Are you a “wanker” if you say “retard” on British television?

The Rude Britannia art exhibit opened at the Tate Britain art museum on Wednesday, and it reminds us that people knew how to be nasty, brutish, and short long before the onset of the blogosphere. The show includes penile, gluteal, and scatological sendoffs of today's famous and rich. But it also goes all the way back to the savage commentaries of the eighteenth century painter William Hogarth, whose Rake's Progress series condemned the moronic habits of the English gentry in unsparing terms.

"God we're rude, aren't we?" the exhibit inspired the United Kingdom's The Independent to note. "We're obsessed with bums, tits, willies, lavatory humour, vicars, knickers, smells, foreigners, fat tummies, fat slags, Fat Les, fat wrestlers, Benny Hill, Carry On Up The Khyber, Viz, Private Eye, men dressed as laydeez, women dressed as anarchic schoolgirls, sitcoms that offer howling tsunamis of verbal abuse, from The Young Ones to The Thick Of It."

And yet the British are also obsessed with monitoring this sort of content with a precision that would make regulators in the United States pause. For example: Ofcom, the UK's equivalent of our Federal Communications Commission, has just published a remarkable 298 page compendium of audience attitudes towards "offensive" language on radio and TV, the scope of which goes way beyond anything done by the government here.

The survey not surprisingly found that most of the same words that raise eyebrows in the states lift UK brows as well. We don't want to turn this post into a bleepfest, so we'll assume Ars readers know them all by heart. But the probe also queried Brits on a much wider array of potential rudisms, including: "Gippo," "Towelhead," "Poof," "Dyke," "Chick-with-dick," "Gender-bender," "Retard/retarded," "Schizo," "Nutter," "Spaz," "Mental," "Bollocks," "Shag," and "Wanker."

As this list suggests, the inquiry focused not only an offensive talk, but "discriminatory" language towards ethnic and sexual minorities, and even against people with mental disorders. Since the UK has a broadcasting code like ours, "Ofcom must therefore keep itself informed, and updated, on generally accepted standards," the report explains. "One of the ways this is achieved is through commissioning research to understand public attitudes towards offensive language."

But reading the survey, what stands out is how conscious many of those surveyed were of the context in which these words broadcast, and their mindfulness of that in their feedback to the government.

The under eighteens

The difference between the British code and our FCC's rules is the degree of precision. Go to the FCC's indecency/obscenity/profanity web page and you still haven't the vaguest practical idea what the government actually prohibits. The time honored means by which US broadcasters discover what the latest regime actually dislikes is after they've been hit with a fine, and most of those fines are being vetted in the Federal courts right now.

The British on the other hand have a set of "protecting the under eighteens" guidance notes for their code that includes discussion about sexual language, violent behavior, drug use, and nudity. They even mention portrayals of exorcisms, tarot, and astrological readings, each of which the government carefully defines:

"Exorcism is the expulsion or banishing of unwanted forces or entities from a person place or thing. The expulsion may take place by ritual prayer, incantations, conjuration, spells, symbolism, commanding or persuasion. The force or entity may include Satan, one or more other demons, evil spirits or ghosts. It may be done in the name of religion or not."

Now you know. The UK also has a "safe harbor" rule similar to that used in the United States. They call theirs "the watershed." Strictures against television programming deemed unsuitable for children are relaxed from nine o'clock in the evening through five thirty in the morning (it's 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. here in the US—guess we go to bed a little later).

This is the context in which Ofcom surveyed the British populace on what they want or don't want to hear and see on TV and radio.

Piss away

Survey participants received a package of DVDs with a collection of TV and radio clips to watch. Clip 4 was described as follows: "Clip 4 is taken from a long running American cartoon sitcom featuring a family, their friends and neighbours. It is designed to appeal to a wide range of viewers. In this clip the mother of the family has been bought a landscaped garden by her husband and thinks aloud 'How much did he piss away on this?'. The programme was broadcast at 5.30pm on a Sunday on Sky One."

Viewers then sorted their reactions to the words used in these clips into three categories: "higher," "lower," and "medium" acceptability. Again, we're not going to go into the lower acceptability words, which you can easily guess. But the report indicates that British couch potatoes have a pretty high tolerance for some strong language on TV. The words "Bloody," "Bollocks," "Bugger," "Crap," "Goddamn," and "Piss/pissed," for example, were all filed in the "higher acceptability to some/medium acceptability to others" / pre-watershed category.

And in the post-watershed period, "wanker," "bitch," and "bugger" were identified as among the somewhat more acceptable words.

"Because those words ['bollocks' and 'crap' etc] are used in language, they could be used in passing and don't necessarily refer to a group of people," one participant explained. "'Pissed' is not even a swear word is it?" an older woman from Glasgow asked.

On the other hand, when it came to "discriminatory" language, survey members had very low tolerance for words like "Paki," "Nigger," "Spastic," "Dyke," and "Faggot." They disagreed, however, on whether these words should be banned from television and radio in any context.

These epithets are "specifically picking out people in society," one warned. "It's not exactly swearing, and they just shouldn't be allowed." Then again, "it's alright for a black person to call a black person that but you couldn't have a white person calling a black person that," another commented.

"If you are going to use it educationally, you have to have a very good reason to do that," advised a third.

The report also noted that "the general UK sample thought that the words 'dyke' and 'faggot' were considered more hurtful and serious than words such as 'tranny' and 'poof' which were felt to be used in more of a lighthearted way."

Nutters

Finally, the survey explored the acceptability of words for people with mental health problems. Many respondents said they could see little harm in terms like "Nutter," "Looney," "Schizo," and "Mental."