Bad Language and the Battle for Meaning

When my dad was really angry with us he would use a single swear word — and then, as if to make the point more forcibly, he would add, “And that’s dockside language!” The language was as harsh as the conditions for a dockside labourer. It did not belong in the home. Yet we had behaved so badly that we had made him use that word in front of us, adding to our guilt.

Nowadays, swearing is common in films and books and on TV, as well as in everyday speech. I rarely encountered it growing up, apart from the milder expletives. When I followed my father onto the docks in the early 1970s, the constant swearing made me feel physically ill until I got used to it. Now I think I swear too much, but I still cannot bring myself to use the C word.

It is not the words themselves that are obscene, but the social and historical context in which they are used. Words now considered vulgar that refer to the sexual act and to intimate body parts were commonplace in medieval times and appeared in literature as well. The really bad oaths referred to religion and were considered blasphemous.

Another argument against swearing is that it suggests an impoverished language, and hence an impoverished way of thinking; but Dostoevsky famously claimed that everything a Russian might think or speak could be expressed with one word, an obscene term for penis. The great Russian cognitive psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, quoted a passage from Dostoevsky in his own book, ‘Thought and Language’ in which Dostoevsky described a conversation he had witnessed between a group of workmen consisting of that single word, but with differences in tone and gesture to indicate six different meanings, “So, without uttering a single other word, they repeated that one beloved word six times in a row, one after another, and understood one another completely.” (Dostoevsky: Diary of a Writer)

Fifty years after Dostoevsky wrote this, Leon Trotsky expressed a different view in a collection of essays entitled ‘The Problems of Everyday Life’. He wrote: “Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, disrespect for human dignity – one’s own and that of other people.”

He agrees with Vygotsky about the relation between thought and language but concludes that in the wake of the revolution: “The working class needs a healthy language not less but rather more than other classes: for the first time in history it begins to think independently about nature, about life and its foundations – and to do the thinking, it needs the instrument of a clear incisive language.”

I think the truth lies somewhere between Dostoevsky and Trotsky. In the 1970s I was on the platform for a socialist public meeting. Chairing the meeting was the union convenor from a local construction site. I had seen him at mass meetings carry all before him in speeches of impeccable logic that were liberally peppered with my dad’s ‘dockside language.’ On the night he was tongue-tied, and his remarks were like the mangled prose that you sometimes hear from union officials on TV when trying to ape the language of university-educated commentators with whom they are appearing. It turned out that John’s biggest fear that night was that he might inadvertently let slip a swear word and disgrace himself and our socialist cause in front of a mixed audience.  

We should avoid language that is commonly used to express contempt for people of a certain colour, or creed, or race or gender. It dehumanises you and the people who are victims of your hatred. And going back to Trotsky’s point about clear incisive language, it is not just about obscenity. If we shout, “Fascist Pig!” at every right wing authoritarian does that obscure the true meaning of fascism?

Conservative and Labour politicians and their allies in the mass media want to obscure meanings. This has become starkly clear during the violence by Israel in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Israelis are ‘killed’ while Palestinians ‘die’. Israeli ‘hostages’ are exchanged for Palestinian ‘prisoners’. The IDF ‘carries out military operations’. Hamas is ‘guilty of terrorist attacks’.

Sometimes they go too far and have to apologise, as with Manchester United’s co-owner, Jim Ratcliffe. The billionaire tax exile who lives in Monaco had the temerity to say that the UK had been colonised by migrants who were bringing down the economy. He responded to the outrage by saying, “I am sorry that my choice of language has offended some people in the UK and Europe”! He is sorry we were offended. He is not sorry for being a racist and a hypocrite.

In the end the real obscenity is not in the language itself, but in the way it is used by the rich and powerful to sanitise their truly obscene ideologies that promote greed and suffering and hatred, and to demonise their opponents. Do words matter? Too fucking right they do!