#ToryScum was last week’s political hashtag of the week.
It originated with Labour MP Angela Rayner expressing her absolute fury at the Government and Conservative politicians. They argued against her colleague Kate Green’s motion to ‘continue directly funding provision of free school meals over the school holidays until Easter 2021 to prevent over a million children going hungry during this crisis.’ [Hansard, 21 October 2020.]
A simple HELL YES to this motion would be a no-brainer demonstration of human decency and governmental responsibility, you might think.
Well think on, as my beloved Yorkshire Grandma would have said.
Chris Clarkson, Conservative MP, set about reducing the debate into party political point-scoring. First by brushing off the Opposition’s approach as ‘support, U-turn, oppose’ and ‘hindsight heavy.’ And secondly, oddly, citing this as a reason to vote against the motion.
As the great Marina Hyde says, “Only this government could miss the open goal of free school meals.“
Angela Rayner’s unparliamentary but, it has to be said, barely audible “Scum” rather galvanised social media.
And lo, the #ToryScum hashtag was born.
You know what? The word ‘scum’ and the #ToryScum hashtag casually does what communicators and marketers strive for every working day.
It’s a rallying cry. A emotional call to action. A clear, simple, effective, immediate, emotive, empowering, passionate. And it’s a four-letter word. Boom!
In praise of the four-letter word
This gloriously NSFW af Wired article, Emma Byrne analyses English profanity. (Trigger warning: these profanities include sexist, racist and homophobic words.)
‘Scum’ fits the profile of a swearword! It’s short. It’s a single syllable. It opens and closes with hard consonants. Whether or not it actually *is* a swearword, it sounds like one. Therefore our propensity is to interpret it as offensive as swearword.
Just look at how four-letter swearwords over-index compared with non-sweary and shorter or longer words. Science and psychology right here!
Non-sweary four-letter words
Back in the nineties and early noughties, company naming, re-naming and branding were at their peak. Advertising, branding and communications agencies were rolling in them. The average pricing, even for straightforward jobs, multiplied by the sheer volume of commissions made it a billings bonanza.
The number one naming strategy was to find a (non-sweary) three- or four-letter name.
The number two naming strategy was to find a two or three syllable name.
The benefits of a short and simple name were: memorability, simplicity and, frankly, the easier creation of an elegant logo that wasn’t weighed down by excessive lettering.
(Yes I’m simplifying, but not by much. Don’t @ me; I was there. Towards the end it was like panning for gold in a coal mine. How do you think faux classical contortions like Consignia, came about? That one lasted under two years before it was consigned (ha!) to the bin.)
Short names were perceived by clients’ boards, their CMOs and customers as serious, prestigious and punchy. Short apposite names also anointed their companies with the pride of accomplishment that came with *trumpet fanfare* the web domain land grab.
Domain names were a gold rush from the mid-nineties to the early noughties. Cybersquatting was hilariously rife. Huge sums of money changed hands.
I remember listening to an exquisitely raised-eyebrow segment on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme in late 1995. The segment was on highly priced domain names. Naturally sex.com was most mentioned.
Interesting bit of internet history: 1995 was the year that domain names started costing money to register. Up until then it had been free to register any domain name. Truly the spirit of the Wild West.
And domain names as ‘prime real estate’ on the internet frontier was addressed in one of the very earliest larger-scale First Tuesday events in London in 2000.
So the successful double land-grab of a punchy descriptive brand name *and* its highly desirable .com (or slightly less desirable .co.uk) denoted a client and its agency at the top of their respective games.
Now there’s no need to land grab a domain name as a location for information. Once you’ve nailed your top level domain (such as ‘.com’ and ‘.uk’), there are a gazillion second level domains (the ‘co’ of .co.uk, the ‘org’ of .org.uk and the ‘gov’ of gov.uk.)
And, most freeing of all, social media hashtags mean we can create an infinite number of locations as temporary or permanent homes for content.
And so to THE #TORYScum HASHTAG
‘Scum’ is a great word. It hits so many sweet spots – its unambivalent unpleasantness, the thing you scrap off and get rid of, its staccato sound, its punch of distaste, its four-letter-wordness. Angela Rayner used it to emphatically reject the politicisation of that most unpolitical of ambitions – to feed our hungriest children. It’s onomatopoeic. It is disgust.
But it is more than that. It is catharsis.
Knowingly or not, Rayner invoked the healing properties of a good old-fashioned four-letter word. In 2010, in an outstanding piece of research, Keele University demonstrated that profanities reduce pain and shock. Swearing as pain relief. Yup! Keele’s experiments showed that swearing raises our heart rates and our tolerance of pain. So awesome was their work that it won them the Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course any of us who have stood on a piece of Lego knows instinctively that swearing helps alleviate pain. It’s remarkable the levels of physical and emotional pain that children and childhood can cause. It can feel as though firing four-letter words at this Government is all the pain relief we have at the moment. But it’s not. We have kind, visionary, benevolent and organised Good King Marcus Rashford. He is the best of us.
And he’s right. We can be kind (4), calm (4), focused (7). We can channel our outrage into hashtags (8) and expletives (10). We can organise (8) and eventually we will win (3).
To organise and win
Support the utter heroes on Marcus Rashford’s Twitter and Instagram.
See what you can achieve at The Trussell Trust’s ‘Get Involved’ page.
And, FUCK, don’t vote Conservative.
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