Even phonetic starts "Ph" which I find ironic. Phonetic spelling assigns consistent, specific sounds to letters, and combinations of letters. "Formula One" comes out as "Faw-myuh-luh Wuhn" according to the online resources I checked. None of that "Ph" guff there!
There is a written joke, frequently assigned to Mark Twain, but now considered as having been first penned by M.J. Yilz in a letter to The Economist. It starts in current English and over the course of some amusing sentences makes recommendations for the standardising of English spelling. The final sentence is as follows:
"Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in jus xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
Which if you read it out loud you should be able to decode with reasonable ease...assuming you speak English without too much of an accent.
So by now dear reader I'm assuming you can speak the title of this article and have at least a mild smile dance across your face. That is unless you find even joking about swearing to be offensive. How is one to maintain standards in such torrid times?
One person's after dinner joke is another's cause for a court case, or at the very least stern admonishment for such poor language.
Which brings us to the latest, literal, war of words between the FIA, the drivers and teams in general, but V. Max in particular.
FIA President, Mohammed ben Sulayem, had barely finished his sentence decreeing the potty-mouths to be horrid, than V. Max elected to drop the Ph-bomb in the very next round of interviews. Oh dear.
So here we are. The FIA having managed to once more create several storms in tea-cups while appearing excessively petty. All this only weeks after deeming George Russell's car too light by a fraction of a roast chicken, and stripping the Briton of his Spa GP win.
The Life of Brian gives us the classic "All I said was 'this fish is fit for Jehovah'" joke, while Derek and Clive gave so many swear-laden onslaughts in the 1970's singling one out as particularly profane is awkward. The Pharck-meter would be off the scale at any one of their recitals.
Fascinating to learn that "Gadzooks!" Is old-ish English for "God's Hooks", implying the nails with which Christ was nailed to the cross. It was considered highly profane and eye-watering back then. Yet these days whenever someone is emulating "old school" or ancient disbelief "Gadzooks!" will be cheerfully exclaimed without a worry, even in children's TV programs.
So if the FIA want to clean-up driver language how are they going to go about it? Consider. Who gets to ascribe words to the naughty list? A linguistic master or a cultural expert, or both? Or indeed many of them. We'd need experts for all major languages used around the viewing world. So that's English, French, German, Italian and, one would think, Dutch, as starting points. Then the division of a common language, American. I remember the first time I heard a sweet lady in an American office cheerfully announce she was just going to grab her "Fanny Pack" I nearly passed out. Once a colleague realised my terrible distress he smiled and explained it was simply a "Bum Bag."
What about Latin or very old English? Some of the odd sounding phrases in Shakespeare are highly colourful swear-word combinations. Could one say these are artistic? Shakespeare's intended audiences would have been rolling in the straw over such inventive use of colourful prose.
Or is the FIA going to fall into the trap of ruling that it is only English swear-words that must be avoided? Either one can argue that's making a racist decision, or one can take it as free license to swear in other languages. Or possibly both.
Back to the complexity of compiling the naughty word list. Are, "heck", "hell", "shit", "God damn", "Christ above" and "Tosser" all on the list or off? (I once had my complaint about Clive Anderson calling the Bee Gees tossers played on the BBC's Points of View, and I wasn't even a fan of the band - Ed) What is a syllable too far? Is an implied rude outcome, out of bounds? "Go stick it up your fundamental...!" or "Go forth and multiply!"?
In one of his marvellous Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books Douglas Adams has a minor character floating around attending a flying party (spoiler alert) which had just hit Arthur Dent in the small of the back. This character was aggrandising himself with an award clutched to his chest, won for "The most gratuitous use of the work Pharck in a stage play." How wonderful!
The FIA will have a hard time composing the list just in English, let alone all the other languages used across the teams around the paddock and across the global viewership. Sounds like the need for a penalty system to me! Just like driving behaviour. One point for "Damn!" two for "Gadzooks!" three for the perennial "Bucket of shit!", all the way up to a three-month speaking ban for "Phark me, the pharking, pharcker has gone and pharked 'imself!" Quite right too.
Why not, as a carrot and stick approach, award extra interview minutes to the best spoken drivers? Have charming radio conversations and you get 30 seconds extra interview time for each well considered sentence. Then we can add an award for it at the gala night at season's end! Most accurate use of past and present tense? Clearest enunciation of diphthongs in a correctly structured sentence? Nothing like a swift gliding vowel to make us all sound charming. Most races complete without a split-infinitive? Oh yes, the FIA are taking us where no man has gone before! Why there could even be championship points in this!
Who composes the list? Who manages it? How are drivers and teams (re)educated on it? As the 1st century Roman poet Juvenal so wonderfully phrased it in the Satires, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The most literal translation being "Who will guard the guards themselves?", but is more commonly quoted as "Who watches the watchmen?"
Quite so Juvenal! The FIA loves nothing so much as setting themselves rules and regulations with which to manipulate and control others. Yet who watches them indeed? V. Max, Lewis and in recent days the GPDA are all attempting to apply a lens of clarity, possibly of sanity. If no one gets a grip on this we could all be pharcked!
Max Noble
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here
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