's almost as if they think that the words themselves are somehow more meaningful than the intent behind the words.
People are weird.
Anytime someone would make a big deal out of my non directed use of cunt in every day speech (im bristolian much like the scottish we use it almost as a term of endearment, and fuck like a comma "yer heez a roit jammy cunt", "awroit me babber yah futtin seen that gert daft cunt jimbo?" etc etc), i would feign absolute shock and horror at some innocuous word they use in everyday speech, "i cant belive you think its ok to say apple in front of a lady"
futtin pointless being offended by words for body parts and biological functions, the line of offence should clearly be from the intent and context not the word it self
To contradict the report calling someone a "clever c**t" in Scotland is not necessarily a term of endearment. Not in my neck of the woods anyway.
I'm surprised the report didn't mention the more useful word "fuckin'" in the Scottish context. As Frankie Boyle says, "In Scotland, the word fuckin' is just a warning that a noun is on the way".
Very true. Amongst the blokes anyway.
Billy Connolly had a good monologue about Scottish swearing being poetry.
I can't find the whole thing right now, but here's a clip: https://twitter.com/BBCComedyScot/status/1430607408586543106
(Sorry for the twatter link)
83 page report. "blackface" is mentioned. "black" (as in blacklist) and "white" (as in whitelist) and "master" and "slave" are not mentioned anywhere.
*
Am I missing the "woke" context in the IT business? ...or maybe the "woke" context in the IT business is just a sideshow? Commentards on El Reg will no doubt do what commentards do!
Because those examples are not cuss words would be my guess ... and in fact, pretty much everybody still uses black/white list and master and slave in everyday conversation.
A friend of mine who owns an indie auto parts store reports that people come in daily asking him for master and slave cylinder parts without batting an eye. He is black, most of his customers are not.
It would seem that the woke set don't work on their own cars. It probably gets in the way of telling everybody else what they should be offended by.
This report is about terms that are usually intended to be offensive.
Not about well-understood and very specific engineering terms that some oversensitive prat decides to find offensive on everyone else's behalf, when the rest of the world wishes they'd just shut the fuck up.
The problem with rating obscenities is that their effect depends very much on context. If my son is playing games on the computer, I'm quite used to hearing "No fucking way" all through the night. I hardly even hear the obscenity. However, if my boss at work replies to my suggestion to a way to improve the workplace "No fucking way." this is grounds for a complaint to HR about their bullying.
I was interested to see that bitch got rated as mild. More and more I hear women talk as if it's almost the worst thing you could call them. I've always seen it as equivalent to dick, or bastard at worst. (Interesting that bastard is almost exclusively used for men, when it's original meaning applied to both.)
I've had a rethink on what contexts I use it in.
'Bitch' makes an interesting chapter in Kory Stamper's "Word by Word", although very much from the point of view of whether it should be in THE DICTIONARY and what the dictionary should say about it.
If you are the sort of harmless drudge who likes words I recommend the book.
Untrue. Female dogs are called bitches in both RealLife and virtual dog forums throughout the United States. People who balk at such well known technical terms are generally ignored until they realize it is in no way derogatory.
Feel free to attend any AKC dog show for more.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this:
He would insult the Universe.
That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.
When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, "A man can dream, can't he?"
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