Indecent Words

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One of the fun things about moving out of Auckland and back into a smaller community again is coming to grips with what is news.

Regular readers of this irregular column may not have caught up with the fact that I finally have set up permanent residence in Oamaru after almost a year of commuting between the Queen City and what’s known as Whitestone City, even though we’ve only got about 17,000 people here and don’t really qualify as a “city”.

In Auckland, I had a single choice of daily newspaper — that broadsheet that grandly describes itself as the “NEW ZEALAND” Herald, even though the staff barely know what exists south of the Bombays, or north of Orewa.

But each morning when I walk in to the local Paper Plus here in “Oh Are Maru” I have to stop and think — do I want The Press from Christchurch, the Timaru Mail, the Oamaru Mail or the Otago Daily Times? And they are all of some significance in that they carry news of this area. The ODT is the last newspaper of any significance in this country that’s escaped being taken over by Big Brother and is fiercely independent and even more fiercely parochial.

Both The Press (the capital in “The” is correct) and the Otago Daily Times carry far more local news than the New Zealand Herald does, while both the Timaru and the Oamaru papers are very much what old-time newspaper people refer to as “parish pump”. You want to know who grew the biggest pumpkin last year? These papers will tell you. And I love that, it gives a real sense of community you don’t get in Auckland.

We’re well served for locally flavoured media in Oamaru — apart from the four newspapers I referred to earlier, there are also a couple of freebies as well as a community radio station and an even more community-minded television station, both are run by volunteers.

Because it is so parochial and independent, my newspaper of daily choice is the Otago Daily Times.

It manages to squeeze in a bit of everything from this great region.

And yes, it still carries court news every week-day morning. There, on the back page of Section One, underneath the television programmes, are the misdeamours that were heard in the Dunedin District Court the day before.

You get to read about all sorts of juicy things that, because they’re not reported in the New Zealand Herald, Auckland people will have no idea are still crimes.

This morning, for example, I read where a 28 year old unemployed man was charged with using indecent words in a public place, fined $300 with court costs of $132.89.

I didn’t know that “indecent words” existed anymore given the frequency with which you hear words that previously caused shock and outrage.

The man had his name published for his mates to read because, here in the Presbyterian south, it’s still regarded as part of the punishment to have your name in the paper and you suffer the supposed shame that comes with that. But I suspect that for many of these people, having your name in the paper is more a matter of stardom than shame.

But this five line, two sentence snippet raised some questions for me. The first is how is an unemployed person going to pay a $432 plus fine, or will it simply be added to the billions of already unpaid fines?

But the question that intrigues me more is what on earth were the police thinking of because what are indecent words in 2011? It’s been at least 30 years since words like the Eff Word came out of the boiler room and into our lounges courtesy of television, books and movies.

I can’t think of a word that used to be classified as “indecent” when I was younger, that I haven’t heard with monotonous regularity on television, in the movies, on radio read in books, magazines and even newspapers.

We used to say “Flipping hell!” when we hit our thumb with a hammer when really meant “#@$%^&* hell!” Today we say what we mean.

Stand-up comedians get their laughs these days by telling very unfunny stories that have words that used to be indecent, scattered throughout them. “I %@#^* tell you, I looked out the #@!%&* window and it was @%^*+@ raining!” Gales of laughter. Eh?

I have no doubt that just because we have become more tolerant and that the Eff Word is now used almost as frequently as “and”, “if” and “but”, it’s still on the law books as indecent.

So, I just have to wonder what it was that this 28 year unemployed man really did that warranted the expense of an arrest and a court appearance when TV One can get away with it on Sunday Theatre almost every week.

Using indecent words is a very, very old fashioned charge these days. An anachronism surely? I wonder who the last person in Dunedin was to be charged with leaving his horse parked at the side of the road without a tail light showing!