Thursday, 18 October 2012
Week 9: Where the bloody hell are you?
In class we were discussing how normative it is to swear in Australian Culture. The discussion made me think about situations that I am exposed to profane language and my own use of profanities. Swearing is a common practice in my everyday life. I swear, my family swear, my friends swear, my work colleagues swear. I am desensitized to swearing that the word "bloody" really has no affect on me. To me it is a mediocre swear word it does not have the same affect as "fuck" and often I will use bloody in replacement of the "f" word if I am in a setting where "fuck" may be too vulgar, or may offend people. In saying that when the Australian Tourism released the infamous commercial encouraging tourism to come to Australia with the famous quote from Lara Bingle "Where the bloody hell are you?". I was mortified, how tacky was my initial thoughts. Not only has the world been exposed to news reports of Racial Riots throughout Sydney, now the rest of the world is think "Why would I bloody want to go there". The word itself is perhaps desensitized in Australian culture, but that is not a global phenomena. A Global campaign that attempts to encourage tourism should be tasteful and appropriate to all audiences. If it wasn't a global marketing campaign, and simple a commerical aimed purely at Australians my thoughts would perhaps be a little different.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That's really interesting, your ideas about the use of the word bloody in the Australian Tourism campaign.I found that myself personally have been sensitized to the word 'bloody' but still get a bit shocked at the use of the term 'fuck'.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that this is because we have been sensitised to such terms because of it's everyday use. I found that these ideas on expletives and words which do not necessarily transfer to other cultures around the world fits in with the idea of our cultural scripts.
I found an article which provides a look at how expletives have been infixed into different words to accentuate them. and This article reflects the many different meanings of expletive terms but also highlights how such terms are sensitised by the collaboration of it with terms that do not necessatily have negative connotaions. e.g. fan -bloody-tastic
REFERENCE:
McMillan, J.B. 1980 .'Infixing and Interposing in English'. in American Speech, vol 55, no.3, pp. 193-183