78 Books & arts The EconomistOctober 5th 2019
2Johnson Sticks and stones
The polarisation of politics is producing a new lexicon of insultsT
hink of themost taboo insult that is
possible in English. Chances are you
have one of just a few words in mind.
Now consider the following anecdote. In
2016 a defendant in an English court-
room told the judge, Patricia Lynch, that
she was “a cunt”. To which the judge, on
the record, thought fit to reply: “You’re a
bit of a cunt yourself.”
Supposedly the 20-megaton nuke of
swear words, still considered by some
people unacceptable at any time, the
C-word does not pack the blast it once
did. Samantha Bee, an American comedi-
an, used it on her news show to refer to
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter,
inciting only a short-lived controversy.
Numerous British television presenters
have mistakenly substituted it, on air, for
the surname of Jeremy Hunt, who was
for a time culture secretary. (Anticipating
the “c” in “culture” may have been re-
sponsible for early slips of this type, but
they mysteriously continued after Mr
Hunt became health secretary.) None of
the presenters has been disciplined.
The words that shock have changed.
An English law of 1606 forbade profane
references on stage to God, Jesus Christ
and the Holy Ghost. Today such impreca-
tions cause barely a batted eyelash (even
if high-profile cases of perceived blas-
phemy still rile the devout in places such
as Russia). Later, words related to sex and
the body were the most likely to offend.
The word “bloody” set off a gale of laugh-
ter at the London premiere of George
Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” in 1914. Now
it is hardly worth remarking upon.
The vocabulary that causes offence
today would puzzle those who roared at
“bloody”. Consider an insult that occu-
pied the British press for several days in
December 2018. Jeremy Corbyn, the
leader of the Labour opposition, seemedbeen anathema for a while.)
The evolution of insults is the subject
of Philip Gooden’s new book, “Bad
Words”. He recounts in one neat reversal
the turn in the history of invective. The
Sun, a British tabloid, was once in the
habit of outing gay people, and even
publicly defended its use of “poof” in
doing so (because, the paper argued, its
readers used the word, too). How times
change. After abandoning the practice of
outing in 1998, in 2018 the paper led a
campaign to track down a bus-driver
who called a reality-show star a “poof-
ter”. What it once considered lightheart-
ed banter is now verbotenhomophobia.
Not everyone is happy with this mod-
ulation in the unacceptable. Some think
it is a humourless and thin-skinned
world that can’t handle a risqué dig now
and again. Those purported stalwarts of
robust free speech have inaugurated a
new catalogue of insults: the “snowflake”
who can’t take the heat; the “libtard” who
can’t think beyond progressive dogma;
the “social-justice warrior”, once a term
applied by left-leaning types to them-
selves, now appropriated as a smear.
Such people consider themselves
“redpilled”, named after the red pill in
“The Matrix” that allows characters to see
the world as it truly is. When Hillary
Clinton, running for president, unwisely
referred to some Americans as “deplor-
ables”, some of her critics embraced that
term as a badge of honour—an ironic
stance meant to contrast with their
supposedly po-faced adversaries.
In a less buttoned-up age, some ven-
erable slurs are in decline. Less happily,
they are being superseded by tags based
on identity politics. “Deplorables” versus
“snowflakes”: in place of the old neuro-
ses, the new lexicon of insults captures
worrying divisions.to mouth “stupid woman” as Theresa May,
then the prime minister, spoke from the
dispatch box. Mr Corbyn was forced to
deny he had said those words. He is “op-
posed to the use of sexist and misogynist
language in any form”; what he had actual-
ly said was “stupid people”.
Mrs May’s successor now stands ac-
cused of misogyny on the front bench. As
Mr Corbyn was speaking in early Septem-
ber, Boris Johnson, now prime minister,
yelled, “You great big girl’s blouse!” On the
same day Mr Johnson also used the word
“shit” (he was quoting a Labour politician’s
reference to that party’s economic policy
as “shit or bust”, meaning “all or nothing”).
Once, the earthy Anglo-Saxon word would
never have fallen from the mouth of a
prime minister in Parliament. Yet “big
girl’s blouse” dominated the coverage.
A watershed moment has arrived:
traditional taboo words, pertaining to the
body and excrement, no longer have the
punch of group-based insults related to
sex, disabilities and other such qualities,
about which Western societies are increas-
ingly sensitive. (Race-based gibes haveOther biographies have depicted Gersh-
win, who was an avid art collector, as a
thoughtless egotist, but Mr Crawford is a
judge of music, not character. Still, he of-
fers a glimpse of his subject’s personal life,
which included glittering parties and ro-
mances with socialites and musicians. He
alludes to Gershwin’s aversion to commit-
ment and his loneliness, and explores his
relationship with his older brother, the lyr-
icist Ira Gershwin, a vital collaborator on
many works (including “Porgy”).
And he briefly covers Gershwin’s child-
hood and early musical studies. His par-ents were unmusical Russian-Jewish im-
migrants who ran various businesses with
mixed success. An interesting chapter ex-
plores the music-publishing district
known as Tin Pan Alley and its influence on
the composer, who left school at 15 to be-
come a song-seller there, baffling his peers
with talk of the “artistic mission of popular
music”. There are lively anecdotes from his
career, such as the humiliation during a
youthful gig at a vaudeville club when a
resident comic jeered that he should be-
come a truck driver instead of a pianist.
That was a rare failure. The few dissent-ers in Gershwin’s lifetime included com-
posers such as Aaron Copland and Roger
Sessions, who unfairly deemed his music
unserious. Gershwin often collaborated
with luminaries including Fred and Adele
Astaire, who had an unrequited crush on
him. The actress Ethel Merman described
her first encounter with him as like “meet-
ing God”. He died of a brain tumour at 38.
A critic said he had taken “the simple
emotion of longing and let it surge through
his music,” making real “what a hundred
before him had falsified.” That emotional
honesty still bewitches listeners. 7