The fine art of vituperation... :

Mind your language!

Gaston de Rosayro

As far as memory recalls I have always been fascinated with the printed word and some decidedly unprintable ones as well. That would be no surprise to any journalist of my veteran vintage who will endorse my statement that proficiency in profanity was once a sort of norm, a prerequisite of the trade, so to say.

I must concede that my lingo even as a lisping toddler was not exactly considered the paragon of propriety. That’s because of my encounters with some vagrant urchins who were allowed the freedom of romping and foraging in our family back yard. Their vituperatively colourful banter was scandalously skilful.

I was always a fast learner particularly where taboo subjects are concerned. When it comes to sheer authentic swearing few languages can be as colourful and eloquently expressive as both the Sinhala and Tamil vernacular. I was enlightened at a tender age that certain idioms in both national languages were the diametric opposites of what they sounded like in Anglo-saxon. For example, phrases that sounded very similar to, say, hooks and eyes were decidedly not referring to the clothes fasteners you would find in your mother’s needlework basket.

Reprimands such as having my mouth rinsed out with soapy water and bottom-smackings notwithstanding were never an effective deterrent. I must add that the early aberration has held me in pretty good stead in the newsrooms of journals in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. And the closer to the perilous deadlines the thicker and more imaginative the swearing became.

Not surprising, really, because we hacks are usually dragooned into all kinds of ungodly nocturnal shifts enjoyed by certain other professionals such as cat-burglars, twilight women and body-snatching ghouls, to name a few. That is evidently why the language of editors, sub-editors and reporters, particularly around the witching hours of 2 am or thereabouts, could never be the subject of polite parlour conversation.

Although many did not possess the same refined vocabulary of a literary genius such as Mark Twain, they certainly appeared to have been on a similar plane of thought as the great American author who once said: ‘Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.’

Yes we the wordsmiths who forge out the best for our readers, are often called upon to perform delicate surgery on badly written copy and sheer butchery on the more horrendous contributions. It goes without saying that the surgeons of the written word mind every other language but our own.

Some of the best, most colourful expletives have been fashioned by bored and frustrated journos. Yes, we are quite a breed apart. And we conjure up the more exotic abuse while prowling the ‘stone’ (pre-production line) to exorcise those beastly little printer’s devils. By this time one is assailed by myopic eye strain and it often becomes difficult to spot the most obvious faux pas even when the font is staring you in the face in all its immense 60 point glory.

Aeons ago when I was a young sub-editor on this very newspaper I almost missed a typographical headline blooper in titanic type that should have read: ‘Woman jumps in front of train.’ The problem was that the letter ‘p’ had been mistakenly interposed for the character ‘j’ in the word jumps.

No need to state the obvious in a single letter gaffe in the word ‘Luck’ for the lottery results headline also intercepted in the nick of time by a crusty old duty editor. It was supposed to read: ‘Luck of the draw.’ The duty editor, unrivalled in his range of outrageous curses came charging at the offending sub-editor who had missed the slip yelling a litany of imaginatively coined swear words with a poetic touch: “You darn blind idiot. Do I always have to save us the blushes just because you are such a complacent huthsie-puthsie cross-eyed hooksie who simply can’t take a proper looksee!”

In an environment peopled by a bunch of versatile opponents in the art of vituperation was the deaf and dumb sub-editor colleague I once worked with who could lip-read and expressed himself quite effectively with hand signs to make his point. Despite his deficiency in hearing and unable to mouth the spoken word he could out-cuss the best of them in the same offensive faculty with dramatically communicative hand gestures.

After one such episode following his gesticulated hurling of vile imprecations at a whole bunch of colleagues one of them posed the pertinent question: “Does his mother ever wash his filthy hands with soap?”