This programme contains very strong language.
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FRENETIC MUSIC PLAYS
According to Jonathon Green, the incomparable scholar of the
language which fell off the back of a lorry,
slang is the poetry of the gutter.
It's the poetry of the disenfranchised,
the poetry of the have-nots.
Poetry is also, as Housman noted, the straightest way to starvation.
Not much future there, then.
And not much future in the gutter either.
We're looking at an OG and an OD.
It doesn't stop poets writing. SIREN WAILS
Gore Vidal described irony as the weapon of the impotent,
and so it is, always has been,
always will be - it doesn't change a thing.
Peter Cook recalled how the doughty Weimar satirists prevented Hitler
coming to power in 1933.
They both might as well have been talking about slang,
which is euphemised as unconventional usage,
though of course it is not particularly unconventional,
it's just kept out of the puritanical media which ignores
whatever trespasses beyond the
limits of decency,
whatever is outside its self-prescribed boundaries.
Wall-to-wall witlessness and unbelievably low IQ fodder for
slow learners is OK. The language of the street isn't.
We're not children.
Satirical exercises may be as politically and socially impotent
as Vidal reckoned, but is corrective change really the point of them?
The real satisfaction is to be had in the creation of texts,
of slang which will be deemed offensive, and of satire.
Satire need not be funny,
but it must be mordant, vicious, aggressive and hurtful.
Unless it's hurtful, it's no use.
These, then, are the weapons that the weak possess.
So what if they - we - use language which is reckoned bad,
or unsuitable for polite society, whatever that is?
FRENETIC MUSIC PLAYS
RELAXED MUSIC PLAYS
The self-interested actions and irresponsible actions of the
powerful are infinitely more damaging than words
which are reckoned unseemly and fit to be spoken or written in public.
Further, the powerful targets of the voices from the gutter are
frequently incapable of recognising that they're being
held in contempt - they just don't get it.
Because they speak a different language, a language which,
as the late Geoffrey Hill observed, they hold in contempt.
They don't value it.
So they don't acknowledge its venom, its loathing, its barbs,
which are hardly noticed. They are impervious.
Politics is inseparable from the people who practise it.
The feeble pleading that it is not personal but about issues is a
cross-party lie.
Politicians from the extreme left to the extreme right are more like each
other than they are like normal human beings.
Their shared language is proof of this sameness.
They all spout the same cliches -
Hard-working families... Hard-working people... I am seeing a few green shoots...
Green shoots of recovery...
The green shoots of economic spring are appearing once again.
It is personal, which is why we should mock the Member for Uxbridge
and South Ruislip for being the rear end of Caligula's horse.
Which is why we should mock the out-of-her-depth
and massively compromised schoolmarm Mrs May ad feminam,
for having willingly submitted to
the Trump lout's radical handholding.
Which is why we should mock her husband for making a nation cringe
with his proud admission that he carries out menial domestic tasks
which most men would do without noticing.
I definitely do the taking the bins out, I do the traditional boy jobs,
by and large.
Slang is the expression of what we think,
rather than what we are enjoined to think,
what we are bullied into not thinking,
what we are liable to censor ourselves for thinking.
It describes the actual, rather than some sort of ideal
which we are enjoined to achieve by hypocritical politicians,
sodomitical bishops, and exploding imams.
The bust - what I got arrested for in San Francisco.
In San Francisco, I got arrested for, uh...
"We can hear that, daddy." Um... I'm not going to repeat the word,
because I want to finish the gig here tonight, it's, uh...
Lenny Bruce was, as usual, on the money.
There is no "what should be" - there is only "what is".
Get in the court, swear the heat in, when did he say, "Your honour,
"He said, blah, blah, blah!"
The judge, "He said blah, blah, blah?!" LAUGHTER
Then the guy really yanked it up - "That's right!
"I didn't believe it, there was a guy up on the stage, in front of
women and a mixed audience saying, blah blah blah!"
Slang is exhilaratingly contemptuous
of those who attain power,
those who attempt to impose their
will on the rest of us.
We are capable of thinking for ourselves.
Slang deflates the preposterous notion of human perfection.
It acknowledges what we are,
rather than what we should be.
What we should be, that is,
according to our supposed betters.
Who are just now, depending on taste and religion,
blessing Allah's suicide bombers, dating a choirboy,
or getting pleasurably whipped by a lady in latex whom they will pretend
not to have heard of when the slime of the gutter press comes
a-blackmailing. WHIP THRASHES
The more one sees of this end of humankind,
the more one's milk of human kindness turns sour.
Slang is the most sour poetry.
It does not wish you well.
It's demotic, it's the spoken and
very occasionally written invention of the tap room,
the bar room, the workplace, the barracks,
the private place.
The received idea about slang - that it's a form of language which
occludes and excludes - is, I believe, wrong.
Slang is about showing off,
about increasing one's idiolect,
about finding a better expression for blowjob than "blowjob".
It's about flexing one's lingo muscle.
It's an expression of verbal dexterity.
Imagination costs nothing.
The pleasure of slang is in the making. It's a boast.
My boast is that I added to the already brimming store of
words for drunk with "badered" - ie legless, like the air ace -
and to the sexual lexicon with "rubbing offal",
which is pretty much what intercourse is.
I'm absurdly proud of these coinages.
Slang is centripetal - it gets to the core of what it describes,
and whatever it describes is made vital.
The gap between signified and signifier is narrowed, exaggerated.
You fucking cunt!
You fucking, fucking, fucking fucked-up fuckwit! WHISTLE BLOWS
MUSIC: Words Don't Come easy by FR David
# Words don't come easy to me... #
Jargon - the prissy net curtains of language -
prescribes instead "you sexual intercourse",
and "you fornicating pudendum",
and "you crass genitalia".
Words, words.
Is it the actions and objects themselves that the petty-minded get
so enthusiastically worked up about,
or is it their verbal signifiers,
the words attached to the beast with two backs? WOOD PIGEON COOS
Is to accuse someone of being a have-sex or a make-love,
or possessing excrement features and a faecal head, what bodies like the
dim-witted football authorities call "foul and abusive"?
What sort of cunt decrees that "cunt" is unacceptable,
whilst vagina is OK?
Jargon is everything that slang is not.
De-centrifugal, evasive,
drably euphemistic, unthreatening,
conformist.
The coinage of jargon words is not a creative act.
Jargon does not attest to our capacity for linguistic invention.
While slang belongs to the gutter,
jargon belongs to the executive estate.
It is the clumsy, graceless, inelegant,
aesthetically bereft expression of
houses with three garages, of businesspeople who insistently
refer to their workmates as colleagues,
of drivers who think it important to distinguish a Mondeo from an Astra.
It is delusional.
It inflates pomposity, officiousness and self-importance,
rather than punctures them.
Slang mocks. Jargon crawls on its belly, giving great forelock,
hoping for promotion. Users of jargon often can't speak
because they are stifled by having their head trapped in the duodenum
of someone senior to them, and that person,
for example a high-flying, multi-platform,
forward-planification colleague is also unable to speak due to the
position of his tongue.
In jargon world, this can prove a problem.
MUSIC: Mr Apollo by The Bonzo Dog Band
# Apollo, Mr Apollo
# Everybody knows he's the greatest benefactor of mankind... #
Why ought we to respect scum of the earth like the Trump lout,
who have attained power by grasping
every opportunity for self-promotion...
My hair is blowing wildly in the wind!
..by backstabbing, by lying,
by making themselves Croesus-rich by borrowing so much that the banks
can't foreclose on them? Nice hotel.
They do this in order to be able to boss their fellows.
Rub a successful politician, and you'll find a busybody who
refers to him or herself in the third person, always knows best,
who yearns to display its
prefectorial pettiness on a global stage.
Rub the Trump lout, and you'll find that, along with being the most
mortgaged man on earth - that's what leader,
"leader of the free world" means -
along with that debt of $750 million,
his proudly proclaimed racism and misogyny...
Why not? ..his cosmic ignorance, his chilling nationalism...
We have to build a wall, folks. CHEERING
We have to build a wall.
..his blatant nepotism... It's a massive problem.
..his taxpaying, his bullying, sheer nastiness,
his complete lack of generosity... Would you rather have Trump?
..his success in turning America into a pariah state, he has launched
on an undeserving world a leatherette-faced
consigliere called Kellyanne -
the New Jersey Blueberry Princess of 1983,
who has in turn brought us a useful
new turd of despicable jargon - alternative facts...
..which means lies.
Lord Acton was wrong - it is not power which corrupts,
it's the other way round.
Power is neutral.
It can be exercised beneficently.
But power is more often than not corrupted,
abused by the people who are attracted to it.
Power is attained by those who already harbour the germ of
corruption but who usually keep that germ hidden - even from themselves -
behind a mask, until they have attained the throne.
That mask may be smooth or clownish or lovable or populist.
Whatever it is,
its wearers give themselves away with their abasement of language.
They coarsely simplify complicated ideas in an access of patronisation.
I wanted a Northern Powerhouse... Northern Powerhouse...
Northern Powerhouse...
Northern Powerhouse... Northern Powerhouse... Northern Powerhouse...
Northern Powerhouse... Northern Powerhouse. APPLAUSE
ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS
Don't they realise how tired, how clapped-out their paltry jargon is?
It's the language of people who can't think for themselves and
arrogantly believe that the rest of the populace shares their infirmity.
We don't. We are all in this together.
Education... Real change... education... real change...
..and education. ..with the strong, the stable...
Strong and stable... Strong and stable... Strong and stable...
Strong and stable... Coalition of chaos. APPLAUSE
These people are programmed morons.
Their threadbare formulae are more than just pockmarks -
they're seething buboes,
signalling an absolute contempt for the populace whom they regard as
gullible patsies to be patronisingly talked down to.
They signal, too, a contempt for the language of the country they're
meant to be governing. They signal their own poverty of thought.
Are they brainwashed?
They're certainly tongue-washed.
Drip-down, trickle-down.
Jargon words which, like so many jargon words,
describe a non-existing process, a non-occurring phenomenon.
Sure, in an ideal world, it might exist, but not in this one.
The hypocritical,
knowingly dishonest theory and the illusory practice are worlds apart.
It is part of the organised social lie.
The Gospel according to Matthew got it right,
and nothing has changed in the last two millennia.
HARPSICHORD MUSIC PLAYS
Jargon begins at the top, which is where putrescence and decay begin -
a fish rotting from the head down and so forth.
The trickle-down of wealth is illusory, a blatant lie.
Rottenness stays at the top.
Just ask the bottom.
However, the drip, drip, drip of septic jargon is undeniable.
It is to be heard everywhere.
The received idea about slang - that it's a language which
occludes and excludes - is, I believe, wrong.
That definition is, however, appropriate to jargon.
Jargon has stealthily nicked slang's clothes from the washing line of
usage. It is today jargon which
occludes and excludes.
I agreed with the Fees Office that a proportion of the maintenance and
cleaning of my house, hence the housekeeper,
should be on the Parliamentary allowance.
A Scottish grandee remarked of the Douglas pig,
"If I had a moat that small, I'd have mucked it out myself."
GRUNTING
As well as pigs with tragic moat problems, we have... CASH REGISTER RINGS
..further expenses-poor MPs...
countless wealth-sharing CEOs, business gurus... CHAMPAGNE CORK POPS
Altruistic bankers, white-collar paragons, philanthropists,
lovers of mankind - but which bit of mankind?
- patrons of what are called the arts, high-IQ media innovators,
humble barristers,
internet billionaires who rob the rich to give to the poor.
Is that right?! And let us not forget the management consultants
who have meekly inherited the earth -
blessed, blessed, blessed.
Whilst this creme de la creme de la creme de la creme de la creme talks
ceaselessly about transparency, its mores and practices are as
densely opaque as the law will allow,
or even denser.
Jargon is the language of the trained liar,
of the professionally mendacious,
of the dishonesty trainee who learns from its masters.
It is the language employed to
construct what the American journalist Ben Bradley called
the "non-denial denial".
It is the language the French call "la langue de bois".
It is the language of the culpable
who will always sidestep admission of guilt.
It is the language of bad faith, of people without conscience, who,
if they ever suffered shame, have long forgotten what it felt like.
What part of the brain is it that barristers have surgically excised
in order that they can, without shame, without the faintest obloquy,
defend the indefensible and prosecute the patently blameless?
It is, presumably, that part of the brain which
suppresses moral infirmity and transforms
life and liberty into a game.
Their parallel world is rendered yet more ludic - more ludicrous -
by the anachronistic garb, the wigs, the ritual, and the jargon,
which is what Latin borrowings are.
The law does not concern itself with trifles.
A victim's body.
Whereby.
In proportion to the value.
Criminal act.
The English translations of all these are unexceptionable,
they are clear and comprehensible. GAVEL BANGS
And that very clarity is, of course, the problem.
It fails to blind with archaism.
Your learned friend, who is most likely your pompous friend,
will seem markedly less learned and markedly less pompous if it speaks
the common tongue.
The words and expressions remain hermetic -
they do not advance beyond the state of jargon.
They are, wittingly, spoken weapons of bafflement.
They deliberately create incomprehension and bemusement.
And it should be noted that legal Latin was once just Latin.
It was co-opted by the law - it is not the law's coinage.
There is a qualitative difference between Latinisms whose use is
exclusively legal and those such as...
..and so on.
These latter have entered the
English language as denizens, if you like.
Immigrants, if you don't like.
They have crossed an invisible border from jargon
into the vernacular.
They're used by speakers and by writers like me who have forgotten
most of the little Latin we once had
and can recall only such things as Horace's
marvellously graphic simile.
MELANCHOLY MUSIC PLAYS
Those who put off leading a full life are like this mouth-breathing
Benny, who is going to wait till
all the water has flowed by till he crosses.
The river will flow and flow, he will wait and wait.
This is a more expansive version of the same writer's Carpe Diem,
another maxim which has crossed that border and shed the constraints of
jargon. It should encourage us to
Epicureanism rather than opportunism.
There is very little jargon - as opposed to slang - which describes,
let alone celebrates, enjoyment and exhilaration.
Very little jargon which accords
with AE Housman's indisputable dictum that "the pleasure of the
"moment is the only possible motive for action."
Only a fool, fluent in jargon or crippled by religious belief,
would disagree.
Immediate gratification is what makes life bearable,
or the anticipation of immediate gratification.
Or, anyway, the possibility.
In Housman's case, this would have meant a plentiful supply of
guardsmen and gondoliers.
Are you going to shave here or wait till you get back to barracks? MARCHING FEET
MUSIC: Nice One Cyril by Cockerel Chorus
# Nice one, Cyril
# Nice one, son... #
Anyone who watches football will be familiar with the nutmeg.
If Lad A persists in nutmegging Lad B,
he will be deemed to be lacking respect -
a very important abstract concept in football, as in life -
and Lad B will elbow him in the eye...
whereupon Lad A will fall to the ground as though felled
by a Tonton Macoute hit squad...
WHISTLE BLOWS
..and Lad B will, when the panting
former-Gauleiter-turned-referee arrives on the scene, be sent off -
or will see red, as they say.
One thing that a nutmeg will gain you, as well as an elbow,
is half a yard.
BIRDSONG
MUSIC: Match Of The Day by Barry Stoller
This is a unit of measurement which is peculiar to football,
and to football's wise and articulate pundit-philosophers who,
week in, week out employ it as though it were everyday speech,
when in fact it is as arcane as such
measurements as a peck, an oxgang,
a livre, a mark, a pennyweight,
a London quarter.
By the way, Lad A has now recovered from his life-threatening injury.
I suspect that these experts don't actually know what half a yard,
18 inches, looks like, how long it is.
And they drone on about the back of the net.
What about the front of the net?
"Half a yard", "nutmeg", "back of the net",
"see red" have entered the language to the extent that people who watch
football on telly are apprised of what they signify.
Yet they remain bound to their original locus,
their original meaning.
The sole exception derives from the philosopher-footballer
Joseph Barton, whose paradoxes are said to nutmeg one's mind.
Otherwise, no use has been found for them outside football.
They're well-known but exclusively in their original context.
They are definitively jargon.
So too are football's thefts from a blue-collar lexicon which is now as
extinct as the factories and mines which gave rise to it.
He's got the guys in there who are willing to put a shift in.
He should put a shift in.
They've got to play those slide-rule passes. Just let him run all day.
Would you say Arsenal, not really at the races?
You say, not at the races today.
"Put a shift in", "slide-rule pass", "not at the races".
Does anyone under the age of 60 know what a slide rule is?
Has anyone under the age of 60 ever
missed a work's outing bus to Haydock Park or Market Rasen?
Jargon conditions behaviour.
As we have seen, when a footballer brushes against another footballer,
one or perhaps both will fall over.
If this grave lack of balance were transferred to everyday life,
then scenes such as this would be all too familiar.
MUSIC: Back Home by England World Cup Squad
# Back home, they'll be thinking about us... #
Footballers regularly increase the proportion of their body that is
graffiti. They disfigure themselves with hideous tattoos,
with brand marks.
They may be Croesus brats, but they treat themselves like cattle.
They have not read Leviticus,
nor do they know that the SS tattooed as an insult,
as well as a means of identifying their victims.
And as for free will, the poor sods have never heard of it.
They're team players, so they follow the team, the mob.
Team spirit isn't a virtue.
It's merely falling in with the flock, obeying the common will.
MUSIC: All Together Now by The Farm
They alter their daft hairdos and their make-up weekly.
So why can they not alter their accent,
their often incomprehensible regional accent?
Accents are no more natural or inevitable than daft hairdos.
It's not as if the lads have regional tattoos
or regional daft hairdos.
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
# With a love like that, you know you should be glad... #
FRENETIC MUSIC PLAYS
I tell 'ee 'uumman, "I be sick o' we clack."
I 'pose now most everybody know how to write love poetry
Bloody near missed the boat to play cricket.
Why should regional jargon, regional dialect, regional accents
be regarded as so admirable if they are incomprehensible
to those with a different regional accent, a different regional jargon,
a different collective lexicon?
They often are incomprehensible.
You can see how the pink part has gone down.
You should have had another 300 there, at least. Yeah.
Eeh, but it's e'er si grand.
But ah'm dazzled with the mysteries of livin'.
There was - and still exists - a wrong idea that mass media have
caused regional accents to disappear.
Television is supposed to have killed them off.
It's an idea without foundation. Why, we call them cosies down
yonder, but up here they call 'em byres.
Do they? Well, it's a very fine mare, isn't it?
She's a grand 'un. Yeah, she is indeed.
In fact, both telly and radio display a wide range of regional
accents, regional dialects, regional jargon.
But perhaps not quite wide enough.
West Country and Black Country accents, both stupidly regarded as
signs of stupidity, are in short supply,
whilst there is an overabundance of mid-Atlantic, generic Northern,
estuarial and Irish.
My deeply caring,
hypersensitive big heart bleeds when I see a tiny child without limbs
bleeding, almost as much as my deeply caring,
hypersensitive big heart bleeds.
Speech has changed.
I don't mean usage, vocabulary and so on - that is and always has been,
always will be in perpetual mutation.
I mean the very purpose of speech.
It is no longer exclusively a means of communication.
It is increasingly employed as a self-conscious badge of identity -
that is, of separateness, of difference.
Mancunian usage is not that of the Lancashire towns.
Tyne and Tees do not elide, nor Cardiff and Swansea.
It's a badge of pride in your particularity,
in where you come from.
Where YOU come from - not me.
All faiths, all moral codes are instruments of repression.
Accents are, too.
Dumping them frees us to go who knows where - on an adventure.
After I heard a tape recording of myself at the age of 17,
I struggled to lose my South Wiltshire, West Hampshire burr.
I had no desire to be bound by what came out of my mouth,
to a particular place.
I did not want to be instantly classifiable.
Nonetheless, I was horrified in my first week at RADA
when a voice teacher, the late Michael McCallion,
listened to a group of us read the same text and then told us where we
came from. He got me bang to rights.
"Somewhere near Southampton," he said.
Spot-on. I grew up only 20 miles from that city,
which is where all of my mother's family lived,
and which I visited every couple of weeks throughout my childhood.
Michael's correct call was shaming.
It made me strive even more to erase this banner of belonging.
Shedding an accent is part of the process of self-obliteration which
necessarily precedes self-creation.
It's a manacle which binds you to wherever you came from,
to whatever faith or moral code you were brainwashed into.
Dumping them frees us, to go who knows where - on an adventure.
HE SPEAKS GAELIC
Scotland has a population of 5.2 million people.
Just over 1% of them, 55,000, speak Gaelic,
and of that 55,000, 65,000 work for the BBC...
LAUGHTER
..which funds the Gaelic channel Alba with actual money.
Alba is comprehensible only to that 1%, all of whom speak English.
There are no monoglot Gaelic speakers.
Thus huge sums are frittered away on life support for a language which is
a luxury - not a means of
communication, but a symbol of tribal belonging.
You have only to go back a mere seven centuries to a time when
Gaelic was spoken in Lothian and the Borders.
Authenticity will link you to the distant past of your ancestors -
that idyll of freezing mud,
untreated animal furs, plague and woad.
It was assumed that the advent of mass media would obliterate the
particularities of topographically determined jargon, and Newport,
Shropshire; Newport, Monmouthshire; Newport, Isle of Wight; Newport,
Pembrokeshire, would become orally indistinguishable parts of the same
community community.
Homogeneity would prevail.
They would, as team-spirit mentorship advisers advise
the easily advised, all sing from the same hymn sheet -
a sheet soiled by overuse, lack of
originality, and maps of Ireland.
At the third stroke, the time will be six o'clock and 20 seconds.
At the third stroke, the time will be six o'clock precisely.
At the third stroke, the time will be six o'clock and ten seconds!
Homogeneity didn't prevail - regional accents,
along with regional everything else, have been revived,
or have revived themselves.
If anyone is acting daft, I say... HE SPEAK IN OWN DIALECT
These accents are worn with such pride, such misplaced
pride in their differences and their tics and their whimsical
peculiarities, that they have become foreign to one another.
What are you like?! Shut up, I'm on the compu'er, all right?!
But Babel is inimical to social mobility - to mobility full stop.
It signals a fractured society,
composed of countless exclusive communities which,
whilst they may not be actively antipathetical to each other,
are certainly separate.
This is willing apartheid - apartheid with a sugar coating,
apartheid disguised as vibrant diversity,
but apartheid nonetheless.
KLAXON
Hello, Radio Olympia.
This is direct television from the studios at Alexandra Palace.
Received pronunciation, RP,
was the linguistic monoculture which has disappeared.
It was practical.
It enabled a pyromaniac from Elgin to understand an assurance assessor
from Port Talbot. A palliative nurse from Norwich, a
chemist from Wrexham,
and an undertaker from Whitehaven were mutually comprehensible.
The widely-held wrong idea about received pronunciation is that it
was a means by which people traitoriously sloughed their natural
identity, whatever that is.
What is germane here is that RP was a successful lingua franca,
an auxiliary language.
RP owes its iffy reputation - don't say "iffy", say "questionable" -
to its cinema and broadcast versions, which were aberration.
Since the opening of the television service in November 1936,
the programmes transmitted have covered a wide range of
entertainment and interest. Where on earth was it received from?
The Rank Charm School?
The douce Edinburgh suburb of Morningside?
It did RP a disservice.
It became an ingrown affectation as much as an accent.
It was a tribal badge, like any regional accent.
This was the tribe of the prissy and the bloodless.
It had its own jargon, which was anything but earthy,
but there was another form of RP which was simply functional.
It merely meant suppressing accentual tics and quirks of usage.
So a pan-British kind of comprehension was achieved.
JB Priestley's celebrated wartime talks were obviously those of a
Yorkshireman, but a Yorkshireman who could be understood in Yeovil.
Could I speak to Mr Oldenroyd, please?
Oldenroyd.
Oldenroyd!
He could have spoken Yorkshire words - "mardy", "gradely" -
which would have seemed ridiculous if spoken by a Southerner,
but which were nonetheless comprehensible to a Southerner.
Jargon and dialect and accent are inseparable.
I remember writing a book that became undeservedly popular,
they made a film out of it, called A Clockwork Orange.
The great peripatetic Mancunian novelist Anthony Burgess and the
great Aberdonian footballer Denis Law, a long-time resident of
Manchester, sound similar.
So as we're walking along, I mean, absolute silence,
he walked right by me. LAUGHTER
If you were Indian, you were out of the picture entirely.
RP was not a disguise - it was an instrument of social mobility,
a social mobility which no longer exists.
Ingerlandlandlandland and a helpful veteran of Stalingrad
won the World Cup in 1966.
By then, RP was on its way out.
This country's only successful national football manager,
Sir Alf Ramsey, was consequently
mocked for having overdone his elocution lessons.
I think, when selecting teams, selecting players,
then it becomes a little more lonely, inasmuch that one feels this
very heavy burden.
So what?
His RP was recognisably that of the sergeants' mess,
the workers' education authority, the saloon bar.
He spoke clearly,
clearly enough for Argentinian footballers to get his gist when he
called them "henimals" and so caused an international incident.
We have still to produce our best,
and this best is not possible until we meet the right type of
opposition, that is a team that comes
out to play football and not act as animals.
Genteel jargon poses a problem.
If you cannot call a spade a spade, what can you call it?
"Speech-impaired onanist" really doesn't cut it the way that
"dumb wanker" does.
And no-one ever called a linesman - sorry, an assistant referee -
a "coupling labia".
No genteel speaker would ever observe, let alone articulate,
that when a darting run down the channel ends up with the ball in the
back of the net - never the front -
the scorer's subsequent celebrations are proxy masturbation.
Or is that a load of testicles?
A bowl of bovine evacuation?
Genteel pretensions affect perception.
The genteel shut out that which does not accord with their straitened
world-view.
They see what they believe in.
We should believe in what we see - the scum, the sublime, the banal,
the numinous, the dreary, the Elysian...
and the operation waste seeping from a sack outside a clinic's back door.
How boring the genteel life must be -
a life that denies so much of life,
a life led in fear of life.
Inhibited language promotes inhibited behaviour and vice versa.
MUSIC: Kama Sutra by The Bonzo Dog Band
# We tried position 31, yeah, yeah, yeah
# It was terrific fun.... #
Is it the genitals themselves that cause offence?
Or is it the many pleasurable uses
they're put to?
Or is it the vulgar names that are
attached to them?
It's liable to remain a mystery.
Genteel persons are unlikely to respond to even the most courteous
inquiries about the fastidious pathology they suffer.
FRENETIC MUSIC PLAYS
Tabloid newspapers are written by people who can't write,
and read by people who can't read.
A character in Tom Stoppard's Night And Day observes,
"People think that rubbish journalism is produced
"by men of 'discrimination,' who are vaguely
"ashamed of truckling to the lowest taste.
"But it's not - it's produced by people doing their best work."
What can their worst be like?
Tabloid Ingerlandlandlandish
attempts to achieve urgency with a
mendacious mix of naive exaggeration, euphemism, elliptical
constructions, and arcane words
chosen for their punchiness.
Trash journalism is another jargon which is widely comprehensible but
whose usage does not extend beyond the page and the screen.
What is remarkable about its
impoverished, cliched lexicon is
that it would rarely be spoken by either its writers or
its readers.
Every match in every sport is a "clash".
No-one talks of going to a clash at St Mary's or Stamford Bridge -
the football ground, not the battle.
No-one boasts of their champagne lifestyle,
no-one quips about their harridan mother-in-law.
No-one bemoans the fate of tragic toddler Darina.
No-one owns up to having penned a script.
No-one witnesses a blaze.
No-one actually says, "vivacious strawberry blonde Tina."
"Bid", meaning hope to or try, is not used in speech.
Celebrity crossing patrol executive Howard Clent, 38, of Brierley hill,
Staffordshire, is bidding to be hailed Mr West Midlands Curry
Inferno Wallah for the third year in succession.
Last year, courageous Howard won the eat-off clash with Sparkbrook's
Norman Bullwinkle, downing no less than 14 megafowls,
despite rupturing his duodenum in the semifinal.
Quips Howard, "Overcoming the pain barrier is worth it,
"if that's what it takes to become a legend."
That way round - it's never, "Howard quips".
Every blowjob is described as a Disgusting Sex Act, a DSA.
A startling euphemism,
given the lack of disgust shown by tabloid tree-top commandos with long
lenses pointed at minor celebrities enjoying this form of
Vatican-approved contraception.
Just how disgusting can it be?
But we should not forget the tabloid world's prurience levels are
dangerously high and
its moral compass void.
Its hypocrisy is astounding.
Or would be, were we not so inured to it
and to its grubby schoolboy lexicon
of wardrobe malfunctions,
side boobs and flaunting,
flaunting, flaunting,
flaunting... This is the language of the verbally inert,
the language employed in the tabloid coarsening of just about everything.
It adds up to a codified pact between xenophobic morons -
xenophobic morons who sort of write and xenophobic morons who sort of
read. The average gutter-press reader is a slow reader.
It takes all day to read the paper
and to have its prejudices confirmed.
That coarsening is not, of course, restricted to the gutter press.
Television is equally infected.
What can one say about this great and gruesome city that hasn't been
said 1,000 times before?
This was where I lived for years
and, I imagine, accepted for years.
This is the first of four programmes in which I want to question some of
the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting.
People are beginning to take advantage of an astonishing new
liberty. We can actually talk about things and people with the same
freedom that you can in magazines and books.
All that power and certainty and ambition and cruelty...
The language used by such writers as James Cameron,
John Berger and Kenneth Tynan -
supple, articulate,
confident of its audience's comprehension -
has disappeared to be replaced by the grunts of primates.
Television's abject distractions are found in humiliation and bullying.
Freak shows fronted by scum-of-the-earth barrow boys and
freelance spivs are neither
intellectually nor morally justifiable.
They appeal to the lowest instincts.
TRIBAL MUSIC PLAYS
APPLAUSE
You cannot marriage multi-platform
kerosene with culture culture.
But no-one...ever magneto-feathered by double axeling.
Expand to contract, contract to expand.
Vibrantly diverse world-class content.
Aerosols - right brain aerosols.
Front loading!
Underlay bleed partnerships.
Have they really got poverty lust?
Or is it sea-horse quanting?
We need big dick thinking.
Big dick.
Otherwise we're retrofitting.
Thank you. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Jargon's ubiquity is a measure of the extent to which we are being
lied to and conned all the time.
Language and usage are gauges both
of gullibility and authority -
patient and agent,
the controlled and the dominant, the meek and the Trump.
Hi there!
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
Discrimination is vital in what is called the arts sector,
which has little to do with art and everything to do with following
exhausted fashions.
The ability to distinguish between noisome rubbish and noisome rubbish
which purports to be art is a demanding and arcane task.
It is not vouchsafed to anyone without a doctorate in paradigmatic
waste interventionism.
Nonetheless, even these experts make mistakes.
A highly qualified gallery cleansing operative might,
in an access of sanity, fail to recognise that a used condom,
a pizza with some cigarette butts in it and a few beer cans
comprise a major work, and sweep it away.
He or she could be chucking out a work worth millions.
But not to worry! When such a fate befell some art rubbish
by Gustav Metzger at the Tate - sorry, Tate full stop,
it's lost the "the" to make it, well, younger, buzzier, more
intensely, Serotally relevant -
it was pointed out by a spokesmoron that the artist had not actually had
to go to the trouble of picking up new rubbish to create a replacement
work of art but had simply found
a bag that had already been filled and discarded.
According to the spokesmoron,
who was presumably acting on the orders of a senior moron,
"The bags are taken from where they are found and placed in the gallery
"space. He doesn't manipulate what's in the bag."
Anthony Burgess wrote...
JAUNTY MUSIC PLAYS
Installations and found objects ceased to be dangerous decades ago.
It's a century since Marcel Duchamp changed the face of urinals forever.
Bad joke then - and one which has
only got worse with constant retelling.
Here are some of the properties
invariably ascribed to installations.
You can simply tick them off.
Really? They're about as dangerous as a soft toy.
A very expensive soft toy, of course.
About as subversive as a high-end BMW,
about as challenging as a poached egg.
And they sell for millions.
Installations, especially minimalist installations,
are the supreme trophies of the international establishment -
that super-haute bourgeoisie which is rich enough, gormless enough,
and boastful enough to own foundations, exhibition spaces,
parks and galleries -
places where the rubbish can be displayed.
Site-specific rubbish and mute rubbish,
for installations have absolutely nothing to say.
They might have been sworn to silence.
The Trappist dictum - be in this world, not of it -
is the very worst precept that any artist can follow.
Yet we live in Trappist art's golden age.
SLOW BRASS MUSIC PLAYS
In this debased milieu, anything is art if an artist says it is art.
This is rather akin to Tony Blair's conviction, or delusion,
that a course of action is correct because it is his course of action.
Quite who anoints a halfwit as an artist is a different matter.
But it's not important,
because whilst we may acknowledge the halfwit's right to call itself
an artist, we do not have to acknowledge that the art is anything
other than worthless.
The history of art since Duchamp has been the history of the kings and
even the pawns within the art loop,
patronising those outside the art loop
for their Ostrogothic philistinism
in failing to appreciate drivel,
mocking pretentious art criticism,
and, above all,
excoriating the jargon of art.
It's also the history of people too afraid and too peer-pressured
to admit that they know they're being flogged a pup.
There are no trades which are more contaminated
by meaningless self-congratulatory, obfuscating jargon
than those of curator,
patron, critic, gallery director,
panjandrum.
They speak only to each other.
Or to themselves - they are, often as not,
the same person in multiple roles.
The art loop is forever out to shock -
pickled corpses, obviously,
performance artists severing bits of their bodies to eat,
insulting royals,
suicides by several means,
burning buildings,
shit, shit and more shit,
drowning babies,
black pudding made from the artist's blood,
bestiality workshops,
and genitals by the truckload.
The usual stuff.
And because it is so usual,
so utterly familiar, it fails in its mission.
It does not shock as it intends.
Its commonplace triteness is not shocking at all.
But it does shock in a way that it is incapable of realising,
in a way that is not intended.
Its carelessly ignorant mauling of the English language is truly
shocking. The work of people with
tin ears and such lack of originality
that they resort to cliche.
Serota called his application to run the Tate "grasping the nettle".
That very title should have disqualified him.
But of course it didn't,
because the clique that chose him recognised him as one of their own,
with the same gross insensitivity to English.
It's for everyone, it is somehow... That insensitivity is shared by the
curator's curator, Hans-Ulrich Obrist,
who mauls the language with insouciant abandon.
The poor man is quite unaware that the words he expectorates are so
meaningless that they might constitute a private idiolect that
he alone can understand.
Within this whole information explosion,
curating is used more and more.
We can see it on Amazon - book lists are being curated.
We can see it in magazines - pages are being curated.
Concept stores are being curated.
Of course, it is understood.
It's a pidgin loosely based on English,
a lingua franca globally spoken by the few thousand people who inhabit
the art loop and who foist their tastes on the world.
Cultish, exclusive, incomprehensible
to the uninitiated, uncommunicative -
which is the very opposite of art -
entirely lacking in transparency.
It is scared to say anything.
Or is it art by people who want to be artists but who have no skills
whatsoever? It is unique -
a lingua franca which is also a language of exclusion,
a word fortress built by the inmates to keep out the mocking gawpers who
want to visit the asylum to jeer at the inmates.
A fortress that has, evidently, been breached.
We shall go on mocking.
MUSIC: Words by Bee Gees
# You think that I don't even mean
# A single word I say
# It's only words
# And words are all I have
# To take your heart away
# Da-da, da-da, da-da-da
# Da-da, da-da, da-da-da da... #