Today… I shall be swearing on this blog… You have been warned… Do not continue reading if you are offended by words labelled by some as swear words… Let me tell you why i am going to swear here today…

There seems to be some sort of uprising in England; a re-emergence of the old members of the Mary Whitehouse fan club… They have dusted off their “no foul language” sticker albums, donned their “I love Mary” t-shirts once again and set about this country trying to force their dogma and righteousness down the throats of the rest of us.

These Mary Whitehouse wannabes seem to have the same manner as Barbara Woodhouse… The famous UK dog trainer… They seem to be unable to communicate without giving orders… Instead of offering up a strict tonality to deliver the instruction “SIT!” They instead use the same tonality to order the rest of us to stop swearing… Not only does it make me want to swear, but surely the tonality, underlying intention and delivery are just as harmful.

The Daily Mirror tabloid newspaper here in the UK is championing this cause. Which seems bizarre on so many levels, they are running a campaign to clean up language in the media in the UK… Oh dear… They are running the risk of turning into the Daily mail…

So first of all we had this recent media scandal involving Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross… hardly anyone complained about it when it went live, yet when the rest of the media honed in on it, suddenly, hundreds and thousands of people decided that they had nothing better to do than to consume their energy protesting about how offensive it all was… They must have tuned in afterwards to check it out in order that they could complain about it! Hahaha.

Then this week, we had a Panorama documentary charting public opinion — based on feedback from focus groups! — about whether or not we need to stop ‘bad language’ in the media.

Sheeeeez… What century are we living in? Hasn’t the Victoria era passed us by?

You see, I beleive, it is the association that the individual has to any given word that is the problem… You are the listener of the word, not the user! I have used a story many times before that I first heard Michael Breen say when someone complained about him swearing at an NLP training, he replied “what about the word ‘duck’ then? Is ‘duck’ 75% as bad as the other word I just used?”

Hahahaha… I love that.

You know what? Many of these words are Anglo-Saxon words and part of our history… The Sex Pistols were taken to court and prosecuted in the late 70s because of the title of their seminal album “Never Mind The Bollocks” — which is a piece of musical history and a truly rip-roaring, poignant, exciting and enthralling album which very few acts have ever managed to replicate since… It was quashed in court because the word was shown to have been around in history… I mean, it was also a real working class expression used by many at that time too!

How on earth can anyone attempt to deny me (or anyone else) the right to swear?

I use the odd swear word on my trainings… I have sworn my entire life… I am not limited in some way, it has just been part of who and how I am.

Answer me this, how can you ban language? How can you ban words? How are words offensive?

Why oh why should I tolerate someone else’s interpretation of the words I use?

I am the one using the word, so ask me how I am using it, don’t tell me!

What’s more, if you don’t like the way I’m using it, so what? It is my right.

It is freedom of expression, without that we are nothing but some kind of slave… This is not some totalitarian state, we are not an opressed mass, we did not democratically choose to live under a regime of word Nazis.

It is my language, I’ll say fuck if I want to.

🙂