Cross-channel rivalry is ancient and entrenched, but for now, France must yield to Britain when it comes to hard-line policing of mere words.
In France, it can be legally actionable not to use the language in writing as prescribed by the official dictionnaire of the Académie Française ‒ a new edition having just been published after 89 years. The government itself has been threatened with court action.
However, Britain can top that now police admit cautioning children as young as 9 for hate speech.
In fairness, the French have been policing word usage for several hundred years, whereas Britain has only bothered for a decade or two. But whereas the academy is vigilant about the perceived pollution of written French by foreign words, you can get your collar felt for an English usage of any derivation, simply because someone claims to feel seriously offended by it.
Investigations into British hate speech complaints now exceed 13,000 a year, whereas France is in uproar over the academy not yet updating some job titles’ feminised versions in all its dictionary’s editions, and still defining “marriage” as between men and women, despite same-sex marriage being legalised.
Britain’s struggle to achieve a proportionate legal response to verbal abuse is much mocked, with people having been cautioned and even prosecuted for making fun of the sparsity of vowels in Welsh and using phrases like “No foreign muck served here!” in pub signage.
When police recently visited Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson about a hate crime allegation against her for a year-old social media post ‒ while refusing to disclose the post ‒ it was initially thought just another ludicrous overreach. Though Pearson is a polarising commentator – erring, for instance, on the side of pandemic denial – her account of the doorstop caution drew cross-party condemnation. An officer even corrected her when she asked who the complainant was, saying the person must be referred to as “the victim”.
It later turned out Pearson had reposted a mis-identified photograph, fuming that it showed British police supporting anti-Semitism. When she found out the picture was in fact of a domestic political protest in Pakistan, she deleted her repost.
But by then, the real debate – did a famous journalist’s endorsement of a false, racially charged post promote hatred to a criminal degree? – had been massively overtaken.
In the ensuing clamour, police admitted numerous other apparent extensions to their patrolling of verbal infractions, including cautioning a 9-year-old who called another child a “retard” and two secondary school girls who said another student smelled “like fish”.
Prominent feminist commentator Julie Bindel said she’d had an “Orwellian” police visit after a Dutch transgender person said they felt vilified by her advocacy for biologically determined sex.
At a time when police say they cannot afford to investigate thefts – amid a rising incidence of shoplifting and snatching of bags and phones – these revelations generated some very strong English usage indeed.
In France, the ever-primed Outrage-O-Meter surged to crimson at the historic new dictionary’s omissions. It newly permits soda, sauna and yuppie, but excludes smartphone, web and coronavirus.
A group whose name translates as “the community of appalled linguists” berated the 40-strong academy panel – known without mockery as les immortels – for its glacial work rate. It can only revise one letter of the alphabet per year, leaving its edicts perennially vulnerable to obsolescence.
Poet Michael Edwards, himself an immortel, complained he couldn’t persuade his colleagues to reinstate the long-ago-cancelled “improfond”, even though French still lacks a word for “shallow”. At press time, the expected ripost – that such a word was “surement pas necessaire en France” – had not been forthcoming.
The UK government was “re-evaluating” the legal framework for hate speech – but the police were still expecting to see Pearson down the nick.
