Gross indecencies
Sir: Max Davidson has written (`Expletives undeleted', 16 May) of the invasion of our world by a vocabulary of disturbingly crude verbal images. His concern is shared by many. The observance of a certain code of decency among men and women of the same language when addressing one anoth- er directly, from the stage or screen (or the pulpit) or in print, was one proof of the potential they had for respecting one another. It is not the ugliness of the vocabulary which should excite us. What we must try to resist is the total absence of mutual respect which this vocabulary dares declare the norm in our society and in our relations with one another.
`Fuck' is an ugly word. Perhaps in ancient Anglo-Saxon days it described the trans- ports of love, but nowadays it has come to mean an act of violent copulation, a form of intimate relationship which sadly still exists, particularly in less financially privi- leged societies than those enjoyed by most who abuse the word; which is where the ugliness lies. Love and rape are, for the time being, still contradictory terms. Our modern society seems to accept that 'fuck' is an interchangeable alternative.
Max Davidson's thoughtful pages con- centrated on word images. But what about `the visuals'? Must our screens carry so much graphic 'fucking' and refuse 'sugges- tions of love' as potent forms of seduction? No inner thighs, no visible navels (let alone nipples) or body hair, twin beds with equal- ly twinned intervening night-tables, the Hays Office decreed. And audiences went home from the cinema to double-bedded bliss and were glad, when they got there, that they had the inner thighs and navels and bodily hair which had been denied the otherwise more-than-perfect Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Celia Johnson or Trevor Howard in their screen personae.
And now, fuck off. (See, how distasteful the signature becomes. . . ) Ian D. Shaw 18 Avenue de Ste Clotilde, Geneva,
Switzerland
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