Great Column Jim! I Didn't Know You Had It In You

Dim bulb or bright light? You tell me You tell me
May 01, 2007
Jim Coyle

It was with considerable shame, but no real surprise, that we read the Toronto Star's editorial page "Darts and Laurels" on the weekend, the ne plus ultra of who's hot or not, in or out, up or down around town.

We'd always feared that sooner or later the brother-in-law (every family has one) was going to step in it. And there he was, darted for masterminding the controversial ad campaign that urges those interested in saving electricity (in a typeface designed to be salaciously misconstrued) to Flick Off!

Sophomoric, the Star observed. And rude.

Fair enough. But hardly news to his long-suffering kin.

We won't name him or his company here. Publicity is exactly what the manipulative mountebanks who make their living in advertising want, isn't it? We'll just say, serves him -----n' right, because he's always been a filthy-minded so and so.

Not, of course, that we don't love him dearly. He's godfather, after all, to our first-born. He was always considered the "cool'' uncle. But we saw this sort of thing coming a long time ago.

Back before he had kids of his own, when our house was knee-deep in toddlers, he used to breeze in, teach our guys to make rude noises with their armpits, give them whoopee cushions, books about farting dogs and such, then swan off to Queen St. W., or wherever it was ardent trendies hung out, leaving us to deal with the scatological fallout.

Charming rogue or not, he was a spit disturber then. And evidently he still is.

What's puzzling, though, is not the dispute about whether or not the campaign is puerile or whether – given that high school kids are being suspended these days for saying rude things on the Internet – the province's involvement is a little hypocritical and light on leadership in matters of civil discourse.

What's really amazing is how the clever little SOB managed to pass off a pun on the F-word as creative and edgy.

"Most cultures swear and have been doing so for a very long time," Bill Bryson observed in The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. "Most of our swear words have considerable antiquity."

In fact, swearing is so old and so prevalent it has its own literature.

A dozen years ago, Jesse Sheidlower wrote The F-Word.

In 2001, Ashley Montagu published The Anatomy of Swearing. According to that, the word f--k first appeared in print in a 1503 poem by the Scot George Dunbar and was probably in liberal use for centuries before that.

"After OK, f--k must be about the most versatile of all English words... used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena," Bryson said.

But in his estimation it probably reached its zenith during the Second World War with the invention of the acronyms snafu and fubar, and the virtuoso (if possibly apocryphal) outburst by a soldier who declared of a broken jeep – admirably alliterative adjective, noun, verb – that the "f----n' f-----`s f----d.''

To be frank, use of the F-word (or surrogate) is about as cutting-edge and original nowadays as all those suburban teenagers wearing pants down around their ---es and saying "Yo'' to each other all day.

It's been a couple of generations since George Carlin – who was, at 69, cursing it up as happily as ever down at Thomson Hall just a few weeks ago – famously itemized the seven words you couldn't say on television. But that was then.

A lot of the once verboten has long since passed into mainstream use.

You can't turn on a quality television program – The Sopranos, Six Feet Under –without catching an earful of it.

The NHL playoffs routinely feature close-ups of coaches and players – even such a milk-fed boy-next-door as Sidney Crosby – effin' this or that misfire or blown call right into our impressionable living rooms.

Leslie Savan, who wrote a column on advertising and commercial culture for the Village Voice for more than a decade, said in Slam Dunks and No-Brainers, her recent book on language, that the formerly forbidden began making guest spots in the 1990s on TV and ads such as a well-known soft drink's "Make 7-Up Yours."

NYPD Blue unleashed a barrage. Cable TV opened the dikes. Bono could tell NBC viewers that winning a Golden Globe is "really f-----g brilliant."

Hit movies were called Meet the Fockers.

And for the Gutenberg set, French Connection UK has long emblazoned T-shirts with the signature FCUK.

Over time, the most embarrassing thing about that campaign, Savan said, "was its own desperation."

But not enough, alas, to dissuade Planet Hollywood UK from flogging PHUK sweatshirts. Or others to make a buck or two by joining the f------ party.

Anyway, let the decent citizens of Toronto the Good comfort themselves in the knowledge that what goes around will almost surely come around.

The brother-in-law's own kids are still cherubic. But adolescence looms. Just wait until one of them asks their granny to pass the flicken' potatoes.

That's when the gravy'll really hit the fan.

Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.