Youth drives change, and crabb'd age often resents this fact. I belong in the latter category, and admit I am something of a pedant and a prig, tendencies that often beset ageing teachers of English whose early lives were sheltered ones. The people I grew up with, for example, did not swear: my grandfather was always refined, even when watching football matches.
He would pull at his flat cap and mutter, 'Sausage of a kick. Do better meself.' He had been a nifty little rover in his youth, and so had my father, whose contrasting demeanour as a barracker left quite a lot to be desired. But he did not swear, either, and his invective was often fairly imaginative, thus chiming with the family proclamation that the use of swear words was an indication of an impoverished vocabulary. 'Open ya glass eye, umpy! Make another decision like that and then go out and cut ya throat!'
Those were the days when children could expect to have their mouths washed out with soap and water if they uttered certain words; they didn't even have to be four-letter ones. Fast forward quite a few years: once I got the hang of Greek swear words and realised my children were using them, I rejected the idea of soap and water, but began a system of fines: the pocket nerve is always sensitive, I reasoned. I took the same approach to profanity, while pondering the strange fact that the most outwardly religious cultures are also often the most blasphemous.
But of course social change has meant that words that were once considered deeply shocking are now part of the everyday speech of the young. When I am visiting Australia, I find this trend particularly jarring.
At least I am not alone, for English writer Susan Hill objects to the frequent use of a certain four-letter word. She points out that it simply means excrement, and asks why people use it in unrelated contexts. She wishes they would stop to think, as it is an unpleasant word and contributes to the blurring of meaning. I'm with Hill, and also dislike the fact that most younger people seem to have no idea that older people might find such usage offensive. But I'm pleased to report that my Melbourne-based son still sticks to my rules. So do his brothers.
In the small country towns of my youth, where many people were forced to leave school at 14, there was not too much swearing (shearing sheds excepted), but there was often deep confusion as to correct usage. 'Ain't' was a common construction, as was 'seen' instead of 'saw.' Gs and aitches were dropped very frequently, and the word 'haitch' was common. 'I ain't lyin'. I seen him 'elping 'imself in the milk bar.' Some years later, the present tense of the verbs to go and to say were multi-purpose. And the conversation filler 'like' was putting in its appearance. 'He goes down the street, like, and then he says ...'
General speech now seems to be almost uniformly correct, but 'like', supposedly originating in California, has been singularly persistent throughout the Anglophone world, with Love Island contestants perhaps trying for a record in recently using the word 76 times in under five minutes.
"Of course the five-letter word 'class' always rears its ugly head."
Many Brits, however, have had enough. Copthorne Primary School in Bradford, West Yorkshire, has forbidden the use of 'like', and pupils are supposed to use sentences in their replies to questions rather than other four-letter words such as 'good' and 'nice'.
Of course the five-letter word 'class' always rears its ugly head in Britain, so state school educators rightly fear that pupils at private schools, because of more opportunities to develop speaking skills, have the fluency that helps them achieve places in elite universities and in professions such as banking and the law.
To return to the subject of swearing. The older generation is aware of arguments in favour of: it's honest, it does away with mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, and the plosive nature of the words ensures catharsis. Most of us read Lady Chatterley's Lover, and adjusted, way back then, to seeing certain words in print. But it's hard to do away with one's conditioning, so we still sympathise with Mark Twain, who believed that a person's character 'may be learned from the adjectives which he/she habitually uses in conversation'.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.