You were listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.

Good evening. Sometime last century, I made a television documentary about my years as a BBC correspondent

reporting on the final meltdown of apartheid in South Africa. It contained a long and

terribly explicit sequence of a black man being butchered to death in front of me. The BBC didn't

bat an eyelid. It also contained the

F word a dozen times or so, powerfully in context, we thought. The bosses went through agonies.

One F, they might tolerate, but 11. Meeting after meeting, as the highest pangandrums, the biggest

editorial brains, bent themselves to the moral question of that day. What was an F too far?

How things have changed to we become markedly and measurably more foul-mouthed? The British

Board of Film Classification has just done a survey that suggests most of us now regularly use

bad language, up 30% since 2017, with young people five times more potty mouth than their parents.

Words that if overheard would have caused my aunt to faint

are now routinely used as noun, adjective, verb and adverb,

sometimes all in the same sentence.

Mind you, my aunt would have cheerfully used the N-word,

not just about people of colour, but about the shade of

her sweater or the name of her Labrador. Is swearing, vulgar, corrupting and stupid, or powerful

and linguistically enriching, and perhaps even good for us? What are we to make of the constantly

shifting vocabulary of offence? And the total lack of consensus on what is acceptable, even in what was once known

as polite society. That's our moral maze tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator

at the Times, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh

University, and McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist and the Priest and Polemicist

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