iGoogle The Old Word Order…….

There was a very entertaining and perceptive piece in The Oldie magazine under this title.

The opener is

‘Nig-nog, Jew’s arse, homo – the language of John Torode’s Forties childhood sounds horrific today. But did it reflect or incite true prejudice? Not at all’.

Obviously language changes through the ages; when did anybody last say ‘Gadzooks!’? The context changes and so does the acceptability of words. Until comparatively recently it was unheard of even in the roughest circles to use foul language in the presence of a female. Now it seems as if the females are amongst the worst offenders.

He says that the ‘N’ word was frequently used in normal speech ‘Work like a nigger’; ‘Nigger brown paint’. He is an East Ender. We country boys used words rather differently. Until adulthood, I never saw a black person, other than an RAF Sergeant from the Caribbean who cycled through our village and was gone in minutes. We referred to anybody of a swarthy hue as ‘Darky’. My father always used ‘nigger’, but we were never sure who he was talking about. Our picture of an African was with a big toothy grin, a bone through his nose and wearing a grass skirt whilst boiling a fat clergyman in a large pot. That was how the comics portrayed them, and great fun it was. The idea that we would grow up racially prejudiced is just too absurd.

He says ‘Nig-nog’ was a mild insult for someone who was a bit of an idiot. ‘It never occurred to me that I was using a racially-based epithet’.

Well, he wasn’t, whatever Wiki might say. I first heard it in the army in 1955. It was used by NCOs to describe we new recruits, straight out of the egg, knowing absolutely nothing about anything. Race never entered our consciousness in those days because Britain was almost entirely white, so racial epithets scarcely ranked in ordinary vocabulary.

Here is a dictionary definition that supports my view:

‘This phrase has absolutely no racial dimension, despite appearances. It is a Northern British (e.g. Yorkshire) term referring to a silly person. It does not derive from nigger and should not be considered racist at all.

Tha cawn't even spell thi own name -th'art a bluddy nig nog’.

Homosexuality? His generation would say ‘homo’ or ‘strange men’.

The proliferation of derogatory epithets seem to be either a modern or an urban phenomenon – or both.

We had no idea what it was. We would refer to ‘bum-bandits’, but we hadn’t a clue what exactly they did.

We would sing a little parody:

‘The boy stood on the burning deck

His arse against the mast.

He swore that he would never budge

‘til Oscar Wilde had passed’.

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