I had a yoghurt today. I still have two of the nine yoghurts that I bought the other week remaining. You do the math
(ematics).
I was delighted to see that only 93 people complained about Johnny Rotten describing everyone one who voted for him as "fucking cunts". When you think that ten million people were watching him say that, then 93 complaints is hardly significant at all. I think that's 0.00093% of the viewers of the show who were aggrieved enough by his (I think) rather witty and charming outburst. He was after all annoyed that people liked him enough to want to keep him. Is there any other situation in the world where we would be overly concerned about what 0.00093% of the population thought?
I don't really understand what it is that makes one collection of letters any more offensive that any other. "Cunt" and "Vagina" refer to exactly the same thing, so why should one be more acceptable than another? They actually both refer to something pretty amazing, so you have to question why anyone would be offended to be compared to it.
"Cunt" and "Cnut" contain exactly the same letters, almost in the same order. Why should one of them make a tiny amount of people so angry that they have to ring up a TV station to complain? Really, who decided that "Cunt" was going to be such an offensive thing to say? There must have been some meeting of wordsmiths who decided to rank all the words in the world in order of how wrong it was to use them and, at the time, "Cunt" came out on top.
I think swear words are great, and though it's a bit disappointing to hear someone using them to the exclusion of all else, when an articulate man like Johnny Rotten employs them, they can have humour and even beauty. In a sense to break the taboo that says we shouldn't say "Cunt" on TV is to question all the conventions passed down from previous generations. And it's good to question conventions, because often we realise there is no reason for them being there, other than that they've been conventions for a long time.
I am delighted that we now live in a country that is grown up enough for 99.99907% of people to not be that bothered if someone says a rude word (nothing..rude word...carry on). Either they think it's too pathetic to draw attention to, or that it's funny (it was this time I think) or it's just so normal to not warrant comment.
Let's not be ashamed of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, let's not get all lah-de-dah and think that Latin and French are more refined. No two words could more effectively have summed up Johnny Rotten's frustration than the two he (probably unthinkingly) chose.
And anyone who bothers to phone up to vote for which celebrity they want to stay in a jungle must be aware that those two words are a very accurate description of them.
