Luftwaffel

Cursing?

One of the very few blogs I read is called... it's called Strong Language.  It calls itself "a sweary blog about swearing".  Language interests me.  Particularly how we interpret language.  I've been interested in it ever since I heard the 1967 B-side of the first Pink Floyd single, "Candy and a Currant Bun" (see my other blog) and was convinced, along with many others, that Syd Barrett dropped an F-bomb in it.

Linguistically I'd say I'm a weak Sapir-Whorf advocate.  It's been overstated, but the way we hear and understand words, I believe, is influenced by our cultural context.  And it fascinates me that, in 1967, nobody would have heard Syd Barrett saying "fuck".  (His pronunciation in the song is affected.  In the line "I like to see you run like that", he pronounces the second "like" as "lick".  This is much less commented on.  Is he being dirty?  Hard to say.)

And that's how I think about the controversy surrounding Disc 3 – 287654.11.  The recording is more or less indecipherable, to the point where they read "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and a couple of the words aren't clear.  If we don't hear "white" or "snow" after being culturally programmed to hear those words, man those words are just not there.

So that we hear a burst of, essentially, noise, as being the word "fuck" says more about us than about what the word actually is.  Maybe that's the word they said, but my understanding is that in 1885 people were much less free with that word than they are today - particularly considering that they were recording for what they could reasonably have assumed was posterity.

A lot of history, really, consists of our minds filling in the blanks where what we have is unclear, or indistinct, or contains lacunae.  I'm more interested in the lacunae themselves than by what we put there.  I'm more interested in the trilling "r"s than by the notion that someone might have put the word "fuck" on record 133 years and a week ago.

There's another video that's circulated from the old days - 1920s, 1930s - of the tremendously racist cartoon character Bosko saying something that sounds very much like "The dirty fuck!"  Based on what I know, I'm pretty sure this is damn near impossible.  The sound on the print is distorted, audibly so, and the degradation affects some other word, some word I can't possibly hear because all I hear is "fuck".  Again I'm more interested in the degradation, the decay, than the fact that my brain tells me I'm hearing the word "fuck".