Not Every Word Has to Go on the Record

First published in the Western People on Monday.

If we use ugly language with each other, does not make us ugly ourselves? Is contemporary language an evolving thing, where yesterday’s taboo is today’s commonplace, or is there a line where we lose articulacy and nuance, and revert a little to the level of the beast?

It would take a considerable level of denial not to have noticed that words that were once unthinkable in polite company and absolutely out of the question in broadcast or written media are now everywhere and, if anybody minds, he or she is keeping it very much to themselves.

This was brought home the weekend before last when one of the national papers published a short extract from rugby hero Ronan O’Gara’s (latest) autobiography. There’s a headline on the extract, and then a sub-headline, with what’s called a pull-quote from the story – the fruitiest stand-alone quote the sub-editors can find in order to entice the reader to read the full story. The seventeenth word in that pull-quote is a swear word. And not just any swear word, but their master and commander.

And the question is: why was it necessary for Ronan O’Gara to use that notorious word in his book, and why was it further necessary for the newspaper to print it in full, in all its still-shocking glory?

There are two questions at issue here. The first has to do with authenticity of how people speak now, in 21st Century Ireland. The second has to do with children, culture, future generations and the state of the English language itself.

The reason swear words are more commonly quoted and used in media now is because there is a ruling belief in media circles that authenticity is more important than prudishness. People swear all the time, and for the media to not report that accurately, word for word, is to dilute the truth. Better innocence be corrupted than a story not be fully reported, like Oliver Cromwell, warts and all.

And that’s fine, in theory. But if you go through most news stories, you will be hard put to find anywhere a synonym for a swearword will not get the message across to anyone with the wit to read between the lines. “The argument became heated, and the defendant implored the accused to ‘go away’ in the strongest possible terms.” It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what was said there.

But even that small example is a particular type of story, a court case. Court cases are important journalistically – you need special permission from the court to report them. They’re serious business.

Rugby, where we came in, is a game. Certainly it’s a professional game now and people invest a lot emotionally in it. But it’s still a pastime, something to worry about when you’re not worrying about the economy or the health service or the state of the roads. It’s important, but it’s not serious. It’s certainly not important enough for a national newspaper to deploy what is still one of the most shocking words in the language in a story where it isn’t needed.

It’s doubly disappointing because a Ronan O’Gara story in the newspaper will be devoured by children for whom O’Gara has been a hero for, literally, all of their lives. It would be an innocent child indeed who has not heard that word or its fellow travellers by now, but to see it used so causally in the newspaper gives the impression that it’s just another word, like cabbage, shoe or wardrobe. And it’s not.

The paper where the O’Gara story appeared prides itself on being the national “paper of record.” What that means is that they will print a news story even if it’s cripplingly boring because they think it’s important that there should be a record of that. In real terms, it means when you buy that paper, you are more likely to read a story about the Troika and European interest rates than who whacked whom on last night’s episode of “Love/Hate.”

And printing the Ronan O’Gara quote in full is part of that full record. By using the full quote, the paper wants to make sure the reader is in no doubt that O’Gara knew, when his phone rang, that his international career was at an end.

But again. This is a game, not an event of great importance. What great injustice to the truth would have been done had the quote been finessed a little. Like so:

“When it rang I had a look at the name. Declan Kidney. Oh no. Ignored it. Deccie obviously wasn’t ringing me to tell me I was captain against France.”

Would that have been such a disservice to the truth? The quote still reads authentically. The feeling O’Gara had when his phone rang and he saw the same is still crystal clear. What you don’t have is a child reading the paper and getting that one small slice less innocent before it is absolutely necessary for him or her.

Language is terribly important. Nothing has meaning without language, as it’s only through language we communicate. People are always going to swear, of course. Reader, if you are in McHale next summer and it happens that Roscommon beat Mayo by a late, late goal as in 2001, no-one will think any less of you if you if frustration overcomes you and you let yourself down for a moment by giving full expression to your dismay.

But when we’re writing, we do so in cold blood. Even under the lash of the deadline, we still have lots of time to choose which words to put in and which words to leave out. Reading the paper and becoming aware of the news is one of paths from childhood to adulthood. Papers should be aware of this responsibility, and remember that it is not, in fact, absolutely necessary that every word uttered goes on the record.

On Renouncing Swearing for Lent

An Spailpín Fánach has decided to conduct an experiment, and is renouncing swearing – or cursing, if you like – for Lent.

It’s been quite some time since your faithful chronicler of contemporary Irish life gave up anything for Lent. The priests of Ballina in the County Mayo in the 1970s still glowed with the reforms of Vatican II, but your narrator and his fellow urchins had the black hearts of schoolboys everywhere, and we knew soft boys when we saw them.

The sandal-wearers told us that loving God in a positive way was just as good as that nasty old self-sacrifice. We nodded assent eagerly, and then off to Brennan's sweetshop with us to gorge our fat little faces on blackjacks, curly-wurlys, catch bars, gobstoppers, sticks of Eniscrone rock and, best of all, the 1970s equivalent of the asphodel that blooms in the Elysian fields, super refined sugar marketed as sherbet, sold in yellow paper packets and consumed by dipping a stick of liquorice into the powder and sucking away. Good times.

An Spailpín is not necessarily in the process of a religious conversation; my Lenten resolution has a practical aspect. Like most Irish countrymen An Spailpín swears like a sailor. The blog stays clean – someone seems to have already cornered the swearing market there – but in his private life your faithful narrator almost unconsciously embellishes every remark with a frightful curse, rich in scope and intent.

And I don’t want to be that guy any more. I hear parents swearing at their children in town in the most vile way and feel sick to my marrow. I don’t want to be on that side any more. It was the same with giving up smoking; eventually, you realise that while it was cool for Bogie and Bacall in the forties, right now smoking is very much a Lee and Nat’lee pastime.

Swearing is a loss to the language on both sides; everyday discourse becomes cheapened as it’s run through with qualifiers that don’t really mean anything any more, and then in moments of extremis when there’s only one word that can describe something, that word’s meaning and impact is lost from overuse.

Perpetual swearing can let you down. One of the greatest philosophers I have known – from the rebel county of Cork, of course – told me once that he had a swear switch in his head, that allowed him to converse in one language with his dear mother, and in quite another with myself. I know what he means, and I seldom cross those circuits myself.

But all the same; you never know when you’ll be sitting in traffic, and someone cuts across you, and you get out of the car and make certain remarks pertaining to uncertain ancestry and unlawful carnal knowledge and all manner of stuff, and some little five thousand year old nun gets out of the car – a 1983 Austin Metro, or some similar chariot – and starts apologising to you, and the ground does not open up and swallow you. It never does.

The chief problem with swearing denial, of course, is what to use to fill the gap. Nothing ever seems to quite replace the oomph. The writers of Battlestar Galactica delight in using the neologism “frack” but it sounds rather too close to the root; a lot like Norman Mailers use of “fug” in the Naked and the Dead. How odd it seems now that the publishers baulked at the original. It wouldn’t surprise me if people were Christening their kids with that word now.

A friend of An Spailpín delighted in using the word “crikey” for a week or two five years ago. It was charming, but it didn’t stick. She enjoyed a week as a visitor from Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers, but she’s very much back to herself since.

An Spailpin was always charmed by the pouting Scarlett O’Hara, and her expression of “fiddle-dee-dee” when she found out that the big dance had been cancelled because the Yankees were rampaging through Dixie. Myles na Gopaleen cooked up some marvellously baroque insults in the fifties, such as thoorlramawn and goshcogue, most of which he hurled at the misfortunate Doctor Alfred O’Rahilly of UCC (“he may deny he is a thoorlramawn, but he cannot deny that he is Cork”).

The rugby against England will be the first big hurdle, of course, and it won’t be easy to watch Mayo play Westmeath in Charlestown next month with no stronger injuction to calm the nerves than “for goodness’ sake, referee!” but if a man can see those challenges through he is ready for the greater challenges ahead. Wish me luck.





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