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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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Look, I'm sorry to go on, but really I have no choice. Yes, it's the bloody BBC again.
 
We know that the BBC is a deeply hypocritical organisation. Its stance on the Gaza charity appeal is a case in point; it claims to be safeguarding its neutrality, when throughout the recent Gaza conflict its reporting has concentrated on the suffering of innocent civilians and ickle children in Gaza and mentioned little or nothing about the homemade rockets that rain down every day on Israeli suburbs and schools.
 
The Carol Thatcher affair really does take the biscuit, though. Jonathan Ross keeps his job and his multi-million income despite outraging thousands with his on-air antics, but Carol Thatcher is sacked from "The One Show" for something she said in private, between colleagues, in the dressing-room, miles from any microphone. Mind you one of those colleagues, Adrian Chiles, doesn't come out of it too well. Apparently he was the one who took offence at Thatcher's use of the word "golliwog", so not only is he a talentless, unattractive oaf who should keep his greasy hands off that nice Christine Blakeley, but he's a tight-arsed humourless specimen of political correctness too. Nice one, Ade. Naughty Carol said a bad word, so you ran off and told a grownup. I hope you're pleased with yourself, because no-one else is.
 
Funny expression that, isn't it - "took offence"? If anyone had used those words during my childhood I'd have assumed they meant someone had legged it with an armful of waney-edge. When in fifty or a hundred years' time, social historians look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century, will they dub it "The Era of Offence"? And will they notice that more than fifty percent of the people who use the word can't actually spell it (if that includes you, it has a "c", not an "s")?
 
Carol Thatcher's offence was, apparently, that in her usual rather coarse and unintelligent way she likened a tennis-player to the golliwog that used to adorn our jam-jars years ago.
 
Now, golliwogs exist. They are children's stuffed toys, mainly of a past era though I dare say there are probably still plenty of them tucked away in playroom cupboards. They weren't offensive when they were popular, and they aren't now - any more than a white dolly is offensive to white people, or a teddy bear is offensive to animal lovers. They're TOYS, for God's sake.
 
Let's think about spastics. "Spastic" is a term commonly used for those suffering from cerebral palsy. There used to be a "Spastics' Society" - in fact there still are quite a few elsewhere in the world, particularly in India, and there's at least one (or was until recently) in this country, the Devon & Exeter Spastics Society.
 
However, the word "spastic" started to be used as a term of abuse in schools, to describe anyone clumsy or stupid. Perversely, the BBC may have been partly to blame for this when in an attempt to show disability in a positive light, the Blue Peter programme followed the life story of Joey Deacon during the International Year of Disabled Persons. The Spastics' Society therefore changed its name to "Scope" in 1994, and I imagine that if I called someone "a spastic" these days - even someone suffering from cerebral palsy, or perhaps especially someone suffering from cerebral palsy - there would be outrage, opprobrium, offence and calls for action by my ISP.
 
Yet there was a word that was going innocently about its business, annoying no one, offending no one, fulfilling a useful function … and suddenly through no fault of its own it's a swear word! How does that happen?
 
Think about the phrase "Nigger Brown". This is, or was, a colour found in tubes in artists' supplies shops, and a useful way of describing a very particular shade of brown. Even quite recently a Chinese factory was describing a sofa as "nigger brown" in colour. But of course the word "nigger", as a contraction of "negro", is offensive.
 
Bit of a problem, that. What should we ban? The colour? Artists are going to find life a little difficult if we tell them they aren't allowed to have certain colours in their paint boxes in case their names are offensive to … some one. For that matter, what about "niggerheads"? These are outcrops of coral just under the surface of the sea in tropical lagoons, very dangerous to yachts. Are these to be banned from the charts in case someone is offended? Tough on the sailors if so.
 
And yet quite a few black people call each other "nigger" today, apparently without either giving or taking offence. How does that work? Is the word only offensive when used by a white person? Because if that's it, surely it's racial discrimination to suggest that a person of a certain race may not use certain words? Or is the word only offensive when used with pejorative intent? No, it can't be that. Carol Thatcher wasn't being critical or unpleasant about the tennis player, she thought she was making a joke.
 
Or is it the corruption of "negro" to "nigger" that's offensive? Would it be all right to say "Hallo, Negro!" to a black person in the street? No, I thought not.
 
Corruptions and abbreviations like "Paki", "Yid" or "Nip" are often held to be offensive. Yet one of the best-known websites for the Pakistani community in Britain is called www.paki.com - it's rather a good site, actually.
 
In Japan, hundreds of companies and organisations use the word "Nippon" in their names, yet to us the contraction "nip" is offensive. Why? And Yiddish is a perfectly respectable adjective when applied to aspects of Jewish culture, especially referring to Jews of East European origin. Yet the contraction "Yid" is offensive, as some Jewish fans of Tottenham Hotspur found out recently when the club forbade them from calling themselves "The Yid Army".
 
On the other hand many people feel able to freely use the contraction "Brit". Why is that different? If "Paki" and "Yid" and "Nip" and "nigger" are wrong, why is "Brit" OK? Many English, Welsh and Scottish people don't like being called "British". Personally I'm happy to be British, but to me the word "Brit" is deeply offensive because of the connotations it carries, the association with tasteless stupidity, chauvinism and union jack underpants.
 
A word cannot of itself be offensive. A word is simply a collection of letters in a certain order, or a collection of vocalised sounds in a certain order. It depends for its emotional impact on the meaning it is given as it is being used - not its meaning in the dictionary, not the meaning it used to have in the good old days, but the meaning the user attaches to it. If the person using it means it to be rude, it's rude. If the person using it means it to be benign, then it cannot be offensive, however hard people like Adrian Chiles try.
 
Take "spastic" for instance - it only becomes offensive if it is used with offensive or contemptuous intent. If it's used to indicate someone suffering from a certain disorder, it is not offensive. What we should be legislating for - if indeed, any legislation is necessary or appropriate - is to prevent people insulting each other. To ban any word is ridiculous: you might as well ban shoes in case we throw them at politicians.
 
Of course, if a word could be offensive all by itself, then surely the contraction of that word must also be offensive - perhaps even more so? So why don't we ban the word "Golly!" when used as an expression of surprise? The GOS uses it quite a lot, and nobody's ever objected.
 
It's not even racially offensive to liken someone to a golliwog, if they look like one as French tennis player Gael Monfis certainly does in some photos (incidentally, he probably wasn't the one Carol Thatcher was referring to), or as many black pop stars did in the seventies ...
 

 
… if they look like a golliwog, they do, that's all. Just like Princess Anne has certain facial characteristics in common with a horse. It's rude to say so, but she can't help her face, poor girl. When The GOS was a teacher the kids nicknamed him "Beaky" because he had a big nose (still has, sadly). It was rude of them, but then it's quite a big pointy nose. We all have our crosses to bear.
 
I didn't hear anyone complaining when "Private Eye" pointed out that the elderly and rather porky Boy George bears a striking resemblance to a Sontaran from "Dr.Who" …
 

 
… or that Andy Murray could be mistaken for a werewolf …
 

 
That's it, really. A word's offensiveness OUGHT to depend on (a) who uses it, and (b) what they intend by it. That's fine. But unfortunately that's not the way the world is going. In our world, just the simple assemblage of letters is enough to make people cry foul, and this simply betrays their lack of understanding of the language we all speak. I'm tempted to make some cutting remark about the lunatics having taken over the asylum, only I don't want to offend all the mad people.
 
Personally I find the word "bucket" offensive, because of the connotation "kick the bucket" meaning to die, which I presumably will do some time. Since old people are far more likely to kick the bucket than young people, the word is chronologically offensive.
 
So every time I read the word "bucket" in a newspaper, or hear someone using it in the street (or, more likely, in B&Q), or on the radio, I'm going to make a formal complaint. It's my new campaign.
 
Do join me.
 

 
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