Hi there. Erm, thanks for coming. FEEDBACK
My name's Cora - Cora Bissett.
I'm an actor and theatre director.
So, tonight, we're going to be looking at Scottish swearing.
There's going to be cursing, vulgarity, profanities,
so if you're of a sensitive disposition,
I would...I would possibly just...head off now.
COUGHING
No, I'm serious. Tonight, there will be very strong language.
SPECTATOR: Oh, just get fucking on wi' it!
OK.
SHE EXHALES
# There'll be shit and shite
# And piss and pish and flyting
# Bawbags and wallopers
# Effing and blinding... #
Some say us Scots are the greatest cursers in the world.
# Arses and shitebags
# Bawheids, your hoor
# Nuggets, rockets, dobbers
# Your maw's baws, you roaster
# F-bombs, C-bombs
# Big bombs, wee bombs
# Frisky and risky Sociolinguisty... #
I'm one woman on a four-letter quest.
This is the earliest surviving record of the word "fuck".
It's time to venerate our vulgar vernacular.
Fud and pish, fanny.
But then Scots has that great ability
just to fucking gang nuclear.
What the fuck are you talking aboot?
The words we choose to express joy, anger,
fears and frustration reveals a lot about who we are...
Excuse me, watch. There's a snake. I'm shiteing myself.
And I'm someone who grew up swearing in two languages, so...
..and we've been standing up for the right to say what we want...
Not only am I not ashamed of the things I've done,
I'm very, very proud of them.
..despite being scolded and censored.
My culture and my language have the right to exist.
There's a power in the profane.
A wee woman fae the East End with her bingo pen
can bring down a country with a word. Oh, my God!
We're going to break the bleeper...
Am I allowed to say it? You can say it. OK.
..sign up for swearing school...
Surely had a lot more important things to do than polish it.
LAUGHTER
..to show that Caledonian cursing is the finest in the world.
Load of fucking rubbish. Why don't you piss off?
# Tonight on your box This is the swear box
# We go there
# We get tae
# Fuck. #
I work in the theatre as a director and actor
on stories that try to capture Scotland's many voices...
And we figure everyone that fights for justice for asylum seekers
is a Glasgow Girl.
..and I know the dramatic impact of a well-placed swearword.
In fact, I discovered that early in life.
When I was a wee girl in a Fife town,
like most kids, I began to speak my first words.
Mum and Dad praised and encouraged me,
and my vocabulary expanded until, one day,
I repeated a funny word which I'd heard a grown-up say,
and...Mum and Dad weren't pleased.
There were words, and there were bad words.
Dick. Stop it. Dick. Stop it. Dick. Don't call me a dick. Dick.
Stop calling me that. Dick. Enough! Dick.
Don't you call me a dick. Dick. No!
Grounded. Give me that juice back. Dick.
My son swore for the first time when he was 20 months old.
His little kind of plastic car thing,
it wasn't closing over properly, and he's going...
He's like, "Fucking car!" And I was just, like, astonished!
At the point where they start
getting told off more and more for it,
they pick up on that it's a way to be naughty,
but they're picking up on that alongside, you know,
it's a way to be expressive, it's a way to identify yourself,
it's distinct from people, it's a way to be cool.
They pick up on all those nuances very early.
Our wee-wean-brains absorb all the language around us.
In the classroom, we learn to read and write,
but in the playground, we learn to swear.
We quickly realise that swearwords get a reaction.
They can be thrilling, effective and funny.
The toughest guy, the hardest guy,
the coolest guy in the school came along and walked up and down
all the kids in the shed, and just went,
"Good guy. Wank.
"Good guy. Good guy. Wank. Wank. Wank."
But childhood is when we also learn
why these words should be treated with caution
because swearwords are often used to insult, to bully, to hurt,
even after we leave school.
Some people never grow up, in real life or online.
Now, at this point, some folk might be uncomfortable
with the graphic language that I'm about to use,
but I struggle to see any joke in being systematically called
a dyke, a rug muncher, a slut, a whore, a scruffy bint.
I've been told that, "You can't put lipstick on a pig.
"Let the dirty bitch eat shit and die."
Whether using swearwords or not,
I think hurtful name-calling is an abusive language.
It's not fucking big...
..and it's not fucking clever.
So, this programme isn't about justifying abuse.
It's not celebrating hurt, misogyny or name-calling
because swearing is just too interesting
to be left to the bullies and bams.
She says, "How, who are you, anyway?"
I says, "I'm his BLEEP boss." Aye.
I says... HE SPEAKS IN STRONG DIALECT
Aye. I says, "BLEEP, what's the score here?"
Language is a window into human nature,
and studying so-called bad language is like shining a light
into some of the most bizarre and funny corners
of the Scottish psyche.
If you want a linguistic adventure,
go drinking with a Scotsman
cos you can't fucking understand him before.
LAUGHTER
You land in Scotland and they're going...
HE SPEAKS GIBBERISH, LAUGHTER
"Oh, yeah." HE SPEAKS GIBBERISH
Swearing fits into the idea of a distinctively Scottish voice
reacting against a set of imposed rules.
HE SPEAKS GIBBERISH
And there's a kind of boldness about it,
a kind of pleasure and satisfaction in that.
Bawbag. Bawbag? Yeah, I don't know that word.
Scrotum. Scrotum. Oh, scrotum. Oh, ballbag! Yeah, ballbag!
The people are saying, "We are making our own rules
"and we are violating the norms of society,
"and in this setting, among ourselves,
"our rules about language,
"our boundaries will be the ones we observe."
It's too late, Captain!
The pish flaps have blown loose! LAUGHTER
People have always felt,
about the Scots, that we're kind of unpredictable,
angry, slightly dangerous, edgy.
You just stay there and we'll come down
and kick your arse every now and again.
And I think, also, Scots revelled in it because they thought,
"Well, I might be wee and red-haired,
"but I can scare the living daylights
"out of that big guy in the corner just by swearing."
Check out the Willie World News. I reviewed the new tractors.
They're all shite!
APPLAUSE
Now we come to the difficult question of taboo words -
words that live in our language
but which we do not normally discuss in polite company.
I think this is going to create something of a scandal.
These words have never been used like this on television before.
Turning the airwaves blue has a long history of offending viewers.
What you're doing, when you use those words
in their usual phraseology, is to tell somebody to copulate off.
I find the word "copulate" offensive, actually, because...
I was trying to use a scientific word, you see? I was trying to...
Yeah, but that's the problem, you see. What is the OK word?
"I feel so strongly about the disgusting,
"abusive language on television, but last night just topped the lot."
So, how do I make this documentary
without offending Disgusted of Kelvinside?
"Filthy to the very lowest grade of filth."
"Somewhat unsavoury."
I've come to BBC HQ to ask a bigwig for wise words on bad words.
Well, my job is I'm the head of editorial standards
for BBC Scotland,
and that involves advising programme-makers about
the use of strong language in their programmes and what's acceptable.
So, there are some words that, by anybody's judgment,
are very, very strong.
How does the BBC cope with those kind of words?
Any programme-maker who wants to use that language
within their programme
has to refer that to a very senior level.
In the case of BBC Scotland,
it has to be referred to the director of BBC Scotland.
So, I'm about to make this programme about swearing,
and I was just wondering if you could give me a bit of an idea
on what kind of words I might have a problem getting past.
Of course. OK.
Minger? Probably OK. Pish? Erm, that's probably OK.
Baws? Relaxed about that one, as well, yeah. Shite? Probably OK.
Bastard? Bit stronger, but still OK, I think. Cock?
Getting a bit stronger there. Minge? Stronger still.
Fanny? Erm, maybe. Depends on the context.
"Fanny" depends on the context? I'll remember that.
Prick? Same for that. Knob? Yeah.
There's an official list for broadcasters -
47 controversial words from mild to extreme...
Spunk? Yeah.
..and they have to justify every curse that's uttered.
Pish flaps? Getting a bit stronger there.
But there are sweary words...
Fuck? Only after the watershed.
..and there are VERY sweary words.
C-c... Can't go there.
There's one word that offends more than any other.
You know it, he knows it, everyone in Scotland knows it...
ALARM BLARES
..but I'll need special permission to say it.
You're at the top of the list now - the very highest of the scale.
We'd have to refer it to the highest level.
Just have to wait and see on that one.
Nobody likes boundaries,
especially being told what we can and cannot say.
And on the streets, from Kirkwall to Kirkcudbright,
we speak very differently to characters on TV.
THEY SHOUT OUT SWEARWORDS
Some people, of course, don't like swearing
and find it distasteful,
but the conjunction of language that doesn't fit
and that is highly policed and the sense that
you can thumb your nose at those boundaries and go beyond them...
Bastard!
..stepping outside the norms of respectability...
"I am not governed by the rules of propriety"
that you would learn in school.
THEY SHOUT OUT SWEARWORDS
Shite.
Bollocks.
# Call me dumb Don't call me smarthead... #
My own swearing vocab expanded vastly when,
as a rebellious teenager, I left home,
joined a rock-and-roll band, and played pubs across Scotland.
SHE SINGS
Swearing felt cool.
But why do us humans swear at all?
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in society,
culture and history.
Bastard. Bastard.
And in this classroom,
you're encouraged to swear at the teacher...
Shit. STUDENTS: Shit. Prick.
..and he gives as good as he gets.
Well, shit, wanker, shag and whore and twat and piss off,
and in this case...
Me and my fellow linguistics students are here to try
and understand just why some words pack a punch.
The most important thing about swearing is
they have to be stigmatised or taboo.
You have to have been told, at some point, "Don't say those words."
Otherwise, they don't have power.
There are four uses of swearwords in English. One is the expletive.
These are the ones where you want to use them to express emotions.
"This is a fuckup!"
Second one is intensifiers,
where you're saying, "It's bloody difficult."
"This essay is fucking annoying."
Abusive is the term where you're actually using it against someone.
"That fucker! That wanker!"
And then humorous. Humorous is probably more common than abusive.
Humorous is where you say something which looks like it's an offensive term,
but, actually, it's to your friend, so it's OK.
"Oh, you didn't get me a fucking cup of tea."
And you're not really meaning it in an offensive way.
For these young students from all corners of the world,
there is no such thing as bad language.
I like to have a classroom where swearing is encouraged,
primarily because I want people to talk about anything.
So, as linguists, we're not traffic police
standing on a corner saying, "Go this way. Go that way."
We're like fishermen that put a net into the ocean, come back,
and you want to find the really weird fish,
no matter how taboo or how risky they think they are,
because language is what matters.
And in the rich seas of Scottish speech,
there are plenty of exotic specimens.
Do you think they use swearing any differently here
from anywhere else?
Erm, maybe, yeah. I've heard a lot of people swearing.
I guess people have just got to express their feelings, so... Yeah.
..a lot of curse words around. What Scottish swearwords do you know?
Erm, just "shite". THEY LAUGH
Good answer. Sorry. That's great!
Swearing may be universal,
but each country has its own nuances.
Would you put "shit" as high as "shite"?
Erm, would we put "shit" higher than "shite"?
What do you think? Yeah. "You wee shite."
LAUGHTER A term of endearment.
We find that things within a community
are more often used as kind of a bonding thing
cos it's part of who we are together,
and it's not something which comes in from outside.
In English, there's more than 800 expressions for copulation,
1,000 for penis and 1,200 for vagina,
but that doesn't include the salty Scottish words
that we all heard from the cool kids,
the funny uncle, on a drunken night out,
and they're often used with affection rather than aggression...
SHE LAUGHS Very jaunty.
..as this Scots journalist explains.
Scots is similar to English,
but it isnae the same language,
and Scots-speaking communities
ken what language you're speaking.
So, if you were saying to somebody, "Och, you're full of shite,"
it's quite vernacular, it's colloquial.
That's a language you'd use with your pals,
and it comes with that sense of familiarity
and you ken he's no' really tearing you doon.
Saying it in English is kind of speaking doon tae somebody, like,
"You are a shit professional."
"Oh!" SHE LAUGHS
"Mate, that was a bit shite."
"Oh, sorry, pal. I'll dae better next time."
Massive difference between they twa experiences, you know? Yeah.
Give me a list of some of your favourite Scottish swearwords. Bam.
Ken? You'd call a ned a bam.
And pish and fanny.
Scots vocabulary is formed mostly on an old Germanic dialect,
but had loads of European influence.
So, words like... "Fud", actually, is connected to the Icelandic "fud",
which means a female animal's vagina.
"Doup", which is a great Scots word for your arse,
just came in fae the Dutch in the 1500s,
and it means, like, the wee underside of an egg.
But it shows the kind of playful nature.
NEWSREADER: A red-warning, high-impact wind...
Oh, my God. Trampoline! ..is going to cause some damage,
some disruption, possibly power outages.
So, the winds are that bad up there?
Yeah, it's really bad over there right now.
They're getting blown around.
But they really are calling it Hurricane Bawbag!
They have a scorn and a contempt for nature,
which I find...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Yeah!
And some of these old Scots words are making an unlikely comeback.
You can buy, like, Bawbags pants and stuff now.
And, like, "bawbag" is one of they words that middle-class writers
will slip into a soap to make it seem authentic,
and nothing gies me the boke mair than that.
It's a fucking language! Respect it.
Respect it and use it or fuckin' dinnae.
We're paying for the banter.
LAUGHTER
But then Scots has that great ability
just to fucking gang nuclear.
Like, calling somebody a fuckheid does feel like, "Fucking hell!"
Which brings us to the world's most popular swearword.
It's a noun, an adjective, a verb and an exclamation all in one.
But what swearers from Fiji to Finland don't know
is that the first F in the world is right here in Scotland's capital.
In the 16th century, shouty Scottish poets would indulge
in a ritual exchange of creative insults known as flyting...
Make some noise!
..like a rap battle long before rap.
Mate, better fucking drop my style
He looks like he spent the last year just coughing bile.
You're aboot Yoda height. LAUGHTER
It's like a cash-and-carry
You're always comin' oot wi' a load of shite.
And these Scottish flyting poems
contain some of the earliest swearwords in history.
Get me a swearing expert.
Hello. Good to meet you. Hi. Very good to meet you, too. Yes.
Today, we're going to look at some really juicy language
from 500 years ago. Wow.
Joanna, as a Polish woman, how on Earth did you find yourself
teaching and studying Scots language?
I fell in love with the landscape the moment I came here.
I wanted to learn more about the language of Scotland
and how it evolved.
Today, the National Library of Scotland
is getting a rare treasure out from the vaults.
So, we're looking at a 500-year-old object. Wow.
It's a very precious manuscript.
You can see the actual handwriting. It's incredibly well preserved.
It's really detailed, isn't it? Yeah.
So, what we're looking at here is The Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedie.
So, why is this manuscript significant, in terms of swearwords?
Well, Kennedy addresses Dunbar.
As you can see here, in this stanza here,
he's calling him, "Ignorant elf, aip, owll irregular
"Skaldit skaitbird and commoun skamelar
"Wan fukkit funling that Natour maid ane yrle."
CORA LAUGHS "Wan fukkit funling."
This is the first surviving record of "fuck".
What he means is your parents didn't make you quite rightly,
you know, if that's the way to put it.
Is this the earliest example we have in the world? Indeed, yeah.
The earliest surviving record of the word "fuck".
"Fukkit. Fukkit." There you go.
THEY LAUGH
Was he going like that when he did it? He probably was!
THEY LAUGH
So, it might never quite make the tourist trail,
but here, in our National Library,
we have the first written "fuck" in the world.
I think that's something to be proud of.
The freedom enjoyed by the early poets wasn't to last.
For most of Scotland's recently recorded history,
colourful language is conspicuously absent.
I've looked in our literature, I've scoured through old newspapers
and searched the BBC archives, and I can't find any.
If you believe these grey, official,
sanctioned accounts of everyday life,
Scotland's mouth was clean.
I think we Scots like to think that we've always been gallus,
swaggering, effing and blinding, but no, at one point, we were...
And I'm going to have to use the C-word here.
..conservative - small C.
So, what happened to all that carefree, bawdy ribaldry?
Well, button up your cardie
because it's time to take a deep dive into the Scots psyche.
First up, the Calvinists.
It was a country where the Church held enormous sway.
Hellfire and damnation sermon by the minister
warning you against all kinds of sins - scary stuff.
Bad language was one of those sins.
For centuries, Scotland wasn't laid-back about, well, anything...
If you did swear, you would be severely ticked off
by figures of authority.
They would have given you a clipped ear.
Please welcome the founder of the Church of Scotland,
Mr John Knox!
..and a lot of it was down to this guy.
Thou shalt bathe in molten lava with only bombs for soap.
LAUGHTER
Thou shalt live in a skip with only a stamp to keep thou warm.
LAUGHTER
And we pray for a return to the old gospel of the Reformation,
the old gospel of free grace.
There's nothing like the old, old story...
Number two on our hang-up list...
..comes courtesy of the flowering of reason,
which was the Scottish Enlightenment.
On the plus side came reason, logic and philosophy,
but on the downside, out went more Caledonian curses.
The great model that they had was English gentility.
They start getting rid of Scotticisms from their language.
And, of course, that then sort of deprives you of all your best ways
of insulting each other.
Even Enlightenment-era editions of William Dunbar's poetry
emitted the forbidden "fukkit".
Surely, you are losing a bit of the expressiveness
of the way that you speak. Maybe we lost some of the joy.
Yeah, yeah. In some ways, you're losing the passion for life.
I would agree! Cos it becomes a bit cold.
It becomes a bit more controlled, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah.
The legacy of religion and the craving for respectability
meant that generations of Scots
buttoned their lip and minded their manners.
HE SINGS
This was the Scotland of The Sunday Post,
of rectitude and propriety,
and if swearing was discussed at all,
it was only there to be condemned.
Right, stand by, all in studio. Stand by... Cue action, please.
Good evening. We're bringing into service
the first television studio in Scotland.
SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCE MUSIC PLAYS
But the biggest influence on Scots' vocabulary
and the way we spoke was when the BBC began broadcasting
north of the border.
I don't believe it! It's true.
At last, the miners of Midlothian, the welders of the Clyde,
the landladies of Largs would hear a Scottish voice on TV.
Oh, I say! I'm getting on like a house on fire.
But no, the vowels were clipped, the accents were unrecognisable.
You have to keep the microphone as near as possible
to the speaker. Yes, yes.
Oh, leave those to me, darling. Look, Linda...
And, of course, the very idea that you would swear on the BBC
was utterly frightful.
I'm afraid I wasn't listening. Oh, of course you were.
You're just being ruddy tactful. Colin, please! No please about it!
Come into camera one. Cue music.
Camera two. Camera three. Camera four.
What was your first language?
Bad language. LAUGHTER
When I started out in the BBC,
there was a very, very strict no swearing policy.
Words like "bloody" and "bugger" and "damn"
would be questionable, if you would ever hear them.
If you were broadcasting on radio, television,
going into people's homes,
then you wouldn't want to use these words.
ANNOUNCER: This is BBC Television.
In 1964, the BBC introduced the nine o'clock watershed.
It is not suitable for children
or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition.
Even when the weans were in bed, the air never turned blue.
These rules and regulations were summed up to newcomers,
as I knew they were, by senior producers,
"Oh, it just means that all BLEEP
"have to be referred to the controller."
And that was the case.
I must confess, however,
that the other languages
were much more harder.
For instance, learning Hindustani
was a whopper of a job.
But it was a whopper mastered.
I beg your pardon? Can you get away with that?
LAUGHTER Oh, I see what you mean. Yes.
And so began a golden age for innuendo.
He kept bees in the old town of Effen.
An Effen beekeeper was he.
LAUGHTER
With a nudge-nudge, wink-wink,
the audience learned to read between the lines.
And one day, this Effen beekeeper...
..was stung by a big Effen bee.
LAUGHTER
Fuck's sake!
Fud.
Dobber!
Come here, ya bastard!
Ya fuckin' dancer!
The Bible, the broadcasters and the belt
all combined to police swearing
and protect the genteel ears of Scottish society,
but the Scots tongue was not easily governed.
In the factories, the men spoke industrial language,
in the North East, the women had "a mouth like a fishwife",
and travelling folk sang out their songs as they toiled.
# Wi' a haben, a boo and a banna A haben, a boo and a bay... #
And these folk songs were rarely written down, nor ever censored.
They were passed on orally from one generation to another...
# Oh, my father was hanged for sheep stealin'
# My sister was burned as a witch... #
..and there's a manny fae Aberdeen who kens them all.
# And I am the son of a bitch
# Oh, when I was a hedger and ditcher
# And up to my oxers in snaw
# The deil took a haud of my bollocks
# And he fucking near rugged them awa'
# Wi' a haben, a boo and a banna
# A haben, a boo and a bay
# Wi' a haben, a boo and a banna
# Come toodle-ay, oodle-ay-ah. #
SHE LAUGHS
So, where would these normally be sung?
One of the main carriers of songs and tunes were travellers.
These traditional people who came from that way of life
sang a song like they spoke.
Travelling agricultural workers moved from job to job,
sleeping in barns and singing sweary songs into the night,
and these bawdy ballads were passed on,
brightening up generations of working lives.
I mean, I come from a background of fishing.
Fish traders, the girls, and they all swore.
It was like, "Fucking God bless you," you know?
SHE LAUGHS You know? It was.
And that was just conversation.
# What'll her mammy say? #
It's the same with the song.
# Get oot the bottle and hae a dram That warms... #
It is part of the history... Yeah. ..of the music and the song.
And if you took that out, you'd be taking out the passion of it.
# Wi' muckle grief and sorrow... #
This oral tradition inspired young folk singers like Ewan MacColl.
He recorded the workers and travellers,
then used swearing sparingly in his folk songs for emphatic effect.
# There's no ogres, wicked witches
# Only greedy sons of bitches
# Who are waiting to exploit your life away... #
Scottish folk clubs were the beginning
of a four-letter fightback.
The lyrics were uncompromising and the language was unsanitised.
# For he is outward bound... #
That's what our job is as artists and singers,
is to keep that stuff alive.
And if there's fucking swearing in it, so be it.
# Noo, I once knew a tailor in Dublin
# A lassie went into his shop
# She asked for two yards of his linen
# But he gave her two yards of his cock
# Wi' a haben, a boo and a banna
# Come toodle-ay, oodle-ay-ah. #
It's a beautiful love song.
SHE LAUGHS It is.
You get all the sentiments in it.
The world was changing.
Why don't you shut up, you goddamn mafia?
HE WHISTLES
In 1960s America, comedian Lenny Bruce
was arrested on stage for swearing and charged with obscenity.
He goes, "Hey, you motherfucker, why don't you try on glasses?"
In England, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan rocked the BBC
when he said "fuck" during a live broadcast.
But in 1970s Scotland,
jings, crivens, help ma boab, we kept it clean.
Not one bad word was uttered in TV, radio or the papers
until one man laughed in the face of the censors.
He was brought up in a grey Glasgow tenement
in the district of Partick, a place he calls
a little fishing village by the banks of the Clyde.
Billy Connolly served his swearing apprenticeship in the shipyards.
Glasgow swearing sounds like... HE GRUNTS
And, you know, there's no mistake
what the guy is trying to get across.
Connolly took the industrial language he'd heard as a welder
and forged it into comedy in the folk clubs.
But it was only when it was pressed into vinyl
that he could get past the censors at 33 revolutions per minute.
ON RECORDING: There's nothing worse than going into a toilet,
locking the door, turning round
and finding that there's a wee jobbie.
LAUGHTER
Somebody else's. LAUGHTER
Listening again and again to LPs
filled with jobbie jokes and sweary stories was thrilling...
The Big Yin. The Big Yin. Look at some of these.
..but it also inspired kids to think,
"Hey, people who speak like me can be funny and famous."
The local record shop had that. That was in the shop window.
It was a gatefold and that was sitting in the shop window.
We used to go and look because it was bad... Yeah. ..you know,
hearing a guy saying "jobbie" on an LP!
THEY LAUGH
Billy Connolly represented the end of civilisation as we knew it.
ON RECORDING: And you can't leave
because if you go to leave and there's a guy outside,
you can hardly say, "Honest, Jimmy, it's no' mine."
LAUGHTER
I always remember my mother talking to her sister, saying,
"Have you heard that Billy Connolly?"
I knew they were talking about it and I was, like, heid doon, kidding on I'm no' hearing it.
WHISPERS: "Have you heard the language of Billy Connolly?
"Have you heard the language?"
The Big Yin was hitting the big time...
# She shouted, "Get him, Rover!"
# And he jumped over and bit my... #
..but television appearances were often censored...
# She sank her teeth in my B-U-M
# And called me BLEEP... #
..making his records even more desirable.
Suddenly, it was cool to have Billy Connolly LPs.
If you were walking about with a Billy Connolly LP,
everybody was like, "Can I get a loan of that?" You loaned.
And that sense of, "Oh, we shouldnae be listening to this,"
that was always, always there sort of thing.
Spots a bush on fire. He says, "Oh, wait a minute.
"Bush is on fire and the leaves aren't."
So, he goes up for a closer look. The bush starts talking to him.
He says, "Oh, haud on."
By making fun of religion, by swearing with pride,
and doing it all in his own accent,
the Big Yin became public enemy number one...
Attack the system!
..but there were many who felt that Scotland's very soul was at risk.
Scottish comedian Billy Connolly
attracts two kinds of extreme followers -
those who love his humour and those who condemn it.
It's about Billy Connolly's blasphemy of Jesus Christ.
There were protests.
Pastor Jack Glass famously,
you know, with the banner, "Connolly is a blasphemer."
Well, that's the tragedy of today - we feel it's such a permissive age
that people are completely godless and Christ-less,
and they prefer to listen to toilet talk like Connolly's,
who we call "manure mouth".
There's one where there's a joke.
Aye, it's called They'll Never Put This On A Record,
and it's because it's a guy in a church who's found dead,
and he's in the church and the policeman comes in and says,
"What the fuck are you daeing?"
And the guy drops dead, and the policeman's explanation is,
"I think he thought it was the Lord speaking to him, you know?
"A Scottish version of God who would swear."
ON RECORDING: Oh! What the fuck are you daeing there?
Billy Connolly released ten comedy albums in the 1970s.
He was uncensored and he was unrepentant.
Not only am I not ashamed of the things I've done,
I'm very, very proud of them.
Any more of his lip, I'll start doing it again!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Billy Connolly!
Funny swearing was now a Scottish speciality.
We saw a great thing last week, you know - a nurse up at the hostel.
Tits, bum, fanny, the lot.
It was sanctioned,
part of Scotland's cheeky, rough-diamond charm.
But what wasn't sanctioned were the harsh realities
of working-class life told in working-class language.
He kept going.
A battler, man, that's what he was.
One thing about the Sammy fellow -
a fucking battler.
If you would have asked him, he would have telt you -
nae brains, but he would aye battle like fuck.
It's true, though, he would have a go.
When I first read Jim Kelman, I thought, "What is this?
"I've never seen anything like it."
Fuck ye! Fuck ye!
Where the hell was he? He'd stopped walking.
Nae wonder he'd stopped walking -
cos he didnae fucking know where he was.
I realised, "God, this guy's the real deal.
"You know, he really is a fantastic writer."
James Kelman's 1994 novel, How Late It Was, How Late,
tells the story of Sammy,
a Glaswegian who's gone blind overnight,
and it made swearing political again.
How is it possible to write about people
if you cannot use the language that they use?
I mean, there is a really serious point
about suppression that goes on,
and this kind of whole myth about so-called bad language.
But the very fact that you don't allow people into literature
because they use language in a certain way,
it means that you have succeeded in suppressing their existence.
In 1994, Jim Kelman was shortlisted for the Booker Prize -
Britain's biggest fiction prize.
Eventually, after much tortuous discussion,
the judges, of which I was one,
decided that Jim Kelman should win the prize.
Mr James Kelman.
APPLAUSE
Scotland had its first, and so far only, winner.
Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize,
has been won by the Scottish author James Kelman.
His books describe the lives of Glaswegian men
who frequent the pub, the betting shop and the dole queue.
His victory brought Scottish voices and swearing
to the very heart of the establishment,
and they didn't like what they heard.
Judges don't normally emerge calling the winning choice "a disgrace,
"a monologue liberally laced with four-letter words
"by a drunken Glaswegian".
They attacked Jim and they attacked his novel.
"How on Earth can you write a literary book
"in which the word fuck features 4,000 times?"
The so-called sophisticates
felt that a savage had been thrust upon them.
My culture and my language have the right to exist,
and no-one has the authority to dismiss that right.
I felt very sorry for Jim Kelman because he didn't deserve that.
He deserved to win the Booker Prize because he was a great author -
he IS a great author - and he is our greatest author.
It was a terrible moment, actually, in British culture.
Sales suffered after the four-letter furore,
but Kelman's innovative literary use of language
ensures the novel is still studied at universities around the world.
There are some audiences and readerships that you can't fool.
This is a brilliant novel, so rich in observation,
so rich in human life,
and I think to actually focus on swearing
is to pander to the censors and the snobs.
TYRES SCREECH Oh! Fuck!
It was pointed out that,
in the very same year as Kelman won the Booker Prize,
Hugh Grant "fucked" and "buggered" his way through
Four Weddings And A Funeral.
Oh, fuck! Fuck! Fuckity-fuck!
There was no controversy.
This is where class enters the frame.
Bugger!
This language of the dispossessed, the language of the oppressed,
I think that does chime with an idea of Scottishness
that is rebellious, that is marginalised.
There is a class politics just submerged beneath the surface.
See? There are good reasons for our bad words.
It's fascinating that the frequency with which we swear,
the words we choose and who swears reveals much about society.
A lot of the discourse about swearing
is secretly a class discourse.
Back in swearing class, time to discuss class swearing.
So, in somewhere like Scotland,
which identifies itself heavily as a working-class nation
full of working-class people,
you then have a situation where a national identity
is somehow related to that class distinction.
And since that class distinction has a national component to it,
fundamentally, a lot of Scots will swear much more heavily
than English people will
because it's a way of identifying yourself with that class.
That's something which then marks out people who say,
"Well, we are this type of person
"and we are proud to be this type of person,
"and so we don't have as much of a problem with swearing
"as you lot do."
Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish?
It's shite being Scottish!
We're the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking Earth,
the most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash
that was ever shat into civilisation!
Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers!
We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers.
Cannae even find a decent culture to be colonised by.
We're ruled by effete arseholes!
It's a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy,
and all the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference!
I think, fundamentally,
this sort of issue of swearing in language
is an issue about power,
particularly when they are people who are kind of out of power,
have power withheld from them
and who use language as a way of expressing their anger
and their protest.
In an upmarket Edinburgh tearoom,
where everyone minds their Ps and Qs,
we discuss the perils of being a nation
that takes too much pride in its profanities.
It risks becoming a trap,
and you end up stereotyping yourself
as a culture that's only fit for sort of swearing and cursing
and sort of drunken brawling.
I don't think that's the fault of the work itself.
It's the fault of a kind of incompleteness
in the way that Scotland is seen. Yeah.
Do you think we're prone to using swearing just to fucking show off?
Yeah, I think there's an element of that.
In sort of larger social groups,
swearing can be a very, very theatrical thing to do.
Lots of F-words sort of start to creep in
as a way of getting a laugh, and then, of course,
that itself then creeps into comedy itself,
so you'll see a lot of stand-up comics getting laughs
by using obscenities in their acts.
I live in a nice part of Glasgow these days, though.
So, I live in a leafy suburb, so if I have children,
they'll be pricks.
So, I've come to terms... LAUGHTER
If you ask someone to caricature a Scottish person,
it would probably start with swearing.
You would say that that's something that Scottish comics are particularly good at -
tapping into cliches out there and emphasising them
and dragging out what's absurd about them.
What happened to you?
Erm, I work for a company that makes a lot of hot shit and...
You work for a company that makes a lot of hot shit?
LAUGHTER
Oh, I can see this starting to come together.
Like the start of an episode of Casualty, isn't it?
LAUGHTER
How did you put your elbow on something hot?
I just kind of brushed against it and I was fucked.
"I just brushed against it and I was fucked."
LAUGHTER There you go.
There's a lovely understatement to Scottish people, isn't there?
On stages across Scotland, our comedians curse with confidence.
I'm meeting with a veteran stand-up and a new comedy writer
to blether about bad language making good material.
I once saw somebody at a football match getting really angry,
and he stood up and he pointed at the pitch and he shouted,
"Fucking...boo!"
THEY LAUGH
Cos, you know, sometimes, "boo" just isn't enough.
Oh, I think that's my new...
That's my new mantra. Brilliant! "Fucking boo."
I'm someone who grew up swearing in two languages,
so I know how much trouble I'm in
depending if my mum and dad are swearing in English or Punjabi.
I'm in, like, serious trouble if it's in Punjabi.
I'm in casual trouble if it's in English.
So, it's a good warning system.
Fred, do you think Scots use swearwords more humourously
than anybody else? I think we do.
It suits the rhythm of our speech pattern, as well,
and, you know, the tone of our voice.
"Motherfucker", right? For me, as somebody from Perthshire,
it sounds more like an agricultural process.
THEY LAUGH
I didn't want to point that out, so I'm glad you did.
"Just went over the 17-acre field with the motherfucker."
Do you use Punjabi swearing in your writing?
Yes, cos there's one that's, like, panh chod,
which means sisterfucker, and it's just a really...
Like, why is my mum calling me that?
SHE LAUGHS It's such a strange swearword,
but no-one thinks about what it means.
It's just a swearword. Does that make sense? Wow.
Like, no-one's actually saying that. That's just what the word is.
Yeah, there's no logic to a lot of swearing, is there?
Yeah, like, why would you say "motherfucker", you know? Yeah.
But, for some reason, we have "sisterfucker",
and it's like, "Cool..." Yeah, as simple as that.
Comedy, theatre and literature had pushed the boundaries,
but TV was a mass medium, and there were still restrictions.
By the Millennium, some were finding ways around the expletive embargo.
Oh, that's sweet. "I love Boaby."
I still love boaby.
Who's Boaby?
Och, just anybody's boaby. LAUGHTER
There is a list of words that will cause offence,
and the great thing was, by using Scottish words,
you could kind of circumnavigate that a wee bit
because they were words that weren't so offensive in a UK context,
like "dobber" or "boaby", you know?
So, you know, people would phone you up from London,
"What is a boaby?" HE LAUGHS
"It's a penis." "Really?" "Yeah."
No-one complained. Gradually, attitudes were changing.
The big thing about it is...the way we started the game was diabolical.
Documentaries also began to reflect the way we spoke.
It fucking sets you up for the rest of the game.
My back three started fucking slack as fuck.
Kenny, you've had fucking three balls.
You fucking punch three balls when it's there. For fuck's sake!
We're lost! Up front, we're fucking lost. We've got fuck all!
But it was only when we could all announce our thoughts to the world
that Scotland really let rip.
PEOPLE SHOUT OUT SWEARWORDS
Social media has become our stage,
and for the first time,
linguists can accurately quantify
how and when we swear.
Looking at what people can post online
is a really good indicator of how they'd naturally use language.
A recent study of more than 20,000 Scottish tweets
found that our swearing is more often friendly than foul.
A lot of people do assume that swearing is always used
abusively or to insult people,
but if you actually look at the context
that people use swearwords in,
in the data that I had, about 70% of those contexts
were just normal, everyday, polite conversations,
a kind of punctuation.
It just sort of came at the end of sentences to emphasise things
and to sort of highlight people's emotions and things like that.
So, it wasn't used, like, throwing insults at people.
Right, don't put too much weight on it, right?
Where the fuck am I meant to put my weight?!
I cannae put my weight on the roof. It's dead thin.
I cannae hold on to the gutter. What am I meant tae dae wi' it?
"Oh, here, Andrew, hold it for five minutes." You fucking wank stain!
"Don't put... Don't shift your weight."
What the fuck are you talking aboot?
I cannae put my weight on the fucking roof.
I cannae put my weight on the gutter. Where's it meant to go?
Know what I mean? I cannae just fucking move it.
LAUGHTER
Just like other nationalities,
Scots swear when we stub our toe or when we're stuck on a roof...
LAUGHTER
It was you... It was you that wanted to go up, dick.
..but we also swear when we're enjoying ourselves,
to add salt and sauce to a sentence, cos we feel like it,
and to test the boundaries to see what's permitted.
SHE MOUTHS
There is one word that truly upsets people,
that really offends, in the past and to this day.
"Cutn"?
Don't like swearing at all...
..and especially that C-word.
The C-word. The C-word. C-bomb.
The C-word. Am I allowed to say it?
That's a very good question.
ALASDAIR MACLEOD: That's pretty much as strong as it gets,
but for your programme, I think you'd probably get away with it.
Yes!
C-U-N-T - cunt.
Now, what's all the fuss about?
What's delicately referred to as the C-word
is consistently rated as the most offensive utterance
in the English language,
the strongest of the strong, number one in the profanity parade.
But, historically speaking, this wasn't always the case.
Here's a 1400 medical text.
So, you have there "cunt" used entirely naturally
as a medical term for the female genitals
because that was the standard term.
You find people who are gynaecologists being called
"cunt polishers" because that is the standard term
for that kind of work
at a particular time and a particular place.
These are entirely acceptable terms.
There is no reason not to use these words in that period.
It is the word for the thing.
HE LAUGHS Sorry, it's mostly you going,
"Cunt polisher?" in the corner of my eye that's distracting.
Do you know, it's the "polisher" bit that I'm having problems with!
Well... LAUGHTER
Yeah! I'm sure they had a lot more important things to do
than polish it. LAUGHTER
It depends on where your priorities lie.
The word somehow went from anatomical to unspeakable.
You have to make a...
..of yourself. LAUGHTER
I know you're censored here. Not at all, we're not.
You go for it, Sean. There's no problem at all here. All right.
Well, being a BLEEP.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
The one word... The one word...
Some of the earliest dictionaries refused to even define the word.
"A nasty name for a nasty thing."
God!
For hundreds of years,
men identified female sexual energy as a dangerous force,
and unlike other words for women's genitals,
this one sounds powerful, it demands to be taken seriously.
It's gone from being sort of just a very, like, descriptive term
hundreds of years ago to, you know,
becoming really, really quite offensive.
And I think that the reclamation kind of movement
is definitely more attached to the sort of anatomical meaning of "cunt"
and of, you know, people saying,
"Right, that's how I'm going to refer to this part of my body."
I am a very confident swearer, generally...
THEY LAUGH
..but the C-word is still a word
that I don't personally use unless in extreme circumstances.
It's not something that is in sort of my Scots.
I mean, I could use it in the same sort of way, as you said,
if I was like, you know, "He was a total cunt last night."
But he'd really have to have done something pretty bad
to get that treatment.
But in certain areas of Scotland,
it really doesn't have that connotation any more
cos it can also be just used a lot generally
to just mean, like, a person.
Just like, "Oh, that cunt over there." Yeah.
This time, it's going to be a good game of football
where every cunt's going to hopefully get along with each other.
Here's where it gets complicated.
The most insulting word in the Queen's English
is frequently used with affection in Scots.
Certainly, in certain subcultures, people would swear a lot.
If you hear someone in, say, Glasgow say, "That cunt there,"
it doesn't seem to have a gendered aspect, right?
It can be used to refer to a man or a woman.
Oh, he's a good cunt, so he is.
It's used in a camaraderie sort of way,
and so it's lost its derogatory element.
So, I was speaking to a linguist fae a university recently.
Her twa favourite new Scots words -
neologisms, words that have just come into the language -
are "naecunt" and "awcunt".
And, now, they aren't sweary words, she was saying.
Like, "naecunt" is just "naebody".
"I went down the hoose perty. There was naecunt there."
Or, "Man, you hae one fuckin' spew on a night oot
"and awcunt calls you a jessie." SHE LAUGHS
As our C-bomb has evolved
into a word used by your lovely old granny...
Are you taping me, you cunt?
..other parts of the world see it very differently.
I work at New York University
and I have a bunch of American colleagues out there,
and American students,
and these are all people for whom the C-word is just appalling.
It can silence a room.
Our swearing prowess astonished a global audience
when one of the world's most powerful men
was given a uniquely Scottish welcome.
So, just give me your name again, please. Janey Godley.
Janey, why are you down here today? Sorry, just one more time.
Hi. My name is Janey Godley.
When Donald Trump arrived in Scotland,
the paparazzi took thousands of pics,
but Janey just took one.
I went straight across and I said to my friend, "There's my phone.
"There's the sign." Click, click.
And that became the iconic image that it is today.
What was the reaction to it? Within minutes, it was viral.
Retweets, interview requests and acclaim flooded in.
It wasn't just the words.
It was the fact that I had the audacity to say it.
Bob Geldof called me his hero.
If what I do didn't affect him,
why does he keep sending the cops after us?
In four words, Janey had spoken out for millions around the world.
I'm barred fae America. I'm an enemy of the people.
Seriously? Yeah, I know.
A wee woman fae the East End with a bingo pen
and a bit of lino can bring down a country wi' a word. Oh, my God!
SHE MOUTHS
THEY SHOUT OUT SWEARWORDS
I'm from Calgary, which is in the western part of Canada.
It is undoubtedly the case that swearing is one of the reasons
I ended up moving to Scotland.
You fucking dick! This is all down to you, you know?
Oh, don't be so fucking stupid. You're a fucking nutter.
I was completely entranced by the pleasure and freedom
of swearing that I found.
Fuck that thinking or logic, reason, talking.
Words matter, and swearwords seem to matter more than most.
I think there's no such thing as bad language or a foul mouth.
There's just the effect the words have.
You can't just say, "Change channels."
If I'm going to be inconvenienced by changing channels... Yeah, sure.
..and it's being shown on the BBC, I want a reduction in my television licence.
Inconvenienced by changing channels? Why not? I mean, it's...
If you have been offended by the words in this programme,
then, believe it or not, you're part of the reason they persist...
What a fanny!
..because if these words didn't offend anyone,
then they'd lose all their power...
Total pish.
..and we'd have to think up some new ones.
I'd like to look into the future and see
what are people going to use in Scotland in, like, 50 years' time
to appal someone, as a properly offensive word?
So, what's going to be next? Cos something has to be offensive.
Every generation needs something they can say
that will shock the previous generation.
So, there'll be something else. You'll start looking out for it.
Whenever you're offended or hurt or have that visceral reaction of,
"Ooh, bad language," you know that's a swearword that's coming along.
From way back, we have always expressed ourselves
passionately and uniquely.
Sometimes, when we're being told what to say, who can say it,
how we should say it, the only response can be,
"Get tae fuck!"
# Fuck it, I love you
# There you go
# Three little words on a mobile phone
# When are you coming home?
# Don't wanna be alone. #