Darren Lehmann - The Big Fat Bald Bloke :)

[CQ]

yeh according to the paper he called him a black c... didnt he? i think thats what i read.

TARKO TARKO MAN!
I WANT TO BE A TARKO MAN!

[MrsTarrant]

LoL that is a damn funny story Assasin I love it! I think when they call each other such things it's acceptable though!

[Scotty Russell]

1. He apologised to the Sri Lankan Team
2. The apology was accepted.
3 Sri Lanka washed their hands of the whole incident.
I belive thats where it should have ended - even the match referee didnt put a report in.

[Donny]

What the @*#* will come next?

By Andre Malan

COMMENT

CRICKETER Darren Lehmann's now-infamous outburst in Brisbane consisted of only two words. The first was "black" and I'm probably still forbidden from publishing the other, so I'll just say that it was the plural of the taboo sexual term that we usually refer to in polite society as "the c-word".

Paradoxically, all the fuss has - quite rightly, in my view - been about Lehmann's reference to skin colour, while hardly a word has been said about the obscenity.

That's a fairly accurate reflection of contemporary standards, particularly among people of Darren Lehmann's age or younger. Like it or not, we have to accept that verbal obscenity is becoming an outdated concept.

Recently I was in a situation in which I overheard what once would have been described as a foul-mouthed outburst from an angry teenager. The string of profanities he shouted at another youngster was clearly audible to a number of much older people of both sexes, all of whom were strangers to him.

My first instinct was to pull him into line. Surely he should have realised that using that language was insulting, particularly to the older women, who were unlikely to speak that way themselves, even in private.

But try to look at it from the teenager's point of view. He was probably brought up in the sort of home in which those words would have been among the first to reach his tender young ears.

No doubt so-called four-letter words are in everyday use at his school, and if he goes to the football or cricket on weekends, he is going to hear plenty more of it from people of all ages.

If he looks around he will see car stickers and even T-shirts bearing the once forbidden words and at home if he switches on cable TV, or even the commercial stations and our ABC, there will be plenty more.

What happened was that art and the media, in the form of TV, cinema and print, started imitating life, then life started imitating art and the media, and we got into a vicious cycle with both sides upping the ante until it became almost compulsory for everyone to use bad language.

In a funny sort of way, the f-word is becoming one of the most commonly used words on television - without hardly ever being heard. Every time a cricketer has an appeal rejected or a footballer narrowly misses a goal the cameras focuses on his face and you don't have to be a lip reader to know what he's saying.

It has also apparently become an acceptable part of political discourse to call our Prime Minister an "arse-licker", as Labor frontbencher Mark Latham recently did.

So the abusive teenager I overheard was not being deliberately offensive.

He was simply using the language he's been brought up to accept as normal.

It has happened quite slowly. There is an amusing website called The Laughing Policeman Wireless Society that purports to give a definitive history of swearing in public.

The first entry is from 1900, when the Prince of Wales, after being shot by an anarchist while standing on a Brussels railway station, uttered the immortal words, "F . . . it, I've taken a bullet".

The next step down the slippery slope was in 1936, when a music hall comedian named Hector Thaxter became the first man to say "arse" on radio.

Then in 1957 more history was made when a British "teddy boy" being interviewed live on BBC news was asked his opinion of Bill Haley and replied: "Haley? I wouldn't piss on him if he went up in flames. I'm an Elvis man meself."

The f-word was not heard on the BBC until it was used on a late-night satire program by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.

The event was followed by a national fit of apoplexy that led one Tory MP to suggest that Tynan should hang.

THE first man to swear on the moon was Buzz Aldrin, who used the word "shit" in a conversation with fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong.

And royalty got in on the act again in 1976 when the Duke of Edinburgh, unaware that he was wearing a microphone, said to a photographer: "F . . . off or I'll have you shot."

With everyone from royalty to roughnecks talking dirty, bad language is starting to lose its sting, and that is probably not a bad thing.

After all, they're just collections of words.

But there is only one problem. How are we going to express the feelings we used to vent by swearing? We may have to invent new expletives.




Donny.

GO THE MIGHTY WOODSMEN !! ALL THE WAY IN 2003 AND BEYOND !!!!

[Donny]

With the subject of this topic and an illness threatening his career, in both Test cricket and ODIs, Darren Lehmann bravely banished the wolf from the door with an excellent maiden century (160) against the Windies.

It wasn't a flawless masterpiece at all and included a couple of times when luck was on his side. It contained many silky cuts and drives to the off boundary and powerful hooks and pulls but his determination to get the job done shone through more than anything.

Congratulations, Dazza. Well done. I reckon even JLC would be proud of you, m8.

[JLC]

Well done Darren you certainly had an apparent EDGE in this match that none of us were aware of including the umpires Darren certainly was in good NICK and caught a few people unawares.

Well Done

jlc

[HAL]

How about that. You think you could maybe like rephrase that?