Friday 6 February 2009

Let's be non-PC

No, I don't like that term, non-PC, so let's be politically incorrect (that's better).

Golliwog. GOLLIWOG. GOLLIWOG.

Gosh, I do feel better now!

I've been following with some interest the story of Carol Thatcher, daughter of our one-time Prime Minister, Margaret (now Baroness) Thatcher, who has been sacked by the BBC for using the word 'golliwog' during a private conversation in the Green Room after a show on which she had appeared. Although Miss T was not accused of racial bias (she claimed she used the word in a joking manner), somebody leaked the fact of its utterance to a newspaper. If that somebody had tried to leak this to me when I worked for a newspaper (they wouldn't have because it wasn't that sort of paper and anyway I wasn't on the editorial team), but if they had, my response would have been to tell them to grow up and get a life. Just imagine it: "Please, Mr Editor, Carol Thatcher used a naughty word."

And this is the very same British Broadcasting Corporation which only suspended for three months the vastly overpaid (at £6 million a year) and equally vastly over-rated Jonathan Ross when he and fellow "comedian" (I use the word reluctantly) Russell Brand made an obscene telephone call on air.

This is one time when I do have an opinion - but I won't state it here because I don't use that kind of language in a public forum.

3 comments:

(not necessarily your) Uncle Skip said...

I thought for a moment you were excited about the verification word. Then I remembered that I'd seen the word before.

So I wonder why they REALLY fired her.

We probably should be paying closer attention to what George Orwell said?

Why don't you tell us what you really think?

Brighton Pensioner said...

Funny you should mention George Orwell: my newspaper also remembered him!

There is talk of the possibility/fact that the BBC now has a distinctly left-wing, anti-Thatcher bias.

The whole PC thing generally p****s me off. I have no objection to somebody calling me Whitey or a bloody Pom or whatever, and I see nothing inherently derogatory in golliwog, negro (and nigger is only a corruption of negro, presumably of negro origin in the southern states). When will it be an offence to call you a Yank (even though you don't come from New York?).

(not necessarily your) Uncle Skip said...

I don't believe that I would use the word "nigger," no matter what its origin. It is extremely derogatory.

As for Yank, it is only offensive, and even then only slightly, when another American uses the term. Most likely someone from the South. The only way in which I would find it offensive is that the term primarily refers to those from the Northeast, and as you well know, I can't even come close to being from there. I wouldn't presume to correct you or any non-American because, by your definition, I am a Yank... and proud of it.