Tea at Trianon: How Swearing Became Twee

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, January 5, 2024

How Swearing Became Twee

I have always hated cursing and foul language. From Spiked:

When I was a girl, I thought swearing was big and clever. Now I’m an old lady, I find it weedy and dumb. It’s gone from being an outrageous way to bait the establishment – as it was when American comic Lenny Bruce got jailed for it in the 1960s – to being a telltale sign of someone who has nothing to say yet craves attention.

The swearers I really hate are the cussing conformists. These are those wealthy establishment entertainers, all of whom hold the same views on everything from Palestine to lady penises to the folly of Brexit, who cuss a blue streak at the drop of a hat. It started when Hugh Grant said ‘Fuck’ repeatedly at the start of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 and has ended up embodied by the ghastly Miriam Margolyes, who believes herself to be ‘outrageous’ for ‘saying the unsayable’, despite holding the same views as all other actors. Hearing well-born thespians pepper their language with four-letter words to add a frisson to their dreary personas makes me want to disown swearing completely and stick to the odd ‘blazes’ or ‘Ruddy Nora!’ instead.

My newly minted loathing of what my sainted mum called ‘language’ was crystallised recently when I read that last year the UK Advertising Standards Authority rejected two complaints about an advertisement for Dawn French’s comedy show, Dawn French is a Huge Twat. The ASA reasoned that ‘the use of the word would be understood by readers to be self-deprecating and tongue-in-cheek, and it was not, for example, used in a sexual context’. (Read more.)