Meanings change. As a teenager I remember a local publican, who would serve us at 16 as long as we sat out by the bins in the backyard, lamenting that he could no longer really call his establishment “the Gay Dog”, as the word had been claimed by “queers”. The landlord’s own dog, Enoch, was not gay, but he did growl at black people and anyone in any kind of ecclesiastical dress. I suggested, in the perpetually sarcastic tone I employed from 1979 to 2019, that the landlord rename his pub the Racist Anticlerical Dog, for which I received a lifetime ban.
Today the (former) Gay Dog is a mock-Tudor McDonald’s, its pivotal point in the ideological struggles of the 80s eclipsed by the death of the community space and the march of poor diet. Ironically, I once saw Enoch trying to mount a fluffy cushion in the snug, suggesting that he was, if not gay, then at least soft-furnishing-curious.
According to The Dictionary Of Modern Written Arabic, the word intifada means “to be shaken off, be dusted off; to shake; to shudder, shiver, tremble; to shake off from oneself; to wake up, come to consciousness”. According to Google’s own AI prompt, which tops your search results, it refers to two specific Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation, the Arabic-dictionary sense of the word given as an afterthought under the subheading “origins”. Due to the Arab world’s attitudes to alcohol, there are very few pubs called the Intifada, so even if Google’s AI prompt is right and the word now has exclusively violent connotations, at least there’s not going to be any need for a lot of new signage.
According to the Metropolitan and Greater Manchester police, the word intifada and the Palestine protesters’ chant “Globalise the intifada” are now forbidden, as “violent acts have taken place, the context has changed – words have meaning and consequence. We will act decisively and make arrests”. I agree that words have meaning and consequence, and that it’s tasteless to use the phrase now. But I do feel for the police, who, as well as taking down details of robberies in order to facilitate the work of the insurance industry, now have to act as experts in semantics and linguistics. That’s what I call multitasking.
Each bobby on the beat must now be a cross between Dixon of Dock Green and the British language philosopher John Langshaw Austin, whose work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. Is it any wonder they’ve no time to follow up on the time seven 12-year-old boys rabbit-punched me to the ground in Stoke Newington and made off with a plastic bag containing a loaf of bread and some tins of baked beans?
A working knowledge of the relationship between sound and meaning is now a basic of any police training course.
And it must be so difficult for the police to police the meaning of words, especially in the modern disinformation age, where Elon Musk and company’s rightward steerage of global discourse ridicules the idea that “hurty words” can even have the “meaning and consequence” the police say they can. A white man standing outside a pub on a Friday night telling a black man to “go back to Africa” might be cautioned by the police on the understanding that words do have meaning and consequence, as they insist they do, a working knowledge of the relationship between sound and meaning now a basic of any police training course.
But when Reform’s Hampshire and Solent mayoral candidate, Chris Parry, who was once a rear-admiral, says David Lammy should “go back to the Caribbean”, he is defended by Reform’s deputy leader and MP for Dubai South, Richard Tice, who said it was the role of Reform to “challenge” the justice secretary. Last time I was in Glasgow I saw a wall by the River Clyde with “Fuck Muslims” written on it in three-foot-high letters. Thanks to Richard Tice, I now understand that it was the role of the wall to challenge Muslims. Who’d be a police officer in the current linguistically challenging climate?
But words and symbols do change their meaning. A November YouGov survey shows that 50% of British adults now think England flags are displayed “mostly as a way of expressing anti-migrant and/or anti-ethnic minority sentiment”, while 44% would feel uncomfortable “if large numbers of England flags were raised on lampposts” in their area. A clear majority of Green, Lib Dem and even Labour voters believe the England flag has become a racist symbol, whereas only 8% of Reform voters do.
A friend lives in a flag-strewn estate in the south-west, and was going out at night to take down flags clearly positioned outside the homes of ethnic-minority residents to intimidate them. Or at least they were, until men started gathering in the dark street to film them doing so. One can be forgiven for thinking it’s one rule for white middle-aged men stringing lampposts with England flags, which 50% of British people now agree have an explicitly racist subtext, and which are specifically positioned to intimidate racial minorities, and quite another for often brown-skinned protesters chanting a phrase whose meaning is, admittedly, currently extremely contentious. Ban chanting “Globalise the intifada” by all means, but if words and symbols have consequences and meaning, as the Metropolitan and Greater Manchester police say they do, I think that probably means, to be consistent, you have to ban the England flag as well.
Good luck out there, bobbies on the beat. Like those baked-bean-and-bread-buccaneering boys you never had time to follow up on, words and symbols and their meanings are elusive, and they have a tendency to give you the slip, like tiny piglets covered in grease. A happy new year to all my readers!
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of next year, with a further 96 dates including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February.
Stewart hosts three nights celebrating the publication of Damon Krukowski’s poignant consideration of the material aspect of sound, Why Sound Matters, at London’s Cafe Oto from 3-5 January, with guests including Damon & Naomi, Richard Youngs, Gina Birch and Laetitia Sadier.
He will also be interviewing Sleaford Mods about their new album, The Demise of Planet X, at Rough Trade shops in Nottingham and London on 13 and 20 January respectively.