Mark Wignall | Good, bad and ugly words
Published:Thursday | August 29, 2019 | 12:00 AM
I was 10 years old and she was probably in her early 20s. I was next door where she was, trying to prove to the older boys who were ogling her that I was up to their game.
As she washed and hung out clothes, something about the skimpy shorts she had on was creating confusion in my system, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. On the spur of the moment I made a lewd sexual comment to her. The bigger boys laughed and patted me on the back.
She didn’t find it at all funny and she laughed at me in a derisive fashion. Among the words hurled at me were ‘renking likkle bwoy’. On hearing the bigger boys laugh at me, I lashed out with words that took even me by surprise.
‘Gwey, yu b….c….’
As if to prove that I was indeed a pickney, she rushed off and made a complaint to my mother. Upon being summoned by my mother, I admitted that I had told her what was then highly offensive words. My mother wrote in her little book.
Weeks later my father, a ship’s electrician working on a tugboat, returned home. A week or so after the joyous gathering, my father called me in the ‘beating voice’.
“Mark! Bad words were never used in our house.”
BE AN ADULT FIRST
He was peering into my mother’s book. I suffered his lecture and, to a lesser extent, the actual flogging with the leather belt. The main lesson I learned that day? If one wanted to use a fat Jamaican bad word, one needed first to become an adult.
Weeks ago, People’s National Party senator, Andre Haughton, suggested that laws be amended to allow for an ease of expression of Jamaican bad words in dancehall sound clashes. I am not attracted to dancehall music and settings, but I cannot see how dancehall sound clashes can exist outside of the use of these highly expressive words.
I accept that most of them were initially generated on the basis that women’s hygienic garments were considered highly unclean, and to use it in description of another person would be bringing derision to a woman’s monthly period. Professor Carolyn Cooper sees strength in the connection between the woman’s natural state and the elevation of these words to their cultural prominence, even if many of us still see them as harmful.
The use of bad words remind me of the hypocrisy long held with the ingestion of ganja. I know a high court judge and an uptown, brown skin politician who smoke ganja like it is ‘going out of style’. And, probably because they are so highly educated and intelligent, they are also liberal in the use of bad words when conversing with their peers.
There are those who believe that the use of bad words in private conversations with friends and family stem from a deficit of education. I totally disagree with that part of the convention. To me, someone well versed in the use of English would not want to waste too much time in using standard English when a fat ‘r… c…’ would better convey and capture exactly what was meant.
A 10-pound ball peen hammer falls on your toe and in that instant, when you think of ‘oh dear’, it pushes to the fore a mix of a well-known New Testament name and a fat Jamaican bad word.
There is no doubt that it is also the language of the poorest among us so, until it is sanitised, legalised and blessed by the wealthy and better educated, it will remain something that we ought to be ashamed of.