swearing

Jailed for swearing: what next in our authoritarian police state?

Tweets are coming in from Manchester police listing the sentences given to those who took part in the riots. People are being jailed for swearing at police. Yes, prison. For swearing. Not assault, not criminal damage, not theft. Swearing. For fuck’s sake.

This is reminding me of the court lists from 150 years ago when people were given life sentences or transported to Australia by the boatload for petty theft.

If swearing is now an imprisonable offence, the days can’t be far off when you can be sent down for shouting, talking a bit too loudly, being boring in public or wearing offensively unfashionable clothes.

Meanwhile, we’re being told the government wants to stop rioters from accessing social media. Makes me wonder, if the government can censor your social media use for rioting today, could they could censor it for armchair dissent tomorrow?

If they can force journalists to hand over photos of protests today, can we expect we will all be spying on each other tomorrow?

If it’s OK for the police to beat you for riding a bicycle today, what can speeding drivers expect tomorrow?

If you can be evicted from your home for unacceptable or illegal behaviour, does that mean the tax dodgers and expenses fiddlers will also be looking for a new place to live?

What’s next? That’s the question everyone should be asking, ‘cause tomorrow it could be you.

Pic credit: Worradmu, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2026

Too posh to swear: and getting a warm glow in Waitrose

The Pet Peeves thread of the writers’ forum I frequent has now been going strong for an astonishing four months and has passed the 3,000-comment mark, with peeved journos and eds popping up all the time to add their rants about mis-used words and bad grammar.

One of the things that’s been enraging them recently is the irritating use of “less” when “fewer” is meant, and vice versa.

Just as greengrocers’ apostrophes drive the pedantic to distraction, so does supermarkets’ use of “less” (as in “10 items or less at this checkout”).

I remarked that I’d got such a warm glow on seeing the correct “fewer” used in Waitrose that I vowed to shop there again. The grammar-deficient Morrisons, I added, with its insistence on “less items” and its missing apostrophe, could bog off.

This prompted an enquiry from an American as to whether I meant “bug off” as he’d not heard the expression before.

Two other forum members told him no, that was right; bog off is a British English expression. One said I was deliberately making a play on words, what with the supermarkets’ use of “bogof” (buy one get one free) promotions.

Actually, she’d credited me with being more clever than I really am, as this hadn’t occurred to me.

I did learn something new though; “bog off” derives from “bugger off”, according to www.wiktionary.org. Another source, www.urbandictionary.com, offers this amusing definition: “a word upper-middle-class kids that are up their own arse use to say ‘fuck off’ or ‘piss off’ because they are too posh to swear”. This definition cites “Bog off, Dave, stop humping my leg” as being an instance where bog off might be used.

This said it so much better than I could have done, so I threw this definition into the discussion. One of our resident pedants immediately pointed out that that it should read “…kids who are up their own arses”.

Pic  credit: Tungphoto, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1708