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17  TEACHING BAD LANGUAGE (FFS!)

At my father's funeral, some years back (he was an English teacher), I met a former pupil of his, John Tenby, who said to me, laughing, "Your father was a wonderful teacher; he kept us always on our toes and we never knew what was coming next. I always remember one English lesson, in particular, when he walked in and without a word started writing up on the blackboard, 'BALLS', 'CUNT', 'COCK', 'FUCK' … and there we were, perfectly coarse and vulgar schoolboys, getting redder and redder, and hot and cold inside, as we thought that your father had gone completely mad! You have to remember, Paddy, this was, oh, back in 1960, when we could have been expelled immediately, if we had been heard saying those words by any of the teachers. Your father finally turned around and said, 'These are now words which have been found admissible to be published in Britain, following the acquittal of Penguin Books in the recent Lady Chatterley Trial'. He then went on to tell us all about D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the trial, and we had a very lively discussion, all about obscenity and swear-words."

How shall we approach the taboos in language, the swear words, the sexual profanities, the blasphemies, the outright bawdiness of language, if we are to be both educators and mentors of young and easily influenced minds?

 

While perhaps not going quite as far as my father's attention-grabbing style, I am perfectly happy to have pretty well ANYTHING asked or questioned in intermediate - senior classes (14-18), again, with the proviso that younger pupils' sensibilities are not trodden on and that pupils are mature enough to engage with the topic in a sensible way. Having girls and boys together in the class is also very important (I taught for 8 years in girls' only schools in England).

 

NB. Make sure that all mobile phones are brought to the front. This will have the double effect of raising interest (especially if you don't say why), but also, more seriously stopping any of the blackboard work, discussions, quotations etc. being uploaded to social media and finding yourself with awkward problems of explanation later on….

 

A good way into this discussion, which could be provoked by quite innocent questions about, say, the suitability of swearing in pupils' own creative work, or else the intrusion of swear words into works being studied (fast forward if you wish now to the poem further on and a discussion of Philip Larkin's  'They fuck you up, your mum and dad…'), is to get pupils to consider the history of the English language more closely.  

 

I like to be provocative and say something like, 'Of course English deserves to be a world language more than French, because it quite literally has MORE words.'

 

It is safe to say that there are fewer than 100,000 words in the French language and between 250,000 and 750,000 words in English (source: Oxford dictionaries). This is largely because the original language of Anglo-Saxon English, which derives from Germany and Scandinavian countries, was overlaid by the French and Latin of the Norman Conquest. English became, effectively, almost two languages, with a high register of Latinate and French words for the ruling classes (who could afford to eat mutton, beef, pork) and a  vulgar ('forbidden') register for the poorer, Saxon peasants (who might afford just ox-tail soup…!).  In the Book of Common Prayer, for example, in the General Confession,  "...we have erred and strayed from our ways like lost sheep." "Erred" is from ther Latin, while "stray" is from the Saxon. There is class consciousness even in a General Confession!

 

Even now, Latinate/French derived words, more ponderously, differentiate between high and low registers. Take the word "cut", for example. Any butcher can make a cut, but it takes a university education to learn to make an "incision". "Defecate", "excrete", "copulate", "fornicate", "intercourse" etc. are more sophisticated ways of referring to "fuck" and "shit". Our horror is born of complicated historical processes involving class and education.

 

There used in London to be a street called Grope-Cunt Lane, which of course, had to be changed a long time ago! I remember, also, having startled pupils studying The Wife of Bath's Tale for the OIB and having to gently talk them them through "her" obsession with her "queynte". "Fuck" and "shit" used, then, if not to be respectable, at least to be legitimate English words, though they, like many others, were forced to go underground by ruling notions of "politeness".

When I was a boy (ironically, given my first paragraph), I never ever heard my father say anything worse than "Damn!" and that, by his Quaker standards, was pretty strong stuff. Gradually over the years, as we all know, more and more words have become increasingly acceptable, depending always on audience and context. It is now harder to find taboo words, though new taboos are always there, ready and waiting. The  word "nigger" was entirely acceptable in the 50s and the word "fuck" absolutely taboo. Now, it is the other way round (though, as always, with contextualised subtleties - for example, the word "nigger", used in the TV series The Wire, is heard all the time, when used by Baltimore drug gangs, within the community). 

 

Shakespeare never uses the word "fuck", but in 'Othello', the word "Zounds!", which Othello uses several times in Q was suppressed in the later Folio edition of 1606 after the Act to Restrain the Abuses of the Players forbade the use of oaths or the name of God. The taboos of religion, therefore, were, then perhaps, even stronger than those of sex.

 

Back to our pupils. It is no bad thing to learn that double standards are OK, and that context is everything! Open discussions on bad language can be genuinely educational. In an age of smileys and text messaging (LOL), what is acceptable or unacceptable is an area where the codes are complex and subtle. Parents may not like it, but the history and the contextualisation of language – good and bad - is a necessary and an appropriate duty for us as English teachers.

 

Here, now, is something to get our teeth into! This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin comes in his last collection of poetry entitled High Windows.  Written late in life, the poems are meditations on youth and old age, some very serious like The Building, some very funny and wry, like this one, or Posterity, for example. In this particular poem, Larkin deliberately goes all out to shock and destabilise his readers, whether they are old or young, in order to make a point about how parents (and he must be thinking about his own rather warped and unhappy childhood) inevitably pass on their own failings and frustrations to their children. 

.

This Be The Verse

BY PHILIP LARKIN

 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

 

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

 

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

 

There is a lot to discuss in this seemingly light-hearted, funny-but-shocking poem. First, of all, then, the use of the word "fuck". In terms of acceptability, one could imagine a poet like him using the word aloud, to his friends, over a drink, perhaps. One could also imagine pupils using the word, secretly, amongst themselves. What one doesn't expect at all is an adult of Larkin's 50s world addressing a young readership in this way.

 

For it is the use of the word "mum" and "dad" which increases the shock. If he were addressing me, or my generation, Larkin would have used "mother" or "father". The real shock is in the use of "mum" and "dad"; those nice, friendly, parent-figures, who demand and, we would hope, deserve our total "respect" are, according to the poem, actually "fucking" us up and are themselves "fucked up". Cue – IRONY, but in a subtle way.

 

Look again at the title, which has a rather mocking feel to it. It is not "This is the Verse". "This BE the Verse" carries a sense of a historical or a rural axiom or saying, as in early maps, perhaps "Here be dragons". It appears to be light-hearted. Look also at how the simple ballad form (used for children, hymns, etc) is undermined and subverted cleverly. The orderliness of the rhythm and the neat rhyme scheme contrast with the iconoclastic (and seemingly nihilistic) meditation.

 

The tone of the poem completely switches in the second stanza. "Man hands on misery to man", with the emphatic alliteration, could almost have been written by someone as oratorical as Wordsworth ("The world is too much with us…").  The image of the "coastal shelf" suggests drowning in the darkness of an immense and lonely ocean. The final shock of the last line completes the joke. Larkin had no children, wouldn't have wanted them, made a mess of his own relationships with women, and exhibits, throughout this final collection, a deeply ambiguous attitude towards young people.

 

Where, however, Larkin remains ambiguous is that in wanting to make us laugh or even to shock us, as a poet he displays a desire to communicate with us, which is ultimately positive. I always remember a teacher who had been at Hull University to read English, say that despite his cantankerous persona in the poems of a grumpy old sourpuss, Larkin as the university librarian showed unfailing kindness and respect to the students. 

 

In the collection, however, for example in  poems such as "High Windows" and "Annus Mirabilis", his grumpy persona is constantly envious that the young seem to be able to have the sort of freedom (sexually and religiously) that he would have liked when he was young. He seems to despise their lack of culture, lack of seriousness and their ability to have a guilt-free good time ("everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly." - High Windows . Just look at the ambiguity of the word and image, "slide"!).

 

Here he is again in Annus Mirabilis, apparently grousing about how HE missed out on all the fun in the Sixties! It's amusing, but also tetchy!

 

"Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first L.P."

 

( from Annus Mirabilis- the light jingle of the rhythm disguises the ironic disparagement of all that he thought the young were getting up to...!)

 

Get pupils to consider the importance of the dominating image of High Windows in this collection. Church windows (Larkin was not a religious believer, but look at his earlier "An Arundel Tomb")? Someone looking down on others from the safety of a building? Or someone trapped and looking up at windows from which he cannot escape? See what the pupils can uncover...

 

Are you, then, up to defending a close reading of "This Be the Verse" to intermediate as well as senior classes? It will get you straight into a debate about bad language, taboos, forbidden areas...! You can defend yourself by saying that Philip Larkin is a thoroughly "serious" poet, and if parents react negatively, tell them simply that he is one of England's most popular 20th century poets (the Collected Poems went to top of the best-seller list) and "on the syllabuses"….!

 

BTW pupils are fascinated by the story of the Lady Chatterley Trial. I personally think that the moment in the prosecution's outlining of the case against the novel, when Mervyn Griffith-Jones, for the prosecution, told the very ordinary jury of nine men and three women that they would have to think seriously about whether they would let their "wives" or their "servants" read such a book, has to go down in the cultural and class history of Britain as one of those moments where the scales fell from people's eyes. It was what you might call a seismic shift, and the jurors wasted no time at the end in throwing out the case. Never again would a James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connolly or a D.H. Lawrence, amongst others, have to find a publisher in Paris (of all places!) and be smuggled into England, the land, in those now far-off days, of prim puritanism on the surface, and underground - 'smut'! This is not just English teaching - it merges into history, sociology and cultural studies. We should be in the forefront, as English teachers, teaching all of this!

 

Here is a link to a good re-telling of the story:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/22/dh-lawrence-lady-chatterley-trial 

 

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