I think I love David Mitchell. Look at this article he wrote on pole dancing in the Cambridge Union

[HerBeatitude]

he's got the point hasn't he?

cretin?

loon?

nutter?

I don't think anybody's saying it's acceptable to use certain terms, but I think understanding reasons why you shouldn't isn't universal at all. And the word used where dh works to signify stupid? Mong. They don't use it anymore but none of them really thought about what they were saying and I was embarrassed to hear it. If they'd continued to use it then I'd be encouraging evisceration of the worst kind but they don't. Job done.

'cretin' is another one that's very satisfying to say Not that I say it any more. But I think I only discovered that that one was offensive a couple of years ago (possibly on MN). And tbh I can't remember why it's offensive, I just know that it's been struck off.

ah well, sparked a debate. suffice it it to say i think insults are intended to be insulting, the whole point is that whatever the words actually mean, the person on the receiving end should be offended. I don't think taking 'third-party' offense is very helpful - stick up for the offended party by all means.

a rather ridiculous case of his was when a premiership manager - a guy who had managed may successful teams of black and white guys and really lived 'multiculturalism' in his working life, was called rascist for using non-pc language - many former players came forth to say they never felt mistreatd by him, and it was bloody ridiculous. He just wasn'tPC. It was rather hypocritical too - i bet most of the journalists calling him rascist worked in offices packed with white men (quite likely really!). And yet the slur against his name stood.

It is perfectly possible to say something deeply rascist/homophobic/etc and couch it in completely PC terminology. The terminology doesn't make it right.

it is for this reason i think that rather than shooting down words, we should shoot down opinions.

by reasoning with them, and showing them to be false,rather than slinging insults.

I find the term 'ignorant' being bandied about quite alot - isn't that just another insult?? why do you assume ignorance, rather than simply 'having thought about it and decided their standard sits differently to yours'????

and yes, outside the hallowed circles of Mumsnet, words/phrases such as 'spaz' 'mental' 'have an epi' etc etc..are in general use, and mostly completely separate to derivation. that's morphology for you.

Isn't 'chretin' actually derived from 'Christian'?

cretin

Words like cretin, imbecile and idiot have evolved from their original meanings and connotations. Hanging on to the supposed offensiveness of them is a bit odd IMO. Like insisting that gay means a prostitute, as it did in the 19th century (or perhaps it was the 18th, I'm a bit hazy on that...) It simply doesn't anymore, common usage changes the meanings of words.

Disinterested is beginning to mean uninterested. Even 30 years ago, it didn't, and pedants will jump up and down but like it or not, the word has almost changed its meaning and if its current most common usage continues, in 30 years time the change will be more or less complete. Just like the word idiot, IMO.

Anyway, blah blah...

Showofhands, I use cretin A LOT, and had NO IDEA that was the meaning. That Wiki page says lunatic means the same thing jeees I say that all the time too... Someone else said 'idiot' was the same oh goodness and I thought I was being civilised for not calling people twats and twunts...

Only on mumsnet would there be a debate on acceptable terms of abuse!

It's abuse ffs.

I'll be sticking with Prick and Cunt alternately just to make sure i can offend half the population at any one time.

HerBeau and Eggy - I quite agree

DM remains a wonder

as an experiment, take two nice words, like biscuit, and flower, and then say them out loud in an insulting fashion 'Flower-biscuit!!' still sounds like an insult, doesn't it..?

The history of language, like most of human history, is full of oppression, bigotry, blood, the sublime and the disgraceful...we speak a lanugage in part forced on us by invaders, in part cribbed from the pages of slave-owning artists, part filthy slang made good, and good words used to decorate the gutter....

where we find good people, why hang them out to dry for using words we don't like the derivation of?

Arse

Biscuit

Feck

(copyright Father Jack)

Great article.

How many world leaders and top business people got empowered by pole dancing?

I'll stick to Plato and the Dalai Lama for self empowerment, they never pole danced.

If Xenia comes on this thread and says all the girls at her daughter's school pole dance before going to the deb's ball, then I'll take it back.

Laurie Penny has written a good piece about this on her blog (slightly redeeming herself after the crap thing she wrote in the guardian about the Primark bikinis thing).

She starts off by saying:

"Write about female objectification in the comment pages of any major paper and you're in for a pasting. No matter how reasonably you put your arguments variously for or against ladies' tits in public places, you will be instantly, brutally and often personally attacked in the comments, on other websites and in the living rooms of the right-thinking. Oh, unless you're David Mitchell, in which case you get a 500-comment thread all about how fantastic you are, and a storm of gushy agreement on Twitter and in the feminist blogosphere.

It's more than a little annoying that when a man decides to write something positive about feminism - for once - he is rewarded with attention and praised for originality of thought, when lady feminists have been saying exactly the same things for years and have been lampooned for it. Mitchell's article about Cambridge university's pole-dancing classes for Comment Is Free is absolutely fantastic, but it doesn't cover any new territory. On the same site in October, Rowenna Davis wrote a brilliant, witty piece about institutional sexism at Cambridge - and was called a silly little woman in the comments."

Men and Feminism

I've happily lauded Julie Bindel et al on here many times - I think she's fantastic. I'm not going to not laud Mitchell just because he's a man, though. And tbh, he's a very skilled and funny writer (Bindel a good writer I think, but not particularly funny - not that she's trying to be). He's not lauded just because he's a bloke, but also because he puts things so punchily and skewers the hypocrisy/non-sequiturs so elegantly.

As to what gets said in the comments on CIF - there are a lot of scum-suckers all over CIF. Any half-sensible column will get a dreadful lot of bilge below the line. But yes, women writing in defence of feminism will get more. Because some people are unutterable wankers.

"I'm not going to not laud Mitchell just because he's a man, though."

No-one's suggesting that, PW. It's an excellent article. If you read the LP piece, she argues that we need more men speaking out for feminism (even if DM might not identify himself as a feminist).

And yes, DM writes beautifully, but I don't buy the line that he's getting plaudits simply because he is wittier than all the women who have said exactly the same thing!

mmm'kay I went right off her over that Primark piece but I will give her One More Chance.

I'm not saying he's lauded only because he's witty - of course he's also lauded because he's a man, and a sleb. But - and dittany might be able to enlighten me here - I don't know of many current feminist writers who are both righteous and amusing and elegant, prose-wise. Bindel is righteous and elegant, but not funny IMO (again, I doubt funny is her objective - difficult to be funny about rape, porn, trafficking etc). Penny's thinking is often muddy. Cath Elliott is a bit dull. Greer used to be all three but is mostly incomprehensible these days.

Some of the feminist bloggers are hilarious ... but they don't get columns in the Guardian!

PS agree about the ill thought out Primark piece. Gave me the rage it did.

Since everyone seems to agree that DM's an elegant writer, I feel obliged to make the (pedantic) point that his use of 'legs akimbo' means he forfeits a few style points

Arms akimbo, yes; legs, no. It means hands on hips, people!

'chauvinism gone senile' as opposed to 'PC gone mad'....I love it. I'll be borrowing that one....