CONNECT/Eddie Holt: The four-letter word that rhymes with duck and starts with F was, quite literally, in the headlines last week. The headline in question was on the front page of a daily supplement to Britain's Guardian newspaper. Against an all-white background, three words, fading from black to dark brown, made a striking statement: "Fuck Cilla Black" they said.
Given that the cover was designed by the artist Gillian Wearing, the fact that "Black" was dark brown, while the F-word was black, may have been artistically significant. Then again, maybe not. Anyway, the fuss was clearly because the most common blue word in the English language (indeed, in international language) was making a rare, high-profile appearance in print journalism.
It was art, of course, not mere hackery that permitted the appearance of the F-word. That, at least, was the paper's defence for the contentious cover. The three scrawled words resembled work hastily produced by a felt-tip marker. The graffiti-look magnified the sense that, really, the slogan shouldn't be there at all - not in a newspaper and certainly not about matriarchal Cilla Black.
Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997 for 60 Minutes Silence, a "video-artwork" in which 26 men and women dressed in police uniforms stood in front of a camera doing nothing. (Well, it was the Turner Prize.) She has said that some of her main formative influences were 1970s fly-on-the-wall TV documentaries such as The Family. Not surprisingly, her critics snigger that she must mean the Manson Family.
The reason Cilla Black was the victim of last week's "journalism-artwork" was because the feature it flagged focused on the growing nastiness of television. A few days after Black announced she was quitting as presenter of Blind Date, the piece contrasted her with such contemporary British TV "queens of mean" as Anne Robinson, Ulrika Jonsson, Liza Tarbuck, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine.
As an illustration for its topic, Wearing's cover design was clever and defensible. Indeed, it was arguably too clever to be wasted on the cretinous crew who get paid for being publicly nasty to exhibitionists pretending to be ordinary people.
Still, it made its case: the F-word remains, rightly so, practically taboo in journalism while mean, ridiculing and humiliating guff proliferates on "entertainment" television.
The mean stuff really is more odious than a vulgar swear word and perhaps we should remember that. Nonetheless, the suggestion that Cilla Black ought to be, let's say, "discarded" (though the word preceding her name has, of course, a more carnal meaning) because, despite trying hard, she's not mean enough, indicts contemporary television.
Even so, some readers remained more outraged by the F-word than by the sheer nastiness its presence lampooned. It's true that a spate of swear words and vulgarisms could only debase journalism and culture generally. Using it in headlines, like in speech, as an intensifier ("the f-ing government . . ." or whatever) would certainly be more crass than colourful, even when it accurately reflected public sentiment.
So, arguments about the word's appropriateness in a public journal will continue to rage. Fine. What's really shocking, however, is the way in which we can all become inured to infinitely more offensive material in the media. Advertising's downright lies, for instance, or a ludicrous lack of proportion about the sex lives of pop stars, or even attempts to justify and respectabilise warmongering, are readily accepted.
Mere vulgarity is insignificant beside such daily monstrosities. Coarseness is not attractive but, being obvious, it is less likely than unexpressed agendas to be insidious. In the officialese of so many press releases, often timed with the sensitivity of a Jo Moore (the British Labour party PR guruette who reckoned September 11th, 2001, provided good cover to bury awkward news) there is often more poison.
(There is, of course, a reasonable argument that use of the F-word was itself a sharp piece of attention-grabbing advertising for the Guardian. Perhaps it was. In fairness however, it was not blurbed on the front page of the broadsheet section of the paper. Nobody, even among the liberals, was quite that f-ing cheeky.)
But in an age when "reality" television treats people like lab rats - because they submit to it and doubtless, because they believe they're worth it - a vulgar word is hardly an assault on morality. Doubtless, it is, for many people, an assault on manners and, as such, warrants their condemnation. For others, such condemnation, given the context, connotes censorship of art. It's a perennial argument.
Anyway, with an attack on Iraq looming, it's arguably obscene to write about such trivia as a public appearance of the F-word. In one sense, this is true. In another, however, the sheer power of the word to attract and repel people simultaneously is such that it illuminates the nonsense of taking it too seriously. In so doing, it also illuminates the media's more toxic daily offences.
House styles of papers and magazines may insist that asterisks be used in place of letters in offensive words. Fair enough. Successful publications generally know their readerships. Gillian Wearing's effort wasn't to everyone's taste, though it has had its supporters too. It has however, shown that there are debasements of culture and people beyond that generated by rude words.
After all, the three letter W-word, which may be unleashed on Iraq, is far more dehumanising than Wearing's suggestion for Cilla Black. With TV plumbing new depths of nastiness to win ratings by catering to jaded appetites it has helped degrade, the F-word can, ironically, be a cultural hero. It was last week. Perhaps every word, like every dog, has its day.