do was have a piece of software search through a page, and if it found a string of letters which added up to a potentially sensitive word, they would block access to it.
The only thing was, the software didn’t make a distinction between the string of letters when it was a separate word and the string when it was part of a word. So, the search engine having decided that sex was a ‘bad word’, the residents of Sussex and Essex found they were unable to access many web pages relating to their counties. Not to mention the good citizens of Scunthorpe.
Software is a bit more advanced these days, but it still lacks the kind of linguistic sophistication which is needed to ensure that basic blunders are avoided. A couple of years ago, there was an Internet news page that reported a street stabbing in Chicago. The automatically-generated ads down the side of the screen said ‘Buy your knives here’ and ‘Get cheap knives here’. The dumb software had spotted the word knife and assumed that this was what needed to be plugged. It wasn’t clever enough to analyse the content of the page and see that, if there were to be any ads at all, they should be about personal protection.
Publications go to extraordinary lengths sometimes to protect their readers from the shock of encountering a taboo word. Even dictionaries. In the 1940s, Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the first to pay full and detailed attention to all four-letter words, was banned by some libraries and placed on the reserved shelves by others. If you were interested in slang and asked to see it, the librarian would look you up and down as if you were a pervert.
Modern dictionaries generally include all taboo words, marking them with a stylistic label such as ‘taboo’ or ‘offensive’. But even these sometimes back away from a full frontal presentation. I have a dictionary, published not very long ago, where the last word on the right-hand page to be given a definition is fuck. This should therefore appear as the guide-word (or ‘running head’) at the top right-hand corner of the page. But it doesn’t. Instead we see its alphabetical predecessor, fuchsia.
As I drove through Caernarfon, past the castle, I stopped at a zebra crossing to let a young man cross. He had just stepped onto the crossing when a car coming from the opposite direction zipped past in front of him, giving him a bit of a fright. He shouted after the miscreant. It was the c-word again, but not at all affable this time.
PORTMEIRION
The road south from Caernarfon into mid-Wales runs along the Lleyn peninsula then cuts across through Porthmadog and past the Italianate village created by Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1920s in loving memory of his visits to Portofino, on the coast of north-west Italy. Portmeirion. I had to go and worship there, for a little while, because it was chosen as the location for The Prisoner, the 1960s cult television series starring Patrick McGoohan. I am of the generation that watched it assiduously, week by week, and puzzled over what on earth it was all about.
Portmeirion was ‘the Village’ where (it seemed) kidnapped spies and agents of all descriptions were kept for interrogation, so that whatever data they had in their heads might be extracted for use by those (whoever they were) who were in charge. McGoohan’s character has suddenly resigned from his job in British intelligence. He is followed home, put to sleep with a gas spray, and taken to the Village. Each episode begins with his character, now a prisoner, waking up in his new bedroom and having an exchange with the Village’s current second-in-command (‘Number 2’).
PRISONER: Where am I?
NUMBER 2: In the Village.
PRISONER: What do you want?
NUMBER 2: Information.
PRISONER: Whose side are you on?
NUMBER 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information. Information.
PRISONER: You won’t get it.
NUMBER 2: By hook or by crook, we will.
PRISONER: Who are you?
NUMBER 2: The new Number 2.
PRISONER: Who is Number 1?
NUMBER 2: You are Number 6.
PRISONER: I am not a number. I am a free man!
Despite their hook and crook, the Village guardians don’t get their information. And at the end of the series, McGoohan triumphs (possibly).
The surreal location, and the ingenious, ambiguous ‘Big Brother is watching you’ plots, a combination of thriller, fantasy, and science fiction, reinforced by quirky music, clever camerawork, crisp editing and colourful design, resulted in a series now acknowledged to have been well ahead of its time. I especially admired the quickfire dialogue, with its contagious catch-phrases, and forty years on still find myself saying ‘Be seeing you’ as a farewell – the au revoir that all brainwashed inmates of the Village had been programmed to say.
Catch-phrases are notoriously difficult things to pin down, as they rarely get into dictionaries. Often, by the time lexicographers come to be aware of them, they are already on their way out, so they are never recorded at all. In any case, they don’t easily fit into a dictionary format. A dictionary is not the obvious place to put ‘Be seeing you,’ for instance. Or Victor Meldrew’s ‘I don’t beLIEVE it!’ from One Foot in the Grave.
Many catch-phrases are generated by particular radio or television series, or by TV advertising slogans, and last only as long as the transmissions take place. ‘Can I do you now sir?’ from the radio show ITMA in the 1940s. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ from Listen with Mother in the 1950s. ‘There’s no answer to that,’ from The Morecambe and Wise Show in the 1960s. ‘And now for something completely different,’ from Monty Python in the 1970s.
There can be huge generational gaps in communication – teenagers not understanding adult catch-phrases and, even more so, adults not understanding the latest teenage linguistic fashions. Nor are catchphrases much recognized outside the country in which they originate. Most British catch-phrases are not known in America, and vice versa. PC Dixon’s ‘Evenin’ all,’ from the 1950s and ’60s television series Dixon of Dock Green, never travelled across the Atlantic. Nor did ‘Gissa job’ (= ‘Give us a job’ in Liverpool dialect), from Alan Bleasdale’s 1980 television play Boys from the Blackstuff, and the series it inspired.
A favoured few phrases catch the public linguistic imagination, and live on. Some of them eventually become part of the mainstream of English usage, and their origin is lost to memory. Who now knows which film Western originally inspired ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’? And how many of us are aware that it was Al Jolson, in the first talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927), who gave us ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’? Such phrases have refreshed parts of our linguistic intuition that other phrases have not reached.
For some (especially younger) readers, that last sentence will seem to be an original piece of literary expression, perhaps admired for its metaphorical ingenuity, more likely condemned as a piece of intellectual self-indulgence. Others (slightly less young) will nod wisely,
