Tag: Taking offence

There’s a word for it…

Photo by Erik Karits on Pexels.com

You know, I know, we all know that when things start to get a little staid – when you cannot think of a joke worth its salt – there are certain words that you can turn to that will never let you down: want a stupid, childish snigger, just use the word pussy (we have recently been to a pantomime – Dick Whittington – in which the words ‘dick’ and ‘pussy’ were used so often that my eyes started to glaze, but they got a laugh every single time); want to amuse people who might well soon, although they will never admit it, be using one, just cram the word commode into a sentence; want to get a quiet ‘yes, we all know what you mean by that’ smirk, simply use any word or phrase that could conceivably be viewed as a euphemism: knob will never fail, nor will pork sword, muff or nunny.  It’s a strange reaction to words that possibly goes some way towards explaining why women (reportedly) laugh more than men: they know how childish and genital-obsessed the other half of the human race is.

It is the very same half that hardly ever uses the correct terminology for anything that resembles what Monty Python called The Naughty Bits.  Men never – except, perhaps, when talking to a female doctor – call a penis a penis.  In the general area you will find a cock, a knob, or a dick, whilst if you wish to take a slightly wider view, you will encounter the dangleys, the family jewels or, my own personal preference, Richard and the twins, but never a penis – unless it’s got something wrong with it.  Have you ever heard a man use the word vagina unless he is wearing vinyl gloves, wielding a plastic spatula and staring down at you between raised knees?  Men will not even use the simple word for what constitutes their favourite thing(s) in the whole wide world: baps, tits, boobies, bazoomers, umpa lumpas (yes, I’m looking at you Hugh Grant) but, unless they are talking to their great aunt, daughter or niece, men are incapable of saying the word breast unless it is in relation to a chicken, and even then, not without blushing.

Women are capable of adult conversations about sex.  Men are capable of ‘Wor!’  Women are capable of making rational decisions about their bodies: ‘I generally wear a loose top because it draws the eye away from my large breasts,’ (oh no it doesn’t) or ‘I never wear tight trousers because they accentuate my big bum.’  Can you imagine a man ever refusing to wear tight trousers because it accentuates his big member (Oh God, I’m at it now!) or squashing his toes into too-small shoes, because he’d heard what they say about big feet?  I wonder how many men would be prepared to go into Marks & Spencers to buy padded ‘Y’ fronts if they were kept alongside the padded bra’s?  Not many.  They might try to persuade their wives to do it though.  I actually knew a barber who always kept a rolled up hanky tucked down in the front of his trousers when dressed to impress: slightly obscene looking (especially when he bent over) and terribly inconvenient when he had a cold.

Perhaps that is why (with the very notable exception of Alan Bennett) men very rarely write great dialogue for women: we use the language completely differently, but women are rather better at translation than men.  I think that women are far more able to laugh at themselves, whilst men are far more willing to let other people do it for them.  Speaking for myself, I am very happy to laugh at a ‘rude word’ provided it doesn’t hurt anyone (I won’t say ‘offend anyone’ because that is something most of us do almost every time we open our mouths today – there is always someone looking to take offence), I am also happy to laugh at myself and to be laughed at.  There’s no point in being an arse about it…

Words

Quote George Orwell

The problem with words is that they do not always say, on paper, what you thought they said when you put them there.  A misplaced comma can turn a plea for peace into a declaration of war; a tribute can become a slight with nothing more than an inopportune underlining.  We are all guilty of ‘scanning’ documents, maybe actually reading just one word in three and assuming we understand the rest.  Perhaps no two readers assume the same.  Words can mean different things depending on the mood of the reader: it is possible to take offence at even the greatest of compliments if you really, really choose to try.  I spend huge chunks of my time excising paragraphs from whatever it may be I am working on because, on reading it back through, I discover that it does not appear to mean anything even remotely like I originally intended it to mean.  If only I could navigate my way around the bits that did not turn out to be funny so easily…

Try as you might, it is so difficult to take credit for a joke: they are never funny until someone has laughed at them and I know plenty of people who would attest that I have never written anything funny in my entire life.  I wrote a book once.  I thought it was very funny until someone who did not know me read it for the first time.  It was intended as a farce (an absurd comic creation) but she read it as a completely different kind of farce (an incredibly badly written attempt at a psychological thriller).  She had much advice on how to make it more ‘thrilling’, but as far as I can remember, had not bumped her head against even the most blunt of jokes on her way through.  Now, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time and I am incredibly inured to both criticism and rejection.  I take them both on a chin that now closely resembles Desperate Dan’s; I try to learn from the critiques, I try not to get too depressed by the rejections.  I eat lots of chocolate.

As well as a number of strangers, I did, of course, give the book to many people I knew, expecting them to be much kinder than they should be, and indeed they were.  They knew me, so they knew that it was intended to be funny and consequently, I suppose, they must have been on the look-out for jokes.  I’m pretty sure that most of them read it (at least one word in three) as they said they had, and I don’t recall any of them telling me how much of a thriller it was.  But one reader, out of many who did not know me, did not find it so; did not see that it was even intended to be so, and it left me facing just three possibilities: 1) they were expecting to read a thriller and so picked out the aspects of the plot (yes, there was one) that did have elements of Ian Rankin about them – they were meant to be absurd, but they were there, or 2) she had absolutely no sense of humour at all, or 3) it was just not funny.  I decided, not unreasonably, that it was the latter: that she was right, and I did no more with it than consign it to a file I keep on my computer that contains more misses than the average convent.  I am used to rewriting (and re-rewriting) but I could not find a way of rewriting a series of jokes that one reader at least deciphered as nothing more than sub-standard Dan Brown (if, indeed, such a thing is possible) so I shelved it and did other things instead (mope mostly).

At the start of this week, finding myself with a little time on my hands, I trawled my way through this ‘Heroic Failures’ file and I read the book again.  I am slightly ashamed to admit that it made me laugh.  It was not the stuff of Booker Prizes, but it never intended to be.  Once I’d started, I wanted to finish and I enjoyed the hours that it swallowed.  I didn’t at any point expect to be thrilled. 

I think, perhaps, I was reading the wrong words…