From: markt@harlqn.co.uk (Mark Tillotson)
Newsgroups: alt.comedy.british
Subject: Re: What is a "git" / "smeg" etc, Paul Merton
Date: 8 Apr 92 22:37:21 GMT
Organization: Harlequin Limited, Cambridge, England

Kristy Gleason kristy@dssdev.dec.com writes:

> To the best of my knowledge, (I'm not British), a 'git' is someone who acts
> like a jerk toward someone else... or a lesser 'b*stard' or a 'sh*t'... I could
> be way off on the definition, but this is what I've gleaned from the many
> British friends that I have... *shrug*

I was told once that it is taboo slang for "illegitimate", ie just
another way of saying "bastard", but has lost this meaning to most
people.

In article <1992Apr1.181743.1619@e2big.mko.dec.com> winalski@tle.enet.dec.com (Paul S. Winalski) writes:
>I was pretty shocked to hear smeg used so often as a cuss-word on Red Dwarf.
>Is the term in common use in the U.K.?  Since it's allowed on a broadcast
>TV show, I assume that it must be considered fairly mild, like calling
>somebody a "jerk" (originally a contraction of "jerk-off", meaning one
>who masturbates).

Well, no, actually its sufficiently obscure that it probably got past
the censors the first time, and has eventually got into the language
without most people being aware of its meaning.  There is a set of
games people play in trying to get obscenities past the BBC's
regulating mechanisms (which incidentally have become *very* much more
lenient over the years).  

ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) speculates:
> For one thing Red Dwarf is shown after 9:00 pm (the watershed) and so
> there are less rules about what words can be used at this time. The
> only word I think the BBC totally ban after 9:00 is the word that
> begins with "f" and ends with "uck". 
There is no total ban, artistic merit and pragmatic issues are
considered. There was a documentary about Touret's Syndrome (sp?)
once, and one of the sufferers from this was featured quite a lot:
their problem was very frequent involuntary utterance of the phrase
"fuck it", completely outside conscious control.  

What I find really perverse, though, is that the BBC is quite happy to
show animals of almost any species copulating in close up (it's
alright because it's wildlife...), and vetinary dramas with
hands-up-cows-innards scenes (at tea-time on Sunday, naturally!), but
seem to be completely hung up about human erotica---I suspect this is
for legal reasons though.  

Anyway, back to British Comedy:  One of the "Whose Line is it Anyway"
line-up that ought to be mentioned while this thread is around is 
Paul Merton, who recently did an excellent series of his own, can't
remember the name (Probably "The Paul Merton show"?), with some
memorable sketches that I have nearly all forgotten(!), including the
brilliant account of a Police Officer in Court, retelling his acid
trip after eating a ``large yellow smarty'' someone gave him... Just
too  fine!
--

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