Nanny Bans Pet

Nanny revealed her Orwellian control tendencies again recently, by trying to have yet another go at the language that we speak.

Orwell warned in his seminal (can I say seminal?) book "1984" that dictatorships like to control the language, because by controlling the language they can control what we think.

Anyhoo, this time Nanny is mounting an assault on the Geordie language, as spoken by the good people of Newcastle.

Staff at Newcastle City Council have been banned from saying things such as "alreet pet", "howay hinny" and "take care love".

Why?

In Nanny's view, these phrases are just too offensive.

The decision was publicised recently at an equality and diversity training course, another spectacular waste of taxpayers' money!

"Pet", "hinny", "love", "darling" and "sweetheart" are now all banned.

As one worker said:

"If you are dealing with the elderly,

they have been brought up with those words all their life,

and I have been brought up with my family using those words.

It's like they are trying to kill the Geordie language."

Shop manager Ben Sehgal, who runs New Image in South Shields Market Place, said:

"I get called 'pet' by women all the time.

It's a local thing that everyone understands.

It's not sexist at all."

The astute amongst you will have noticed that Mr Sehgal is a bloke.

Newcastle City Council were rather stung by these reports, and have seemingly backtracked on the ban; ie they have denied it:

"There is no ban on words, such as hinny, pet, love or darling.

The point made to council staff during equality and diversity training

is that they must make a judgement before using these words

as to whether they are likely to offend the person they are directed to.

In the vast majority of cases these would not offend

but we want our staff, as part of the equality and diversity training,

to be sensitive to the needs of those in all of our communities."

Feel free to send Newcastle City Council your own colloquialisms via this link Newcastle.