I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen the meme which passed around a while ago - an unbroadcastable Channel 4 promotion. It follows the pattern of some other promos the channel was running at the time, with many of its leading stars saying brief snippets on a particular topic.

Anyway, the verboten one was, perhaps predictably, on the subject of stars’ favourite swearwords. There’s a copy here if you haven’t seen it, although potential viewers should be advised that it contains a great deal of filthy language (really, a lot. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Oh, and it’s in Shockwave Flash, so you’ll need that particular plugin in your browser.

Technical niceties aside, I came across this again the other day, and am surprised to say that certain segments of it caused me a particularly strong pang of homesickness.

There’s probably something deeply wrong about that, really: one of the things I associate most with home is language that would make your elderly relatives turn bluer than the air…

…it’s a little more complicated than that though, so (as so often) bear with me.

The sequence opens with the quintessentially english Tony Robinson (cultured Americans: think Baldrick Blackadder uttering a particularly heartfelt “shit!” And sprinkled throughout the rest are many luminaries of British televisual life: Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy from the Channel 4 News, that nice bloke from Grand Designs (who is achingly, squeamishly British about the whole affair), Daytime TV drivel champions Richard and Judy, Jamie “most irritating chef in the world” Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall , Richard “Countdown” Whiteley… the list goes on.

So, it’s like a little (albeit profane) microcosm of British life. Or at least, the portion of it we watch half-slumped on the sofa with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

Then, only briefly, there’s the fact that the whole style of this piece is undeniably Channel 4, and Channel 4 is a curiously, wonderfully British thing in its own right. It’s hard to imagine now the excitement and glitz surrounding the launch of C4, which promised to be (and mostly delivered in being) a channel for both intellectual and challenging TV. Okay, for some of “challenging” read “purposefully shocking” - you could watch people eating pigs’ intestines live on The Word years before the Americans ever put Fear Factor together. Nevertheless, Channel 4 News retains standards above even the BBC’s sadly deteriorating current affairs coverage, and many of their documentaries are amongst the best television produced anywhere.

I just can’t imagine America ever producing something as self-aware, self-deprecating and generally refreshing as Channel 4 (even in its bleaker moments) has managed to become.

Ultimately, though (and probably somewhat depressingly for my close relations), the fact is that a lot of my momentary homesickness was caused by the swearing itself. It reminded me that day-to-day language where I am now is a lot, well, cleaner. Not that Americans don’t swear - there are plenty of Yanks in the promo who are quite happy spouting filth. It’s just that they seem (at least out west) to do it less frequently, or more privately. New York, I’d bet, is an exception to the rule, but then any American will tell you that New York is an exception to every rule.

Sitting where I am right now in Northern California, I’m less than 6 hours’ drive from the two most prolific porn-producing cities on the planet - Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Of course, considerably further away there are one or two states where unwedded sex is still occasionally prosecuted, and it is illegal to possess sex toys. America is at its most self-contradictory when it comes to permissiveness (or, as those on the right of the argument seem to prefer, “morality”). And of course, this comes back partly to the fact that the place is so goddamn huge.

Still, in amongst the contradictions most people boil down to a compromise which lies somewhere in between. Perhaps due to the sheer forcefulness of the conservative voices, however, the compromise is far more restricted here than in the UK.

Working in London, it was perfectly commonplace to hear an unworkable idea denounced as “bollocks” in a meeting; or cries of “shit!” at a server malfunction. Admittedly, the technology industry is more permissive than most but the interesting thing is that these words had taken on as much of a technical as a purely profane role in a lot of British speech.

“Bollocks” is a much more succinct way to indicate your intense disapproval of the subject under discussion - there’s no room for eqivocation, as there is in the admittedly more polite “well I really don’t see how that could be the case”. The profanity is overlooked in favour of the definite message it conveys. And you can be sure that a single-word lament of “shit!” will alert your fellow engineers to the fact that there’s a problem far more urgently than “um, this isn’t good.”

I’m not even going near the inevitable argument that (to paraphrase) “a reliance on profane vocabulary dulls our language skills, and corrupts the English vernacular”. Recent reading on psycholinguistics has strengthened my long-held belief that a language is defined by nothing more than the speech of those currently practicing it. We shouldn’t necessarily lament the rise of “bollocks” as a succinct indicator of disagreement, any more than most of us spend time deploring the loss of the phrase “thou goest” from our everyday speech.

Whatever the linguistic arguments, people simply don’t use profanity in the same way over here. Even expats (as I’m finding in myself) moderate their usual linguistic tics in order to fit in. Refraining from uttering “bollocks” is just an extension of calling a mobile phone a cell, and asking for toe-may-doe in your salad.

I’m not really arguing that commonplace profanity is a good thing, or a bad thing. But, being removed from my usual cultural pond, it seems to me that it’s certainly a modern British thing. Actually, scratch the “modern” part. Any reader of Chaucer should know that Londoners have enjoyed a bloody good swear for centuries, eight of them at least.

And on the subject of Londoners and their particular fondness for the offensive, it’s the ending of the video which caused the most homesickness in me. Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the speaker, but her final contribution is “Wank-aaah”, followed by a dirty giggle, “and said just like that.”

It’s delivered in an impeccable East London accent (if there is such a thing), and somehow those few offensive syllables and the obvious enjoyment with which they were delivered conjured up a far more vivid feeling of the London I’ve left behind than any pictures of Columbia Road flower market could possibly manage. I have a mild-ish estuary accent myself, so I guess that in part the particular pronunciation resonated with me strongly, because I’ve been hearing exactly that delivery ever since my schooldays.

And “Wanker” is, of course, not even a swearword in American English - the Yanks seem to prefer the rather tamer “jerk-off”, which is a shame, because it’s absolutely impossible to deliver it with the same careful force and emphasis.

So there’s the sad state of affairs: after a month and a half away, the three things that I miss most about London and the UK in general are:

• Decent pies
• Greasy Spoon Caffs
• The word “wanker”

What a load of bollocks, eh?

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 1:13 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Brief Notes on America, Thinking.
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