Considerable progress
has been made in the past year towards the goal of ensuring that the word ****
is spelt **** in all printed and online media. With one exception, major news
organisations have co-operated fully with our campaign to standardise the
spelling of **** as ****. Previous partial reforms which led to a proliferation
of variants (most commonly f*ck, f**k, f*** ) were deemed unsatisfactory by the
Office for the Reform of Spelling and we can report general agreement that
these variants should be phased out. However, when recently a well-known troublemaker
called on his supporters to “**** Business” his words were persistently
reported in old spelling by the Financial
Times; we put pressure on this Japanese-owned organisation but achieved only limited
success. In contrast, OFFRESP welcomes Mr Corbyn's decision to refer to the troublemaker's “Anglo-Saxon word”, which in our view helps educate citizens into understanding that the Anglo-Saxons were on the wrong side of
history.
We have made great
progress in correcting online resource spellings. Thus, for example, an
attention seeking poet, some years ago, wrote a “poem” about mothers and
fathers, alleging that they “**** you up”. We found many online versions of
this silly claim which continued to use the poet’s original spelling and others
which used three, two or even just one star. However, when we pointed out that
all these versions would be blocked by our latest Child Protection software,
most online sources fell into line with the correct **** spelling. We are now
considering whether a similar policy should be extended to the coarse “you up”, which would yield a first line of the poem reading, "Your Mum and Dad, they **** *** **".
But problems do
persist, especially because of our current inability to control what are known
as graffiti “artists”. For example, in a study authorised at the highest level,
sixty school pupils at Key Stage One (5 to 7 years old), were asked to spell aloud
****. Ninety percent responded with “Fir,
Uh, Curly Cur, Kicking Cur” and ten percent proposed “ Fir, Uh, Kicking Cur”.
None were unable to complete the task. When asked to write down the word,
ten percent expressed reluctance to do so; of those who did write down, none
used **** and forty percent wrote their letters very large with double outlines
showing the clear influence of graffiti “artists”. Some of the pupils seemed to
be pleased with their efforts which they coloured in and showed, not only to
our testers but to their friends. We repeat the argument advanced in our
previous report, that this disastrous state of affairs can only be improved if
there is a complete ban on the sale of aerosol paint cans.
A main purpose of
spelling reform is to protect the young, and though it is admirable that the
elderly readers of popular newspapers are spared the old spellings, it is
really the young with whom we should be concerned. All the evidence is that
they are in clear and present danger.
In our next report we
will look at progress in the reform of the spelling of ****, ****, *** and ********.
© Trevor Pateman 2019. First published here April 2019
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