That Girl from Derwent dwells on the value of religion this Christmas.
That Girl from Derwent has learned a few more things about prejudice since moving up North.
That Girl From Derwent reckons if you're going to be offensive, you should find a better reason.
That Girl from Derwent is having a few difficulties facing up to the facts of her looming graduation.
‘Does fingering count?’ I demanded of my fellow actor, and the room dissolved into a mix of shocked, nervous and genuinely amused laughter. I couldn’t believe I had said it. I had actually asked, if fingering counted, in front of a room of people. It didn’t matter that I was reading from a script, what mattered was that it me, me! who had said it. I had been the quiet one of the group; then thanks to the seat I had chosen when I had walked into the room that morning, I had been picked to provide the amusing voice of sexual candour.
So, I said it. I said it, and the workshop passed on, with us all rather assuming that was enough diversion for one day.
That was until one girl realised she had forgotten her text sample we were supposed to read from. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘I’ve got another book in my bag…’ Cue an excerpt from Trainspotting, you know, that bit where he’s gone cold turkey from the drugs, all effing and blinding and that dreaded C-word that caused our reader to blush and stammer and apologise.
Yet it was liberating in a way. Here we were, all fairly middle-class, fairly subdued students who took care not to swear in front of our elders, whether from respect or habit or both. Here we were, talking about sex, and drugs and swearing right left and centre. I think I said f*cking more times in that class than I have in a long while. And we could laugh about it.
But we weren’t swearing and being obscene for the sake of it, or trying to show how “cool” we were in our apparent fearlessness in saying the most unacceptable word we could: that’s kind of crude. Instead, we were saying what needed to be said. We were writing how people act, how people think.
We were being real.
Or something like that anyway.
Fast forward to my first seminar of this term and I realise I had missed something from this class. Cue a discussion on the empowerment of, well, that dreaded C-word. Or lack of empowerment. My tutor just wouldn’t stop saying it and everyone seemed to get increasingly embarrassed. But why? After all, it’s just a word, right? And more importantly, it is a word that was crucial in the discussion of the text that seminar. So what was there to be embarrassed or ashamed about?
But words like this are multi-functional: it’s not enough to say they are simply words, because they are not. They’re not even expletives as well as words. Words like this have a wider meaning, ascribed to them by our mistrust of them, our horror at their use. By giving these words the power to offend, we are pushing their original meanings back into the realm of the taboo. In my original class I came out feeling alive, empowered even. But that is because we had removed the offensive tendency from the words. I had forgotten what usually accompanies the usage of “swearwords”: anger and repression - often some kind of pain. Whether this pain is self-inflicted or inflicted upon someone else, it doesn’t matter. These words are the province of the more primal side of human nature. They are words that mean more than most in the human repertoire.
That doesn’t mean I think we should use them the most. I think it means we should use them the most carefully. Unlike some authors I can think of.
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