5: Once upon a time, Andrew was walking down the road.

Once upon a time, Andrew was walking down the road.

Outside a shop, he saw a poster with the words FUCK OFF! printed on it in large, unfriendly letters.

Immediately, he performed an exegesis.

“I think it means ‘We are closed today’”, he said. “But I wonder why they have expressed it in such a rude way? Perhaps the owner was genuinely cross when he stuck it up. Or perhaps he has such a reputation for good manners in the neighbourhood that he takes it for granted that everyone will take FUCK OFF! as a good natured joke.”

He thought a bit longer.

“Perhaps it is a message delivered to a particular customer,” he thought “One who was very rude to him yesterday, and who will know the message is directed at him.”

“Perhaps that’s his standard OPEN / SHUT notice” he thought “Maybe it says COME IN YOU WANKER on the other side. Maybe he’s making the point that he’s the kind of chap who doesn’t care about social norms and wants to attract customers who feel the same way?”

“Or maybe he’s from a different culture” he thought “Where FUCK isn’t nearly such a rude word. I remember once eating in a cafe in Germany with a waitress who kept dropping ‘fucks’ and ‘bullshits’ into the conversation—I can only suppose she was translating milder German words and didn’t know how rude she was being in English. Or perhaps she had heard that the English were exceptionally foul-mouthed. There is a funny story about how an England cricket manager in the 1950s complained to the Australian cricket manager that members of his team kept using obscene and shocking language. The Aussie turned to his players and said ‘All right—which of you bastards has been calling this bastard a bastard?’”

“No, I’m overthinking this” he concluded. “It’s much more likely to be an advert for a local punk gig, or a political advert from a local anarchist collective.”

And then Andrew had a brain wave. He decided to ask the shopkeeper what the poster meant.

“Excuse me” he said “Why have you stuck such a rude poster on your door?”

“I am sure I don’t know what you mean,” said the shopkeeper. “There is absolutely nothing rude about the word FUCK. It’s just an acronym for Fornication Under Consent of The King. I intended it to mean ‘Please be advised that I am not taking visitors today’ and if you found it offensive, that is your problem; it is rude only in your head. Now be a good wanker and bugger off.”

As a matter of fact, the word FUCK is not, in itself, particularly rude.

It kind of represents rudeness: everyone knows that it is the King of Swears, the one word you must never, ever say: but in fact nearly everyone uses it all the time. In a conversational context “Fuck off...!” very often means “That is very surprising and I can hardly believe it.” I myself occasionally use it to mean “I acknowledge that you have told a joke at my expense, and, while at one level being a little bit annoyed, at another level, I acknowledge that it was a little bit funny.”

There is an old saying that expletives are okay when used as exclamation marks, but not when used as commas. For some fucking people, they are the actual fucking font.

I believe that the law currently takes the view that the true meaning of a text resides in the intention of the author.

If I intended my pirate cartoon strip to produce sexual excitement, then it counts as pornography (even if no-one is particularly turned on by it) but if I honestly didn’t mean it to be sexy, then it isn’t porn even if loads of people get off on looking at it. A person skinny dipping on a public beach might be charged with public order offences or causing a disturbance, but he isn’t committing a sexual offence unless you can prove that he took his clothes off for specifically kinky reasons.

This is quite sensible. But there is a problem with it.

I know that some people find bodies sexy. Not my body, necessarily, but bodies in general. I know that some people are embarrassed by them. It may be that in your nudist colony, no-one pays the slightest attention to anyone else’s skin; and it may be that that is a more sensible way of going about things, but when I decided to walk round Sainsbury’s in my birthday suit, I knew that I was doing something that other people would find (at the very least) odd. I can’t not have known.

The shop keeper knew that some people consider FUCK to be a very rude word when he stuck up the poster. He can’t possibly not have known. You can’t isolate the meaning of the word from the act of putting the poster up. The true meaning of the poster is “I am the sort of person who would display this sort of poster in my shop window.”

We aren’t really talking about the F-word. We are talking about a different word. Which begins with a different letter of the alphabet. Which is even ruder and more shocking. And which brings us back to penguins. 

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4: Many thousands of fountain pens must have been made in the eighteenth century.

Many thousands of fountain pens must have been made in the eighteenth century.

But one particular pen resides in a museum because that particular pen is the one with which Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence.

But surely, Captain Picard could use teleportation and replication technology to make a replica of the fountain pen, identical to the original at a sub-atomic level. Do you now have two instances of Jefferson’s pen? Could you in principle have thousands of iterations of that one pen? And would they all now be the pen with which Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence? Over the last two millennia, billions of tons and trillions of gallons of the actual body and blood of Christ have been consumed by pious Catholics.

Even those of us who are not that interested in rare books can see that a mint condition copy of the first edition of Lord of the Rings with an intact dust jacket is worth more than a mint condition copy of the first edition of Lord of the Rings without a dust jacket. But it might sometimes happen that a particular collector has kept his dust jacket pristine but inadvertently spilled tea on the interior pages of the book; while another might have kept the book in good condition but scrunched up the dust jacket. But it turns out that if you take the undamaged dust jacket and put it around the undamaged book, you do not have a mint condition first edition of Lord of the Rings. You have actually committed a kind of artistic fraud. The rest of us wonder what difference it could possibly make.

Phillip K Dick’s frivolous suggestion (in the Man in the High Castle) is that Thomas Jefferson’s pen must contain a sub-atomic particle—call it Historium if you like—which the matter replicator cannot reproduce.

He is being silly. But it does seem that a very large number of people believe that pictures and books and words contain sub-atomic particles called Obscenium, Pornographium, Racisium and Wokium.

In the Star Wars prequels, it turns out that spirituality is not a subjective, ineffable state: a Jedi Knight can be scanned for Midichlorians and discovered to be either Strong or Weak in the Force.

Perhaps we could in principle create a detector that could isolate the amount of Smuttium in Michelangelo’s David and the amount of Racistium in my beloved rag-doll.

We have mentioned Simon Heffer before. His unintentionally comedic grammar book, Strictly English, maintains that the meaning of all English words was irrevocably fixed when the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.

He acknowledges that new words like “television” and “internet” may occasionally have to be coined; but any usage of a pre-existing word which deviates from the 1928 definition is simply wrong (and barbaric, and a threat to the future of civilisation).

Christian fundamentalists believe that the true meaning of the Bible was in flux until the creation of a unique and perfect English version in 1611, which can never be improved on. I do not know if Heffer envisaged seventeen cloistered Rabbis producing seventeen textually identical copies of the Oxford English Dictionary under divine supervision. It would not greatly surprise me if he did.

I once had an argument with an internet pedant who strongly objected to use of electrocute to mean “to receive an electric shock”. The word, he opined, irreducibly meant “to be killed with electricity”.

Interestingly, he deprecated “he was electrocuted while trying to fix the light and had to be treated for burns” but permitted “he recklessly climbed a pylon and was electrocuted.” But so far as I can see, this is not the original meaning of the word. Electrocute is a vile portmanteau of “execution” and “electricity”, coined by Thomas Eddison to refer to his new system of judicial torture. (He had previously considered calling it “dynamort”.) You can’t say someone stuck his fingers in a plug socket and was electrocuted, any more than you can say that someone stepped out in front of a fast-moving car and was guillotined. 

Except, I suppose, as a colourful metaphor.

But then, if we believe in essential meanings, we have no right to say that a murderer was executed. You don’t execute people, you execute sentences, in the same way you execute wills and real estate contracts. And come to that, electricity didn’t originally mean a force, a charge, or a current. It originally meant “the quality of being attractive”, and before that (according to Wikipedia) “pertaining to amber”.

People who have vaguely heard that there is such a thing as Critical Theory believe that English Literature Departments teach that texts mean exactly what you want them to mean. Books like Strictly English are more or less conscious attempts to slay the imaginary Post-Modern foe. I suppose that was what Jordan Peterson has in mind when he insists that “brown” is always and only a description of skin-tone and never a label of ethnic heritage, even when the speaker is quite clearly using it in the latter sense.

But no-one has ever argued that texts mean whatever you want them to mean. No-one has ever argued that when Propsero says “Pluck my magic garment from me”, pluck means “hold a referendum”, magic means “a common market in goods and services” and garment means “free movement.” But any fool can see that two different people might read the Tempest and come away with different impressions about how wicked Prospero is, how hard-done-by Caliban is, and how completely unfunny Trincolo is.

Tolkien said that he disliked allegory. Cordially.

But mark what followed. He did not say “The Lord of the Rings is not allegory: it’s just a story, a piece of light entertainment, stop reading stuff into it.”

He said that the Lord of the Rings meant whatever any individual reader thought that it meant: and that you shouldn’t necessarily give special status to what he thought it meant just because he wrote it. Allegory, on his definition, was not critics reading things into books: it was authors trying to insist that their meanings were the only ones.

“I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

This doesn’t mean that “three rings for the elven kings under the sky” means, or might mean, “seventeen pairs of sneakers for the seventeen delegates from the department of trade and industry.”

But it does mean that although Tolkien thought that the elves’ magic lembas bread was like the holy wafer in the Catholic Mass; and even though Tolkien consciously edited the book to make the likeness more obvious, readers aren’t obliged to think of the body of Jesus every time anyone reaches for some elf-bread.

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3: It might well be argued that decency and modesty are religious taboos....

 It might well be argued that the idea that you shouldn’t show nude pictures to children is a religious taboo.

It might equally be argued that all ideas about ethics and behaviours are religious taboos. But most of us think, that “you shouldn’t kill anyone without a very good reason” and “you should remove your footwear before coming into a place of worship” are in rather different categories. The danger of puritanism is that every personal taboo is raised to the level of a universal moral imperative.

I avert my eyes from certain images; therefore, everyone should be obliged to wear blindfolds.

If we allow churches and mosques to enforce the head-covering taboo, it is only a matter of time before the Home Secretary makes a rule that all ladies have to wear a headscarf in public

The solution to this is to send purity patrols into Wee Free Churches and rip the hats off all the ladies. I understand this has literally been tried on French beaches.

The more we tolerate people’s religious taboos, the more taboos fringe religious groups will think up. If we say “That’s all right, you don’t have to come to morning prayers if you don’t want to” then pretty soon the guru will decide that members of his sect are also not allowed to participate in egg and spoon races, flower-pressing competitions or Sociology.

The more taboos a religion imposes, the harder it is for members of the sect to integrate with the wider culture. The less the religion integrates, the more likely it is to survive. This is one of the reasons successful religions have long lists of obscure prohibitions.

Do you remember that scene in Twelve Angry Men where the Bigoted White Juror fumes at the Nice Hispanic Juror?

“Why are you always so goddamn polite??”

“I think” replies the nice Puerto Rican man “For the same reason you are not: it is the way I was brought up.”

Young children tend to split the world into good and bad, wrong and right, naughty and nice. Tell a small child that he can go to the end of the path, but no further, and he may very well try going two steps beyond the gate, to see what happens, but he generally won’t run down the street and across the road.

Sophisticated parents don’t treat this as a bold act of defiance, but merely a way of understanding where the boundaries are. Sometime around puberty, we start to be able to make finer judgments: to be able to understand concepts like “this thing is forbidden, except when it’s allowed” and “I’ll make an exception just this one time, because it’s an unusual circumstance.” Ask a young child if a starving person can steal food, they will probably say “Stealing is naughty”. Ask a teenager, and they’ll admit that it’s a difficult question.

Political conservatives and religious fundamentalists often have, or pretend that they have, the moral perspective of an eight year old. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Something can’t be good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. Situational ethics and postmodernism will lead to the downfall of society.

Why does Andrew think that black face dolls, public nudity, and the word fuck are generally inappropriate? For the same reason that you do. It is the way we were brought up.

I don’t buy the theory that a naturist is harmed by the sight of pants in the same way and to the same degree that a puritan is harmed by the sight of genitals.

I don’t buy the theory that the same liberalism which says that a Muslim lady has the right to keep her face covered if she wants to also says that a humanist has the right to not see ladies wearing burkas if he doesn’t want to.

I don’t buy the theory that the same liberalism which says that a transexual person should be allowed to go to the lavatory if they need to also says that a prejudiced person shouldn’t have to use a cubical adjacent to one that might have a transexual person in it if they don’t want to.

Some people say “If Christians are allowed to take Good Friday off work it logically follows that Satanists should be allowed to carry out human sacrifices” but they don’t really believe it.

I think that under most circumstances, where it is reasonable, all other things being equal, we ought to respect people’s religious traditions. And we pretty much agree on when things are equal and when they are not. We are mostly cool with Jews abstaining from pork pies; but not with Jews saying that no-one else should eat pork pies and definitely not with them closing down Melton Mowbray in case someone inadvertently walks past a pork pie factory.

I think that most adults can see that an anatomically accurate representation of an adult nude figure in a book about human anatomy is semiotically different from an accurate representation of an adult nude figure in a life-drawing class; and an adult actor taking his clothes off in an erotic movie sold only to adults is not doing the same thing as he would be if he sent a stranger an unsolicited explicit e-mail. We grok that you can take your clothes off in a sports-centre changing room but not in a sport-centre bar.

Contexts may overlap. There may be misunderstandings. Sometimes we may have to say “Whoops, so sorry, I thought the door was locked.” If I thought I was watching a documentary about professional footballers and suddenly found myself looking at a group of nude men in the shower, I might well say “That embarrassed me.” I might even say “That made me feel violated and dirty” or “That made me ritually unclean and unable to take the sacrament” or “That brought on a post-traumatic shock reaction because I was assaulted by a person with a similar body part some years ago.”

Which is why we tend to put warnings on that kind of material. “Contains nudity”. “Includes images which you may consider indecent.”

Some people might think that a sign saying “WARNING: If you come through this door you might catch a glimpse of a naked man” placed outside an exhibition of Greek Sculpture—or, indeed, a men’s changing room—was silly and unnecessary. Others might find it quite helpful.

But it really wouldn’t be a threat to free speech, democracy, and the continuation of western civilisation.

Nor, come to that, would a couple of judicious fig-leaves.

There is a lovely chaotic old fashioned toy museum in Sidmouth—less an exhibition than a repository of Teddy Bears and models trains and Muffin the Mules and Star Wars Lego that people have donated over the decades.

I can’t directly recall if the have any gollywogs on display, but I would be surprised if it didn’t.

I assume that somewhere in the world there is an International Jam Jar Museum. If there is, I imagine it includes jars with the offending character on the label.

I felt some sympathy for the enthusiasts who had restored an old bus, complete with a very old fashioned advertisement for Robertsons Marmalade on the side, and were asked if they wouldn’t please mind removing it.

Anatomically correct images of naked men could be exhibited in such a way as to constitute pornography; but equally clearly they could be exhibited in such a way as to not constitute pornography.

And, as a matter of fact, pornography may be relatively innocent or very harmful indeed.

I once saw a movie which consisted of nothing but still photographs of gentlemen’s private parts. It was second feature to an extremely dull film about Italian nuns, I seem to remember. I think the point was that if you show a sufficient number of such images (dicks, I mean, not nuns) they cease to be dirty or prurient or embarrassing and just become, I don’t know, skin.

Yoko Ono made the same point about bottoms in a film called Bottoms.

As a matter of fact, my willy wouldn’t drop off if a lady caught a glimpse of it; and the lady wouldn’t go blind if she accidentally caught a glimpse of my willy.

People who have done the naturist thing says it stops mattering after about three minutes. I believe the showers at Glastonbury are co-ed.

If we could just get over ourselves a lot of the difficulties would go away. We’d instantly deprive flashers and streakers of their power and put a lot of pornographers out of business.

Sometime around 1986, comedian and Blackadder perpetrator Ben Elton did a comic stand up routine.

He asked what the world was coming to when a primary school teacher putting sun-cream on a six year old kid might be thought to be committing a sexual act; but the President of America ejaculating into the mouth of an intern might be thought not to be.

He was being disingenuous for comic effect. What Clinton claimed was that what he had done in the Oval Office did not strictly amount to sexual intercourse, a significant legal distinction if what you are being accused of is telling lies. Many of us think that, given what we now know about Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, quite a lot of clergymen and a fair number of PE teachers, a rule which says that teachers can’t touch kids, at all, for any reason, ever, is quite a sensible rule to have.

I was reminded of the joke when two news items invaded public discourse at the same time.

A pub in England was temporarily closed because it had a collection of several hundred black-face rag-dolls on display. I think the police actually confiscated the collection, but outraged citizens donated new dolls so the display could be restored. Everyone involved asserted that there was nothing racist about the display. That the pub was called The White Hart was probably an unfortunate coincidence.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned school teacher was sanctioned for showing an carved marble penis to his art class.

What, I found myself asking, is the world coming to when a renaissance sculpture might be considered pornographic and a display of gollywogs might not be considered racist?

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