WE see it on the playground all the time. Little boys being rude to little girls: pulling their hair, calling them names, and the like. This is when the boys “like like” the little girls. When they think she’s the “bee’s knees” and they, in their immaturity and with a limited vocabulary, don’t quite know how to express it.

Perhaps that’s why Opposition Senator KD Knight is so rude to Attorney General Dorothy Lightbourne. Maybe he like likes her. His calling her “rude and stupid’ was not his first disparaging remark in the House of Parliament. In fact, during Upper House deliberations in 2009 on an amendment to the Trade Act, he called a comment of hers “idiotic”. He has apologised for neither outburst.

He’s known her for close to 20 years, he said, but he’s “never seen this side of her”, a side which perhaps coincides with her role as leader of Government Business in the Senate and as the country’s minister of justice; a new side which clearly moves KD to hurl abuses. Speaking recently to the media he continued his diatribe – apparently unable to cease talking about her even at his client Kern Spencer’s trial — calling the lady aggressive and pugnacious. When Rodney Chin spoke Ms Lightbourne’s name in court, Knight admonished him sternly, saying “don’t go there”. Sounds like puppy love, if you ask me, for as we all know, Knight likes aggressive and powerful women. Recall that bit with the boxing of the blue-seamed one at the airport?

Let’s not fool ourselves. Considering all that ails us in this country, name-calling is not the new low. But debates in Parliament seem more regularly than not to dissolve into kass-kass and bullyism from both sides. And while the attorney general may or may not have taken offence at the abuse, she has probably endured worse and far better articulated insults, for she’s in a very difficult line of business. We admire her restraint.

We would have hoped, however, that Keith Desmond St Aubyn Knight, an eminent lawyer, former minister of foreign affairs and former minister of national security, would have better demonstrated his adeptness with the English language rather than rely on the very base “rood and stchupid”. Words which are the domain of the playground, not the honourable House.

It’s not like he used a bad wud, just a very common word. “Stupid” appears on a list of invectives which the former prime minister of Australia Paul Keating used in Federal Parliament against the opposition: “harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, criminals, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies.

And to his credit, Knight’s language was hardly as vulgar as the language used by Irish Parliamentarian Paul Gogarty to swear at Deputy Labour leader Emmet Stagg during a debate on a social welfare bill. “With all due respect,” he started his presentation, before it deteriorated into the most foul expression of physical intimacy. A word which both Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the United States’ veep Dick Cheney have used in their respective senates.

Members of Parliament are immune to prosecution when making statements in Parliament that are in the national interest. Unparliamentary language occurs when the rules of respect are broken and attacks on the character and dignity of individuals are made. For instance, parliamentarians are not allowed to call each other liars, but Winston Churchill got around that when he would accuse a member of the House of being guilty of “terminological inexactitude” .

And they’re not to call each other thieves, either. But if they were very creative they could sneak it in, as did Britain’s Benjamin Disraeli when he attacked Sir Robert Peel in 1846. “I find that for between 30 and 40 years the right honourable gentleman has traded on the ideas and intelligence of others. His life has been a great appropriation clause. He is a burglar of others’ intellect… there is no statesman who has committed political petty larceny on so great a scale.”

Perhaps the most “spectacular breach”* of parliamentary language occurred when Oliver Cromwell dissolved Parliament on April 20, 1653, and launched a verbal broadside at the incumbents: “Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government. Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches and would, like Esau, sell your country for a mess of pottage.” He pointed at individuals, and called them “whoremasters, drunkards, corrupt and unjust men”, adding: “Ye have no more religion than my horse… Perhaps ye think this is not parliamentary language. I confess it is not, neither are you to expect any such from me.” Some members protested, more at his language than his unconstitutional action in closing Parliament.

And so if we are to tune into the live coverage of Parliamentary proceedings courtesy of our Public Broadcasting Station, then we ask that our politicians amuse and uplift us with their skill with words and turns of phrase that send us to the dictionary instead of forcing us to hang our heads in shame.

*encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/833/Unparliamentary-Language.htm

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