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more >So Mark, our Managing Partner, and I are having a chat about football over a nice cup of tea. This is rare. Mark is a rugger bugger. He can’t help it. He went to a very posh school and prefers oval-shaped balls.
I mention that I want to take my boy Charlie to a match. But only when he’s older and knows more swear words. Mark smiles. This prompts a long forgotten memory about his son Joe.
When he was a mere lad, Joe’s Uncle Bertie took him to see Spurs play arch rivals Arsenal. He thoroughly enjoyed this first tentative step into manhood. However, he was rather confused by some of the more colourful language spewing forth from the terraces. Or, rather, wafting up to the comfy corporate boxes like over-cooked burger and rancid-onion fumes from the cheaper plastic seats below.
On returning home to the family seat, he enquired, “Daddy, what’s a ‘wonker’?”
You may not approve, but swearing is actually older than time itself.
You see, way back in pre-history, a suddenly wounded or trapped animal would emit a bloodcurdling howl to startle, injure or escape from a predator. In fact, many early human responses to dangerous life-threatening situations would have been similar. I know. I’ve watched One Million Years BC at least a thousand times now.
What’s more interesting is that many more prosaic cries would have developed from conversational vocal sounds. Think about ‘Yuk’, for example, upon finding a stray mammoth hair in the thick of your primordial soup.
In his excellent book, ‘The Stuff of Thought’, Steven Pinker notes how swearing might well have developed from these verbal responses to potentially fatal situations and everyday nuisances. Perhaps, they became standard responses or reactions to misfortune then morphed into taboo words, either as a cathartic reaction to sudden pain or a warning to a potential enemy.
Perhaps Darwin was right when he said that ‘verbalised outbursts were the evolutionary missing link between primate calls and human languages’. So, in short – to swear is to be human.
Charlie meanwhile, will have to wait before I take him to a football match. Having said that, he tells me he already knows the ‘most rudest word ever’. I enquire innocently what this might be.
He leans forward, looks around to make sure his mum and sister are far, far away and whispers the word ‘curt’ in my ear.
I breathe a sigh of relief. Yes, I tell him, ‘curt’ is a very rude word indeed and not to ever repeat it – ever, ever again.
Now and then though he lets slip that he knows other bad words too. ‘And just where do you learn all these bad words, Charlie? School? Cubs? Drama?’
‘No Daddy’, he replies nonchalantly, ‘I learned them all from you’.
‘Oh.’
It’s official. I’m a Bad Dad…
What a wonker.
Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought is also available free from our library.
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As Jeremy Hardy put it, “I don’t like to use the c-word in front of my little girl, but how do you drive?”
It’s from the same beginnings as Conduit Street. Think of that next time you walk through W1. And for ever and ever.
Who won the game uncle Bertie took Joe to? It wasn’t those curts Spurs was it?
A friend of ours often refers to those who speak with an estuary accent as being ‘very down to earth’. As estuary English also includes a fair amount of lingual silt, it must be fair to say that far from being bad examples of humanity, they are in fact the best examples of humanity. By which logic one might also conclude that those of a more lofty lingual style might be said to be least human of all. So what are Clegg and Cameron doing running the country? They clearly have no idea how to shepherd humanity…being as far as it is possible to be from ‘down to earth’. I am not about to suggest Chubby Brown for PM, but perhaps it would be less stressful, and the language more appropriate to the current economic reality if he were. As for Clegg and Cameron – massive public spending curts?
[...] post originally appeared at http://www.quietroom.co.uk/qr/2011/02/14/learning-to-swear/ This entry was posted in Elsewhere and tagged arsenal, darwin, mammoth, one million years bc, [...]