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Ken Loach in Cannes for his movie, The Angel's Share. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images
Ken Loach in Cannes for his movie, The Angel's Share. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

Keep our curses in rude health

This article is more than 11 years old
Victoria Coren
Ken Loach is upset he had to drop oaths from his film. But these words must not be tamed

How would you feel if this column started with a string of expletives? Just imagine it. First word of the piece: "C***!" There, in capital letters, no asterisks, right under my byline photo, as if scrawled there by a critic. Glaring at you from this noble, 220-year-old newspaper. Followed by about 12 repetitions of the same thing.

Would you laugh? Would you be offended? Would you, perhaps, say: "The Observer is very Glaswegian this morning"?

It could never happen. My copy editor, Stephen Pritchard, is just the wrong combination of kindly and liberal for such a revolution in the world of opening sentences. He wouldn't want to offend the readers, neither would he want to smash down the fist of censorship; he would simply remind me that he is the readers' editor, thus the one who'd spend the next 42 years replying apologetically to the letters of complaint. The more kindly and liberal he sounded as he detailed the workload, the guiltier I'd feel and the further I'd retreat from unbowdlerised obscenity. Tyrants take note: such is the evil genius of this approach that I have voluntarily typed asterisks into the single example I've used so far, just picturing his sorrowful face.

If you haven't guessed already from the clues above, I've been thinking about this because of Ken Loach.

The great film director is furious with the British Board of Film Classification for giving his latest film a 15 certificate only on condition that he reduced the expletives.

"I think we were allowed seven c***s," Loach revealed mournfully. "But only two of them could be aggressive c***s."

Seven c***s and two of them aggressive? Sounds like my local pub on a Thursday night. But the BBFC strikes me as rather reasonable; it's not like the film was banned for being rude. Mr Loach was simply given the choice of making a commercial decision: lower the c*** count if he wanted a younger audience. Which he evidently did and did.

I'm glad about that, though Ken Loach would say I would be a stick-in-the-mud: "The British middle class," he grumbled, "is obsessed by what they call bad language."

But that's not the reason. From a man of such cleverness and integrity, Ken Loach's complaint is plain illogical. He believes that the BBFC does not understand Glasgow, where such language is "completely natural", because they represent "middle England", which is much less sweary. He can't have heard the sound of Guildford when the local Waitrose runs out of Pimm's.

He said the BBFC should realise that: "There are different ways of speaking and they should be acceptable to all and sundry."

And yet, he also said that we should "have respect for our ancient oaths and swear words which we all enjoy".

Now, how can you respect an ancient oath while also saying that it "should be acceptable"? If it were acceptable, it wouldn't be an oath. In demanding its curtailment, it is the BBFC, not Loach, which is respecting the c-word's visceral power.

They wouldn't put it like that, of course. They would (and did) say they are protecting the public. But never mind the public; we'll cope. It's the word I'm worried about.

There's something miraculous in the power this word has retained over literally thousands of years. It comes, as you probably know, from a Germanic word that existed more than two millennia ago.

Ken Loach referred to its being used by Chaucer, but, despite its centuries of existence, Chaucer dared use it (as did Shakespeare, 200 years later) only in teasing puns and riddles. After a few more centuries, in 1928, an Oxford English Dictionary was published, in 10 volumes, containing more than 400,000 words – but not that one.

It's in the dictionary now, but still can't be used on mainstream television or radio. It still shocks. And not just among the middle classes; I think that's a rather snobbish thing to say.

Don't you think it's amazing, that one small word can wield such strength after so many years? To bandy it about, to neuter it with daily use, to make it "acceptable to all and sundry", strikes me as an act of terrible vandalism, like demolishing Stonehenge. Only more so, because you can build new astonishing structures but you can't invent new swear words.

You can devise new ways of being offensive, but you must construct them from a selection of existing words to create an offensive concept; you can't just coin a word and infuse it with power. That way lies "smeg" and "frak". Limp and lame, the pair of them.

There's a feminist argument that it's appalling to cower at a word that denotes our genitalia, but I'm rather proud that its potency lies in a history of fear that female sexuality was a dangerous force. It reminds us where we have come from, in at least two ways at once.

I once made a documentary series about the English language, including a section on the c-word (which we got special dispensation to use on BBC Two, given the context) in which Germaine Greer talked about the efforts she made in the 1970s to bring it into everyday use and remove its "malice".

Twenty years later, she said: "I don't think now that I want the c-word to be tamed. I love the idea that this word is still so sacred that you can use it like a torpedo. You can make strong men go pale."

If Ken Loach truly wanted more c***s in his film in order to hurry a wider audience into finding the word as bland and unshocking as his characters do, then I'm glad he was stopped.

And if he meant what he said about respecting our ancient oaths, then he should be, too.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Cannes 2012: Killing Them Softly and The Angels' Share - video review

  • Cannes 2012: The Angels' Share – review

  • The Angels' Share – review

  • The Angels' Share's Paul Brannigan: 'I've been slashed, stabbed and shot at'

  • Cannes: Ken Loach brands BBFC hypocritical over cuts to the c-word

  • Gary Maitland: not a load of rubbish

  • Q&A: Ken Loach

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