About Kant

I keep returning to the matter of Radio 4, pretty much the last remnant of Reithian values, and how in its desperation to remain relevant to Gens Y and Z, its presenters apparently feel the need to explain cultural references that their parents and grandparents would have taken in their stride.

And then this happens. In the lexicography-cum-comedy show Unspeakable, the comedian Russell Kane explains how he and his wife, when in the presence of their children, use the name “Immanuel” to describe someone who might in adult company attract a rather more robust epithet. What’s interesting is that the audience gets the gag with the barest of clues; all Kane tells us is that Immanuel is a philosopher who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the ribald chortles begin. I’m not suggesting that everybody who rocks up to a BBC comedy recording is totally conversant with what Kant has to say about metaphysics (I’m certainly not) but they have enough basic, possibly superficial understanding – what ED Hirsch would call cultural literacy – to ensure they laugh in the right place.

I wonder what it would take for producers and controllers to understand that listeners at home can cope with the same sort of thing.

PS: Vaguely related: investigating the war on so-called performative reading; and when AI destroys one’s ability to flirt, let alone write a college essay.

PPS: From the vaults: when I defended Paul Morley from the Philistines.

PPPS: An argument that men don’t read books any more; and an article on beach reads (Kinsella beats Tolstoy) that seems to take that contention for granted.

About #tube_chat

For the first time in Blake knows when, I wrote a poem. A bit rough round the edges. Full story here.

Underhound

The people are ghastly and so is the heat
As my tired bum slumps down on a chewing-gummed seat.
No I don't want to chat, you preposterous twat.
Get lost and piss off and begone.
Let me be with my pain on this hideous train.
But do wake me up if a dog gets on.

A couple start snogging and a man sniffs his feet.
I need to survive this till Liverpool Street.
I know shutting my eyes will not minimise
The arseholey-armpitty pong.
I'm securing my space with my sleeping bitch face.
But, yeah, wake me up if a dog gets on.

My colleagues are morons, my job is a bore
And the thick prat in Pret served me decaf once more.
So why should I talk to a simpering dork?
Fuck you and the horse you're upon.
My earbuds are in to create my own din.
But please wake me up if a dog gets on.

--Tim Footman, Sept 2016

About Donald Trump and fleeting fame and cocksplats

(WARNING: CONTAINS SWEARS)

I’ve neglected this blog terribly over the past year or two, for a number of pathetic and avoidable reasons, including work pressures, general lack of inspiration and the rival lure from other forms of social media. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say — it’s just that it seemed quicker and easier to  let rip with a succinct gobbet on Twitter or even some deadpan picture caption on Instagram. Blogging — at least the way I do/did it — requires some sort of considered structure, the right word in the right place, spelled correctly if you’re lucky.

So it seems appropriate that my belated return to Cultural Snow is prompted by Twitter. What happened is this. Donald Trump, a man who might stop being funny in November, appeared in Scotland on Friday, shortly after the result of the European Union referendum was announced. He, or one of the social media gnomes who live in the yellow depths of his hair, tweeted thus:

A number of people responded that, although the UK as a whole had chosen to cut ties with the EU, Scotland as a whole was very much in favor of hanging around. One or two of them probably expressed this sentiment in sober, cogent, reasoned form. I wouldn’t know, because their tweets were lost in a maelstrom of abuse, some of it colourful and imaginative, some of it puerile and profane, plenty of it occupying both spheres. And, yes, I joined in. And, no, I wasn’t in the cogent camp.

No, it wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever but, hey, Twitter, who cares, right? Well, some people do, apparently. I went off to do something vaguely useful, somewhere with lousy phone connections and forgot about my little vent. I only checked my phone a few hours later (I normally do this far more regularly, a habit that has led my 13-year-old niece to describe me as anti-social, but yeah, whatevs) and discovered that I’d gone properly viral. The tweet was liked and retweeted around the world: the current stats, if you’re interested are 2,301 likes and 1,219 RTs, which is modest by Taylor Swift standards but not bad for a balding, middle-aged curmudgeon the focus of whose career has drifted from writing about Pet Shop Boys compilations to writing about fish soup. But it was the messages that made it such fun, especially the awe-struck Americans thanking me for encapsulating their own inchoate thoughts about Mr Trump in such elegant prose and vowing to incorporate “cocksplat” into their vocabularies; a couple of them even proposed marriage. Many of them seemed to think I’m Scottish, which is odd, but not a problem. Of course, there were some naysayers as well. Apparently I’m a “low life liberal dirtbag” which can be the title of my autobiography, if @17762point0 hasn’t copyrighted it already, and, according to one Keith Bishop, “the worst kind of ignorant moron” which makes me wonder what the best kind might be.

But these things don’t just stick to Twitter either, do they? The online barrage that The Donald had suffered was picked up my other media, most prominently on Buzzfeed but also here and here and here and here. And my little cocksplat got its time in the sun, alongside other delicious epithets, from old reliables such as “gobshite” and “tit” to relative newcomers like “cockwomble”, “jizztrumpet” and “tiny fingered, Cheeto faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon”. It was like being at a convention of Malcolm Tucker impressionists. No, change that. It was like being at a convention of Malcolm Tucker impressionists and I was one of the best Malcolm Tucker impressionists there, and lots of people were queuing up to tell me how much they enjoyed my Malcolm Tucker impression and could I sign... but sign what? What would I sign? My own Twitter account?

It wasn’t only strangers. Some of my friends who aren’t on Twitter saw these articles and posted them on Facebook, a few of them very sweetly and generously declaring that they are proud to know someone who said “cocksplat” to a man who may end up as the next President of the United States. One friend came across my contribution during her grandmother’s funeral and she said that sharing it with her family brought some welcome relief to a sad day. Which is lovely.

And people are still saying nice things as I type this, but the compliments are coming at a far less  ferocious pace and pretty soon they’ll fade away. I realised that digital, viral fame is very nice, but it rarely lasts. I suspect the people we’ll remember in all this are the man who handed out swastika golfballs and this lady, who clearly decided that good, old-fashioned analogue communications would do the trick better than anything:

And while all this was going on, the pound was slumping to a 30-year low and the Prime Minister resigned. But, y'know, hee hee. Cocksplat.

PS: And then this happened.

Ahmed Aboutaleb says “fuck off” (or does he?)

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and associated horrible events, the mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, has told Muslims who don’t like the city’s chilled pluralism and might consider taking violent offence at the contents of a newspaper to “rot toch op”, which has been translated in the British media — with varying numbers of asterisks — as “fuck off”. I don’t speak Dutch; some contacts have suggested that in reality Aboutaleb’s words might be translated as a rather milder “go to hell” or even just “go away”, but he’s still earned plaudits for his straight-talking approach to the enemies of freedom. Of course, Mr Aboutaleb is of Moroccan extraction, so he can probably use more direct language than some other civic leaders could get away with, without being accused of racism or Islamophobia. (I’m thinking of Boris Johnson, his Turkish ancestry notwithstanding.)

But the discussion did get me thinking about what an odd beast our favourite expletive construction really is. If we accept that “fuck” means to copulate, how exactly does one “fuck off”? It creates images of someone copulating so forcefully that he or she is propelled bodily from the bed or other surface, rather in the manner of Viz’s Johnny Fartpants being sent skywards by the power of his own bottom burps. The American “fuck yourself” is more satisfying as an insult, casting the recipient as a sort of carnal oureboros, pleasuring and consuming himself at once, the ultimate in squalid self-indulgence. But then the “off” does reinforce that your ultimate goal is for the person in question to leave your presence entirely, which I guess was Mr Aboutaleb’s main point. Maybe in celebration of this excellent fellow we should recalibrate our default swear mode to “rot toch op”. And unless we’re telling a Dutch person where to go, only we know how rude we’re being.

PS: This:

#EDL, #LFC, #PC, etc

OK, back to that PS at the end of the previous post. In the Word of Mouth discussion, one Movingtoyshop says:

I tend to take anything that’s littered with spelling and grammatical errors and written by someone who’s a stranger to paragraphs and punctuation with an extremely big pinch of salt.

And so, to be honest, do I. Are we wrong? Well yes, according to some of Sunny Hundal’s friends when he posted the following on Facebook:

Some suggested that Robinson (leader of the populist, anti-Muslim protest movement the English Defence League) was in fact deliberately playing up his own linguistic ineptitude, in an effort to attract sneering putdowns from middle-class lefties and enhance his own credentials as a man of the people. Others felt that it was wrong of Hundal and crew to mock someone deficient in “cultural capital”. I’m torn. Yes, there’s a certain sneery superiority at work if we poke fun at Robinson’s spelling when we should be dealing with his arguments; but at the same time, shouldn’t those who seek to defend what they see as traditional English culture be treating the English language with more reverence? (And if you’re so proud of your handiness with an apostrophe, have a go at this.)

At least with grammar and spelling, there’s a degree of unanimity about what’s right and what’s wrong, even if the likes of Robinson (pretend to?) forget. When it comes to the content, the words themselves, we all seem to be running around like headless clichés. The magnificent Mary Beard seems to have come up with a pretty good rule of thumb; if it’s not something you’d want your mother to hear, don’t say it on Twitter. Liverpool FC, meanwhile, are rather more specific in their efforts to rid the beautiful game of ugly attitudes:

That said, such a list wouldn’t have helped Barbara Morgan, the communications director for Anthony Weiner’s increasingly preposterous bid to become mayor of New York. When asked to comment on an intern who had written about her time on Weiner’s team, Morgan refrained from using any of the proscribed words on the Anfield list but did manage to call her a “bitch”, a “slutbag”, a “twat” and a “cunt”. Does anyone have her mum’s number? Or my mum’s, for that matter, because she certainly won’t like that last bit.

The Descendants: muck this for a laugh

I’ve only just got round to seeing last year’s The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne and featuring an Oscar-nominated performance by George Clooney as a man facing up to the imminent death of his wife. And it was good; sensitive without being sentimental and peopled with flawed but ultimately sympathetic characters. But either you know that already, having seen it, or don’t care, having decided not to; I’m assuming that I’m the last person on the planet who did want to see the thing but was too idle to do anything about it. The only serious flaw was ultimately my own fault; I watched it on a plane.

It wasn’t the small screen size that disrupted my enjoyment, nor the guy in front of me experimenting with his seat incline. Nor was it even the nasty, rigid headphones. No, it was yet another example of the infantilisation that everyone has to undergo when they step on a plane these days. OK, plastic cutlery and having your toothpaste confiscated, I can grudgingly see the point of that. but censoring every film to make it suitable viewing for a Victorian maiden aunt doesn’t make me feel safer; it makes me want to commit acts of random violence, possibly involving duty free goods.

OK, let’s deal with the obvious ones. Air passengers aren’t allowed to hear the word “fuck” or variations thereon, even though I’m sure they get muttered sotto voce every time someone is told to remove his belt at security. In this version of The Descendants, there are two alternatives. When it’s used as an all-purpose modifier (eg “What’s your fucking problem?”), the syllable is replaced by “freak”. When it’s a transitive verb, however (a usage that comes into play when Clooney’s character discovers his comatose wife had been unfaithful to him) we get “Did you muck my wife?”

So far, so Harry Enfield. But the swearing in The Descendants actually serves a purpose, indicating Clooney’s clumsy attempts to impose a little discipline on his variously dysfunctional offspring. So when his younger daughter calls her sister something odd but innocuous like “motherless girl”, Clooney’s response is to berate her for her bad language; an exchange that only makes sense if you know the phrase is a stand-in for “motherfucker”. And if you know language like that, surely you’re already corrupted.

That said, it’s not just George Carlin’s seven words that cause problems for the inflight Bowdlers. They also have to contend with the warriors/worriers of political correctness, such as this blogger who objected to the use of “retarded”. Again the word becomes the subject of an exchange about appropriate usage, although Clooney’s character is the bad guy here; but because the word itself isn’t heard, the whole scene is effectively meaningless. (The dubbing is particularly inept here; I assume they tried to replace “retarded” with “repugnant” but it ends up as something like “retugnant”. Which is potentially a good word, and I must think of a meaning for it some time.)

But the best moment comes when the elder daughter is trying to convince Clooney of his wife’s infidelity, explaining that she saw her going into a house with a man. Clooney suggests there must be an innocent explanation, but the girl’s having none of it: “He had his hand on her arm,” she says. But I don’t think she really said “arm”.

Melonfarmer

Two recent responses to the increasing levels of rudery in our public discourse: the Daily Telegraph’s Neil Midgely informs us of the contextually justified “fuck”s that will pepper a forthcoming Radio 3 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, inevitably prompting (profanity-free) outrage across the breakfast tables of middle England; and in the New York Times, Jon Pareles notes that three songs in the Billboard Top 10 (by Cee-Lo Green, Enrique Iglesias and Pink) are similarly blessed, although the precise volume of soy latte being spat out in Manhattan is not recorded.

The problem in both cases is that the journalists in question find themselves unable to spell out the word that provoked the articles in the first place: presumably this is down to the policies of the papers that employ them. Midgely opts for the tedious “f-word”, and then resorts to “[blank]” when discussing Emily Brontë’s own self-censorship, although it’s not clear which words these blanks are replacing. Pareles is more eloquent, referring to “variations on a familiar, emphatic, percussive four-letter word.”

Of course, in writing around such unmentionables, both writers are faced with a paradox: readers who aren’t familiar with the word in question will be utterly baffled by the article; those who know it and aren’t bothered by it would have been relaxed if the veil of good taste had been lifted; and those who do know the word but don’t like it being used will have been reminded of its existence even if they haven’t read it. Pareles for one is aware of the ridiculousness of the situation:

Even if the original lyrics are off-limits to old media, it’s clear to everyone that the profane versions of the songs are going to be heard. The enforced innocence of broadcasting is no longer a cultural firewall; it’s barely an inconvenience. 

There’s a debate to be had about whether old media should give in to the barbarians, or instead maintain their decorum and thus demonstrate why in a multi-channel universe, the Times and the Telegraph and Top 40 radio are still special. As Pareles suggests, this is part of a wider question, of what newspapers and other mainstream providers are really for these days; does it still matter that they’re maintaining standards if nobody else gives a fuck? Not to address this is just f–––ing while Rome burns.

...but nice

Somehow I don’t think this classic of live radio will acquire as much repeat airplay as Brian Johnston’s leg-over of blessed memory. So it’s up to the rest of us to disseminate it. Oo-er, etc.

Twhat?

“The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it - too many twits might make a twat.”

If we can leave aside for a moment the propriety of the Leader of the Opposition giving it a bit of the old Anglo-Saxon on live radio, I think there’s a more pressing question here. The sheer, unabashed, eating-your-own-eyelids-in-embarrassment crapness of the alleged joke for a start. Ian Duncan-Smith was Eric Morecambe compared to this guy.

Lust in translation

I always wonder whether a word's impact is down to its form or its function. I mean, would George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words be as dangerous if they were rendered as Plop, Widdle, Rumpy-Pumpy, Quim, Nosh, Physical Manifestation of the Oedipal Narrative and Funbags?

Expletives deleted

It's all getting pretty potty-mouthed over at Cif, I'm afraid:

It's a pretty basic tenet of fiction writing: where possible, don't tell us, show us. Rather than state baldly that a character is bad, allow him or her to demonstrate that badness through word and deed. One of Shakespeare's darkest creations is at first described by his unwitting boss as "Honest Iago"; only in his first soliloquy does he make his own "double knavery" evident.

Of course, just because Shakespeare put those words in Iago's mouth, it doesn't mean he agreed with them. Sorry if that seems bloody obvious, but it's a point that appears to have eluded two recent contributors to Cif...

For more blimmin' flip and crikey, click here.

Language, Timothy!

One reason I maintain my atavistic loyalty to The Guardian is that they don't deploy the prim asterisks that defaced (and made pointless) this story in most other papers:

"Is this a question?" asked the apocryphal philosophy paper. The alpha-plus response, apparently, was "Is this an answer?", which demonstrates, I suppose, that a combination of inspiration, outside-the-box thinking and sheer bloody chutzpah should be worth the same as countless hours of revision and the interminable recital of stock answers to stock questions.

This seems to be Peter Buckroyd's thinking. He is the GCSE examiner who gave two marks to a candidate whose response to the instruction "Describe the room you are sitting in" was "fuck off"...

Its not big, and it's not clever, but there's more of it here.

The worst word in the world

My memory's definitely getting worse. Not only do I regularly forget where I've put my keys, by the time I find them, I've forgotten why I wanted them in the first place. Well, to open something, sure: but to open what?

One interesting side-effect of this encroaching senility is that it's left room for bizarre recollections from decades back to reassert themselves in my befuddled mind. This morning, for example, I remembered a very peculiar conversation I had when I was about 11 years old.

Slightly perturbed at the borderline sociopath they'd bred, my parents went through a phase of sending me on "adventure" holidays, in which I would be forced to engage in healthy outdoor pursuits such as rock climbing and horse riding and other things that didn't involve reading Dr Who books in semi-darkness. The holidays were usually based in boarding schools (which would otherwise lie empty during the summer) and I'd be thrown into a dorm with about a dozen other kids, many of them as socially dysfunctional as myself, which probably defeated the object.

Anyway, here's the memory. As we tottered back to the dorm after the nightly disco, conversation turned to the single 'Jilted John', which had got us all pogoing in our Clark's Commandos. One boy announced that it was "the best punk rock song ever". I demurred, suggesting that the Sex Pistols might have a stronger claim to the title.

But one kid, whose name I really can't dredge up, try as I might, announced confidently that we were both wrong. The best, nastiest, most evil punk song ever was the work of one Johnny Apple, who had been thrown out of the Sex Pistols because he was such an utter delinquent. The song was called 'The Queen is a Niker'. We went a bit quiet.

"Do you know what a niker is?" he asked, with a faint hint of menace. We shrugged. "It's the worst swear word ever," he continued. "It's like calling someone a fucking bloody fucking shitty wanker. But worse."

It was several weeks, by which time I'd returned to the bosom of my family, before I realised he was making the whole thing up. But I like to think that one day someone from the Oxford English Dictionary will drop me a line, asking if I have any documentary evidence of the provenance of this peculiar word, (late 1970's), (vulg.).

I've tried to find footage of the legendary Johnny Apple, but not surprisingly the well is dry: no sign even of the clean version. You'll have to make do with this:

Niiiiiice

One good thing about Bangkok is that the hotel bars are littered with pretty decent American jazz musicians offering some elegant tooting and tinkling as you sup your early-evening maragaritas. They're rarely household names, but a lot of them have impressive pedigrees, including stints with some of the big hitters as far back as the 1960s.

So the Bangkok Jazz Festival ought to offer a chance for these guys to get away from being background music to finger food, and actually play a few proper gigs. Sadly not. I'm not quite sure what jazz actually is any more, when I see that the headliners include Blood, Sweat and Tears, Shakatak and Matt Bianco:



To be fair, I was quite fond of MB when I was a nipper. Think it was the houndstooth check jackets that did it. But I rather doubt they'll be performing their most memorable hit in BKK.

Brent cross

I was flipping through a book about the Lady Chatterley trial last night, and chuckling over the prehistoric attitudes of the prosecution counsel. Everybody remembers Mervyn Griffith-Jones's line about whether it would be "a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read." But the moment when he gets to the naughty bits is high camp to the power of several:

"The word 'fuck' or 'fucking' occurs no less than thirty times. I have added them up, but I do not guarantee that I have added them all up. 'Cunt' fourteen times; 'balls' thirteen times; 'shit' and 'arse' six times apiece; 'cock' four times; 'piss' three times, and so on."

It's tempting to be smug about the whole business. Such prim and prissy attitudes are long gone, surely? But then comes a story from last month's Emmy Awards. Dame Helen Mirren, a woman who must be credited with guiding an entire generation of males through the traumas of adolescence, remarked upon accepting her bauble that she had almost fallen "arse over tit" on her way to the stage. This got a few laughs from an audience more used to female recipients bursting into tears. And the whole thing would have been forgotten, were it not for a person going by the frankly preposterous name of L Brent Bozell. Mr Bozell, L to his chums, is President of something called the Parents Television Council, which waves its fists and stamps its little feet at rudeness and badness on the telly. "It is utterly irresponsible and atrocious for NBC to air this vulgar language... when millions of children were in the viewing audience," said L, who has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission.

Atrocious? I'll give you atrocious, mate. This is Helen Mirren you're talking about. This is a woman so adored that, when she was chosen to play the Queen, the only reservation expressed was whether the Queen was classy enough to be played by Helen. You diss her, you diss all of us.

People, I need your help here. This is my 200th post on this blog, and I need to do something special. The obvious thing would be to dismiss Mr L Brent Bozell as an arse and a tit, and forget about it. But I think he deserves something bigger and better and badder. First of all, he needs to be warned, in the most direct terms possible, that you don't mess with the Mirren. But he also needs to be made aware that "arse over tit" is but a bland, vanilla-flavour topping on the seething, brandy-and-dark-chocolate-and-morello-cherries pudding of British sweariness. I want you to offer up the worst, vilest, most heinous, irresponsible, atrocious insults that can be swabbed from the darkest recesses of your putrid minds. Apply them to Mr L Brent Bozell (is that an anagram, do you think?) and put them in the Comments section. Pass the word around to your friends, family and blogroll. If I get a decent number, I might just let L Brent know what we think.

To kick off, my own humble offering:

"L Brent Bozell is a perineal spunkmuppet."

Off you go. And remember... this is for Helen.

Cufk, Tish, Sips

The day after the guy who got shot in Forest Gate said "fuck" on Radio 4's The World At One (but he was quoting the police officer who was allegedly trying to throttle him, so that's OK), the engagingly preposterous Zoe Williams tries to reclaim "cunt" in The Guardian.

David Baddiel once said something quite interesting (there's a phrase you don't hear much these days) about the c-word. He suggested that the main problem with it is aesthetic, that it's a nasty, ugly, angular word, entirely inappropriate to its primary meaning. (Is there a word for the opposite to onomataopoeia?) As such, he wanted to reclaim it solely as a term of abuse, and forbid its association with the female genitalia. Unfortunately, the cogency of his argument was somewhat blunted by the fact that, even on Channel 4 in the early 90s, he wasn't actually allowed to say the word itself.

In any case, it's all slightly academic. As any fule kno, there is one super-expletive that banishes all others to the nursery slopes of offensiveness. And that word (sorry about this) is...