The C-word is no longer the most dangerous word of all

Should we be as worked up as the Mail on Sunday about a BBC Radio Four panellist implying the word “cunt” in a show broadcast at six thirty in the evening? The paper has got itself into a right old lather.

Apparently, Sandi Toksvig made the typically hilarious “quip”, that “The Tories have put the ‘n’ in cuts,” while appearing on The News Quiz. The supposed pun doesn’t work semantically; it is just ad hominem abuse of the Tories, which I why I suppose the BBC let it go through. They would have baulked at the word “nigger”, I would guess, and probably cavilled at “motherfucker”, unless it was implied in reference to, say, George Osborne. By the same token I don’t suppose the Mail would have been quite so enraged if the implied use of the word had not been directed at the Tories, but at, say, Ryan Giggs instead.

So far as I can tell the BBC received only one complaint, and that was from a “retired newspaper executive”, Colin Harrow (I think he worked for the Daily Mirror).

The Mail also described the word as being the most obscene in the English language, although I suspect that this is no longer true and has been eclipsed by both of the words I mentioned above and also by a number of others such as “coon” and “faggot” and “Dacre”. I think cunt has long since lost its dangerously exotic whiff, but perhaps I am wrong.