Ranting again

On his blog, Steve Brewer mentions a survey undertaken by the UK subsidiary of an Australian company. Just why a company supplying motor oil should want to survey the amount of swearing done by people is something of a puzzle, but their survey shows that 87% of Brits swear on a daily basis, with the average being 14 times a day. I'm strongly inclined to agree with Benjamin Disraeli (if indeed it was him who coined the phrase) when he said ‘there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics'. I always treat the results of surveys and opinion polls with more than just a pinch of salt.

Part of the problem is that the announcement of the results of a survey fail to give sufficient information. In this case, for example, we don't know that all respondents had the same idea of what constitutes a swearword. There is no doubt that a century or so ago the words ‘damn' and ‘blast' would have been called swearwords by the world at large, whereas in these days I imagine that many people — if not the majority — would consider them pretty mild.

I also question the average of 14 swearwords a day. Go into a garage workshop, onto a building site or army base, in fact anywhere that is entirely or almost entirely male dominated and you will be lucky to hear a sentence that doesn't include a swearword, usually starting with ‘F'.

It irritates me enormously (can one be irritated enormously?) when scriptwriters and authors use excessively strong language in search, they claim, of verisimilitude. I really think it unnecessary. After all, there can be very few viewers or readers who are so far from the real world that they are unaware of what goes on. (I should have written ‘intensely' instead of ‘enormously', but the meaning is much the same.)

I can't claim that I never swear, but there are a number of words that I do avoid using. I do wish others would follow my example, but I must remember that if I can't control the speech of others, I can control my attitude to it.