I swear, you swear, we all swear, and that’s OK

IT ALL started with one little word in an otherwise-innocent article about Julie Bishop. What’s all the fuss about?

“Angela said WHAT in her article?”

OH DEAR, I’m in the doghouse. A reader has written in to complain about my column a couple of weeks ago on Julie Bishop.

“I wonder why it is that Angela Mollard chooses to employ language that makes her sound really ‘common’,”she writes, before going on to critique my use of the word “backside” and my observation that our Foreign Minister has a “don’t f*** with me” attitude.

She points out that it’s distressing enough hearing “potty-mouthed” girls on the street without someone like me setting a bad example.

This probably isn’t the sort of potty-mouthed girl the reader had in mind.

As a congenitally defected “pleaser” and dyed-in-the-wool head girl, my first thought was to write back a long grovelling email pointing out that I am tattoo and piercing free, didn’t inhale those few times I smoked marijuana in my 20s, ring my mother every week, bake excellent cupcakes and say prayers with my daughters every night. Oh, and that I use profanities only rarely and under stress.

But then I thought “oh bollocks”, because if Helen Mirren can describe being 68 as “f***ing awesome”, Cate Blanchett can footnote her second Oscar win with a “don’t you f***ing forget it” and Kevin Rudd can exist on expletives alone then, goodness gracious me, I can utter “backside” occasionally.

I appreciate the fact that eyeballs are more tender than ears, so I initially wrote that Julie Bishop has a “don’t mess with me” attitude. But it sounded so 1973, so teacup and saucer — the sort of thing a powdered and coiffed Bronwyn Bishop would say rather than the razor-jawed international stealth bomber that is J Bish.

Bronwyn Bishop certainly has a “don’t mess with me” attitude in Parliament.

When it comes to matters of taste, I use my mother as a yardstick. “Would she be offended?” I ask myself, as if I’m still five and any transgression might be punished with the wooden spoon. But fortunately, mum lives in New Zealand. She did once tell me off for saying I was “knackered”, but then I’m sure my parents still picture me wearing Holly Hobby dresses.

The truth is, I’m a late developer when it comes to cursing. At school I had a vocabulary not dissimilar to that of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. It was all “raindrops on roses” worked back with a sensible fringe and a nice line in dobbing. Later, in London when I toiled for an editor whose use of the “C” word was so extreme his meetings were referred to as The Vagina Monologues, I retained my prissy provincial habits. I suspect I’m the only person ever to utter “fiddlesticks” upon being threatened with a sawn-off shotgun by a drug pusher on a Brixton estate.

The word “estate” always makes us think of this.

But then I had kids and something about the soft, milky, fruit-chopping, peasant-bloused, faux pleasantness of early motherhood brought out my latent bad girl. If I was to model the restraint and seamless jollity that are the hallmarks of good parenting, then I needed a secret stash of expletives to counter the relentless niceness of it all.

There’s something deliciously satisfying about a single, short, sharp explosive syllable as it exits your mouth, subverting all the worthy boundary-setting and bum, sorry, bottom-wiping and “pleases” and “thank yous”. Even thinking the “F” word is a form of silent therapy, and I couldn’t give a flying duck if it denotes a lack of intellect or imagination.

My best friend is the same. Sarah is a wordsmith beyond compare, a heterosexual Oscar Wilde if you will. But even with the Oxford English Dictionary lodged in her frontal lobe, she still comes out with the odd profanity. It sounds fabulous — like wearing Topshop with Chanel. I suspect it’s inherited, because for her birthday earlier this year, Sarah’s mum Meg had a cake shaped like an apricot rose and iced with the message: “Holy Shit and now I’m 90”.

And you thought your multicoloured candles were exciting.

I cringe when expletives are used abusively or repeatedly. They are the caviar of language and thus should be served rarely and dished out with a tiny silver spoon, on top of a light brioche of other elegant and witty words. Think Stephen Fry, not your uncle Tony.

Cinema is steeped in profanity — The Wolf of Wall Street recently broke records for the most swearing in a film — and television and radio long ago responded to a loosening of our language. Recently, I was on The Today Show with the fragrant and proprietous Deborah Thomas when she brazenly uttered the “F” word. Nobody gave a monkey’s.

So why are newspapers, rarely afforded the same latitude, viewed as time capsules or bastions of moral standards? The best are living, evolving reflections of the world they report. No one wants streams of invective, but do we really need the coyness of an asterisk?

When one esteemed newspaper replaced a politician’s use of the word “a***hole” with “a vulgar euphemism for a rectal aperture”, sure it was funny, but arguably it was also misreporting. Last year, The Washington Post asked: if the F-word is used in the Senate, the White House, in songs and in movies, “can something so ubiquitous still qualify as scandalous?”

So to those of you still reading, yes I am “common”, but not only because I lack refinement. I’m “common” because swearing is a widely-shared behaviour, and if I occasionally reflect that, then so be it.

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Twitter: @angelamollard