A STORM IN A POWDER-PUFF
The press: Paul Johnson
on the Press Council and the Sun's vocabulary
THE latest victory of the liberal fascists has been to scare the Press Council into a ruling forbidding the use of 'poof , 'poof- ter' and 'woofter'. Of course the Council, which has always adopted a craven posture towards the pressure-groups of the Left, was a soft target. But in yielding on this occasion it has merely damaged itself, contriving both to force the object of its peculiar detestation, the Sun, into a heroic posture, and to make itself look ridiculous. When Louis Blom-Cooper, a sort of poor man's Lord Goodman, took over the chair- manship of the Council, the word was put about that a new era in its history was opening. It would not bother its important little head about niggling matters of taste but would concentrate on the Big Issues. The Council's rulings would be News and Carry Weight, and the roar of Blom- Cooper would be heard in the land. I thought at the time this was likely to prove a lot of baloney, and so it has. Blom- Cooper raised expectations he could not Possibly fulfil and the authority of the Council has continued its inexorable de- cline.
Certainly this latest decision will not help. To begin with, it contradicts the original Blom-Cooper line about taste. It also contradicts its own specific earlier rulings, on two occasions, that use of the word 'poof was a matter for editorial discretion. The Council has always had a tendency towards inconsistency for the simple reason that its verdicts depend on Who turns up for its meetings. Sometimes its composite personality is merely wishy- washy, sometimes vaguely left, occasional- ly distinctly left; and the adjudications vary accordingly. But in this instance the incom- patibility of the two rulings is so glaring as to suggest that the Council has no basic philosophy at all, or has changed it fun- damentally during the past two years. In 1988 it was, broadly speaking, an anti- censorship body. Now it is a pro- censorship body. Is that the message Blom: Cooper means to convey? The ruling likewise defies two sensible precepts. The first is de minimis non curat lex. The second, more important, is that a body which by its nature is on the feeble side should not give orders which are certain to be ignored. The Sun will take no notice of the Council's decision to classify 'pool' as an 'impermissible' word and this time will have the support of most of those journalists who normally detest its ways. Now enough of the Press Council, and on to the much more interesting question: do working-class people, as the Sun claims, actually refer to male homosexuals as 'poofs' etc? These words are very odd. I have never come across 'woofter' at all, and don't believe it is in usage anywhere. It may, technically, exist, but it has reality only for philologists, like 'antidisestablish- mentarianism'. 'Poof and 'poofter' I have seen written often, but have never heard used in speech. They have an antipodean ring but I have never heard them used in Australia either, though the last time I was there an ostentatious parade of homosex- uals in Sydney aroused a great deal of abusive comment from the citizenry. The words may or may not be common parl- ance among manual workers here. My impression is that they never refer to homosexuality at all if they can help it. They find it embarrassing, a middle- and upper-class thing which has nothing to do with them, though guardsmen quartered in London barracks know there is money to be made out of it and some sailors practise it faute de mieux.
However, I may be wrong. The older I get, and the more I study history, the more I find the whole concept of a 'working class' mysterious. All kinds of people claim they know what the workers are thinking — Labour politicians who have inevitably changed their status by adopting a middle- class profession, academics, sociologists, pollsters, and not least tabloid editors with daughters in jodhpurs. Dennis Skinner seems to think he can hang on to his working-class qualifications by being rude. But real workers are rather prudish about 'manners' — Derek Jameson has a special accent and patter he puts on when broad- casting. But no one really talks like that outside showbusiness. The truth is that by the time a person becomes conscious there is such a thing as a 'working class', he has already lost touch with it and has ceased to be a credible authority on its characteris- tics. The vocabulary the Sun and Mirror ostentatiously present as 'working-class language' — including 'poofs' and 'poof- ters' — is not the way workers talk at all but is the way tabloid editors think they ought to talk, an entirely artificial sub- vernacular on its own, not unlike the phoney thieves' slang used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Edgar Wallace, or the dodges of Thirties playwrights who had their proletarian drolls use phrases like `strike me pink, guy!' .
What does seem to be true is that, thanks perhaps to television, words now dart about rapidly all over the class spec- trum. When I was a young man the only people who referred to a lavatory as a 'too' were debs. Men never used the word at all. But in the last few years it has come into universal use, presumably because it is convenient. That is a case of an upper-class word whizzing down. Others whizz up: 'nick' for instance and 'fancy' (as in, `Do you fancy him?'). And some terms are swapped. The old working-class 'the telly' is now standard, while pub-parlance has abandoned it and adopted instead the middle-class pejorative 'the box', short for 'idiot box', an invention of Maurice Richardson. There are some subtle distinc- tions even now. The word harass, in standard pronunciation, has the stress on the first syllable. To put it on the second was originally American black usage, and if you pronounce it thus it indicates you are young, anti-authority and come from, or sympathise with, a culture where the police are the natural enemy. But even this generalisation is risky. There are not three classes today but hundreds, perhaps thousands, all slithering about and mutat- ing in an increasingly classless soup. What words they find unacceptable is pure guess- work. The only reliable judges are readers. If they object they will make their views plain. The rest should keep their middle- class traps Out.
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