Rod Liddle
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So, window-licker, then. It is a term which, by my reckoning, is always used in hyperbolic fashion, to suggest that someone is a half-wit or an idiot. The reference point, though, comes from those special buses taking special children to a special school — perhaps George should simply have used the hate-speech term ‘special’ and had done with it. Anyway, the denizens of these buses are reputed to gaze fixedly while licking the windows of the vehicle. I have never seen them do it, although I suppose we should allow for the possibility that this has happened on at least one occasion. More to the point, I have never heard the phrase ‘window-licker’ used to refer to people who might actually be stupid enough to lick a window; it is most often used to lampoon someone who has done something useless or silly. Incidentally, it is used by some schoolchildren interchangeably with the word ‘gay’.
Language evolves, but the disabled charities don’t seem to. They’re stuck in the 1970s, seemingly more concerned about use of English than issues that actually affect the disabled. If our self-appointed word police were to go to football matches, they’d presumably be baffled to hear Celtic supporters sometimes use the term ‘window-licker’ when referring to their protestant Glasgow rivals, Rangers, much as Liverpool fans have used it in the past to refer to supporters of Everton. The Celtic connection may be how George Galloway came by it. What it was not, despite the protestations from people with too much time on their hands at Mencap and elsewhere, was a term of abuse directed at disabled people, despite its probable origins. It may have been that, but that is not how it is most often used, or how Galloway intended it.
Now you can ban all of these terms if you wish — and Mencap most certainly does, much as the mental health charity Sane insists we shouldn’t use words and phrases like ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’ and so on. But other words — such as ‘special’ — will move in to take their place, words no less pejorative in their intent. I suppose you could try to ban all words which are descriptive, in case they offend somebody somewhere, and we should commit ourselves to a discourse from which allusions, hyperbole, figures of speech and so on have been utterly expunged.
We would end up talking like politicians (not special politicians like George, but normal ones) and public relations executives; a bland, colourless discourse from which all real meaning has been excised. Clearly, this is what some people want — the charities, the pressure groups, the maniacal window-lickers of social networking sites. A form of discourse where the sole purpose is not to remotely offend anyone, anywhere, and so becomes, in the end, meaningless. The sort of opprobrium being flung at Galloway is why politicians speak like this these days; because they dare not say anything different.
Because here’s the other point. Isn’t it remarkable that of all the fantastically stupid things or wicked stuff Galloway has got up to throughout his career — the cosying up to Saddam in his Baghdad lair and paying the grizzled old despot salutions, the attempt to crawl up the fundament of extremist Muslim voters (which may or may not have included a conversion to Islam), the vainglorious, breast-beating, hackneyed language of the barricades used in every political speech, the support for Hezbollah, his grotesque hypocrisy over rights for gay people which led to him defending the execution of an Iranian homosexual — right up to his recent ventures of taking money from Iranian-controlled Press TV and accepting £70,000 a year to host a programme on a pro-Assad Lebanese channel… none of that stuff will hurt him in the end. But calling some idiot on a social networking site a ‘window-licker’ might well do so.
It’s this, along with his fairly sensible, but samizdat, comments about rape, which will be dredged up when he is next on the campaign trail. I hope he appreciates the irony.
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