When David Cameron came into One Golden Square on Wednesday morning to speak on The Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show we were expecting an interesting and hopefully entertaining interview. It was to be an opportunity to hear, for better or worse, what the man who might be our next prime minister is like when you strip away the formality that normally surrounds a party leader. In the end we heard more than expected.
Christian asked the Conservative Party leader if he used the micro-blogging service Twitter, David replied that he wasn’t, explaining that “Politicians have to think about what we say. The trouble with twitter, the instantness of it, I think too many twits might make a twat.”
The debate since in both the mainstream media and Twitter itself has been whether it was a genuine slip by a man with his guard down, or if this was a deliberate attempt to appear a man of the people. You can judge for yourself by either listening to the full interview or watching video of the Twitter conversation. In the studio Mr Cameron seemed unaware of the full connotations of the word, a lack of understanding apparently shared by Channel 4 News’ Jon Snow. Speaking to Christian on this morning’s breakfast show, Krishnan Guru-Murphy revealed that the story caused a debate in their ITN office when Snow said that he understood the term to refer to a different part of the female physique.
The word’s origins are far from clear, but most etymology experts believe it to derive from the Norse word for forest clearing or cut, which has since been applied to the female anatomy. The possible reason for the Tory leader’s slip up is the dramatic difference in its meaning depending on where you hail from. In Scotland, Ireland, Wales and southern England it is the softest of insults, interchangeable with idiot or fool, whereas in some communities and areas of northern England it can be directly swapped for the ‘c’ word and is capable of causing enough offense to spark a fight. A report for our broadcast regulator Ofcom summarises it as ‘Very polarising; female sexual anatomy word; offensive esp. to British Asian females and some women from other groups, but many esp. men think it is an everyday word and quite mild.’
Language will always be subjective though; there is no reason other than convention, why some words should carry any more power than others. On the whole we are becoming less sensitive to swearing, to the extent that some people are calling for a campaign to keep swearing special because where would we be if the situation demanded a really strong exclamation and all of our profanity had lost its power. The potency of language is shaped by its use, so it is events such as this which can affect how a word is used and received, it’s therefore all the more interesting to see the overwhelmingly positive way in which our listeners have reacted to Mr Cameron’s choice of words.
