Belfast councillor Séamas de Faoite got more than he bargained for last week when he cornered secretary of state Chris Heaton-Harris at an event in Stormont.
Grasping his opportunity, Séamas accused the Tory minister of using brutal budget cuts as a way of putting pressure on the DUP to restore devolution.
Obviously stung by the suggestion, Heaton-Harris responded, saying de Faoite was talking b*****s – not exactly parliamentary language, but to the point. A source close to Heaton-Harris defended his comment, saying, "Factually incorrect points were made, and these were directly rebutted".
I was amused by the hysterical reaction from moralising hypocrites over the use of such language. Personally, I love to flip and basket – you get my meaning; indeed, I swear so much an Englishman once thought I suffered from Tourette’s.
And I know I’m not alone, for we Irish curse with more regularity and conviction than almost any other nation. I have friends who would be struck dumb if you removed obscenities from their vocabulary; one is able to utter a whole sentence comprised of nothing but curses.
Not that I’d argue such language is acceptable in all situations. I have self-imposed rules such as never cursing on social media – yes, you can go and check. I do, however, sprinkle expletives in my live shows and occasionally in my online videos, as with both I can stipulate an adult audience.
I have noticed that as I’ve grown older, my language has moderated somewhat. I even managed on one occasion to complete a full stage show without one expletive, though it wasn’t easy.
Read more:We treat smoking as a precursor of cancer – we need to do the same with sunbeds
Read more: The FBI should have known Irish pubs are the natural habitat of lying Irish ex-pats
Every year I say to my comedy wingman, Terry McHugh, that we should try and do our tour without cursing, but every year he turns the stage blue, infecting me with his obscenities. Yes, it’s all McHugh’s fault...
Joking aside, cursing allows me an almost visceral release of tension, anger and pain. I wonder, when they hit their thumb with a hammer, if the sanctimonious say, "Oh blast and bother". I doubt it somehow. Indeed, scientific studies have proved that blurting out an obscenity in such a scenario reduces pain, making cursing a non-addictive and natural analgesic.
Not that I ever stood a chance of linguistic purity, having worked in bars from the age of eight. By the age of 10, I’d a lexicon of bad language any adult would have been proud of. Not that I was allowed to use any at home, as my parents were quite conservative on the topic of acceptable language.
One slip of the tongue would result in a battering, which occasionally led to another slip of the tongue, which would extend the punishment until the errant tongue was silenced.
Aged 17, I’d a summer job working in a bar situated at the gates of Belfast docks, and my vocabulary of vulgarities increased exponentially. Sailors from every corner of the world taught me their nation’s forbidden words and, at one stage, I could have held my own in an argument in not only most European nations, but a few African ones as well.
My favourite teachers of unmentionables were the Italians, who elevated insult from the verbal to the physical, instructing me on a litany of hand signs which covered everything from questioning a man’s parentage to his physical attributes, or their lacking. So, if you happen to be visiting Italy, Afghanistan, Iran or Greece, avoid giving the thumbs up as in those countries its meaning is not positive.
As the mediums through which we communicate evolve daily, our need to insult perseveres. Sadly, my years served as an apprentice to obscenity has been rendered obsolete in our digital age, where bad language has been reduced to abbreviations.
Today, we’re able to grievously insult someone with nothing more than a selection of capital letters appended to a social media post. While more compact, I think we can all agree it will never allow the same satisfaction as a good old-fashioned guttural ‘flipping basket’.
No doubt there will be a small army of the perennially-offended who will be outraged by my defence of what they’ll see as gutter language. In response, here’s a story told by Christopher Hitchens about the famous dictionary creator, Dr Samuel Johnson.
Having completed his monumental work, Johnson was visited by a delegation of London’s respectable womanhood who congratulated him on his decision to exclude all indecent words from his dictionary.
The great man replied: "Ladies, I congratulate you on your persistence on looking them up."
