Britain has become a country of loud and repetitive swearing. According to a recent survey, a third of all Britons hear a swear word every five minutes. The findings of all social surveys of this kind must be treated with suspicion, but these particular figures seem quite believable to me. As I write this, I can’t in fact hear any swearing. I’m alone at the top of a tall house and the people down below in the street — men in the building trade — are from somewhere east of Poland and speaking in languages that I don’t understand. They may be cursing their heads off in Russian or Bulgarian — son of your father’s whore, may you rot in your mother-in-law’s cesspit, and so on. I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that if I felt hungry for some proper English swearing I could easily satisfy my appetite by sitting in my local pub for an hour or two or by staying at home and switching on the television to watch the celebrity chef, Gordon Ramsay, who never stops swearing. A total of 63 f***s in the course of one of Ramsay’s shows last year set some kind of record.

Note my polite use of asterisks. It rather dates me. When I was a child in the 1950s, people certainly swore. They swore in army barracks, down coal mines and amid the racket of engineering workshops; boys knew the expressions and would sometimes shout them daringly in the school playground. Swearing was mainly a working-class habit, reserved for the workplace or military life. Working-class families like my own never tolerated swearing at home or in any public place where women and children or social superiors such as doctors and schoolteachers might be present. Looking back, it seems to me that our domestic language was unimaginably chaste. Even the mildest of ‘bad words’ were hidden in euphemisms. ‘Bastard’ became ‘basket’, ‘shit’ was known only by its first letter and became ‘ess’ (a mystery it took me years to solve). I never heard my father use ‘bloody’ as an adjective or ‘hell!’ as an exclamation and only once, when he was close to dying, did I hear him say ‘bugger’ as a description of anyone (me, as it happens). Blasphemies — “Jesus!” or “Christ!” — were never heard at home, not because we were church-going Christians (that was far from the case) but because ‘decent’ or ‘respectable’ families didn’t talk in that way. “Dam!” was probably the strongest exclamation my father ever uttered in my presence, which isn’t to say he didn’t use stronger ones when things went wrong at his factory.

The four-letter ‘f**k’ and ‘c**t’ were of course absolutely forbidden and the penalty for saying them would have been far stronger than an injunction to “wash your mouth out with soap.” Fifty years later they can pop out of any television programme after the nine o’clock ‘watershed’ (when, according to the broadcasting bureaucracy, all good children are in bed), usually prefaced by a warning that the show you’re about to see contains “strong language”. Strong has an attractive ring to it — strong meat, strong drink, strong-minded — but all it means is that you’re about to hear lots of the old Anglo Saxon words for sexual parts and activity.

This is a huge linguistic shift, probably the biggest in my lifetime. How did it happen?

Many of the usual reasons apply: old ideas of good behaviour died with religious belief, new philosophies of personal freedom unshackled Britain from a century and more of Victorian social restraint, language was set loose along with sex. The middle classes took it up and made it fashionable. When the distinguished theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan, became the first person to utter ‘f**k’ on British television, in 1965, he used the verb properly and concretely, to describe sexual intercourse. It prompted national outrage — my father said he would never watch “that man” again — and several decades went by before it became a commonplace of late-night broadcasting. Newspapers were equally reluctant. In 1987, the English cricket skipper Mike Gatting had his famous row with the Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana on the field at Faisalabad, with each man accusing the other of insulting language. What these insults were remained a mystery, until The Independent decided to reproduce Gatting’s claim that Rana had called him a “c**t”. It was the first appearance of the word in a British newspaper, and as shocking to many people as Tynan had been 22 years before. But the shock lay in seeing the word in print. By 1987, you could hear it often enough in football stadiums and City trading floors, where despite some feminist protest its usage has increased since.

As a society, we’re now in a muddle about all this. In broadcasting, television seems to work to different rules than radio, where four-letter words are almost never heard. Among newspapers, The Guardian prints them the most liberally, mainly as a gesture to verisimilitude (what the quoted person actually said) and modish street credibility. Tabloids, on the other hand, maintain the decency or prudishness (choose your viewpoint) of long-ago vicars. In the Sun, for example, a footballer describing his unhappiness will have his words reproduced as “p****d off”. You might say this is paradoxical. Newspapers designed for working-class men of minimal education now obey the educated class’s former niceties, while a middle-class newspaper such as The Guardian swears, as the saying goes, like a trooper.

A bigger paradox is that though swearing has become much more common and is almost everywhere audible, the words themselves have lost little of their power to shock and offend. People swear and then hate to hear others swear. According to the survey I quoted at the start, 83 per cent of the population aren’t at all happy to hear swearing in public, though many of that same 83 per cent must be among the swearers. I read about it last week in the Daily Express. “Barrage of swearing that shames Britain,” said the headline above the story, which was followed by an editorial: “The rise of foul language is one of the vilest aspects of modern life… a country full of people who cannot keep a civil tongue in their heads can hardly regard itself as civilised.”

I tend to agree. It’s hard not to see swearing as part of a general coarsening of British life. It’s become so ubiquitous a verbal tic that newcomers adopt it without thinking: to judge from the on-field lip movements of Francophone football stars, of which the Premier League has so many, ‘f**k’ must be the first English word foreign footballers learn after ‘money’. Prime ministers use it in private and their PR men more publicly. It’s spoken loudly into mobile phones, by schoolgirls on the top decks of buses, by comedians and pop stars on stages and television studios. Not least, according to many reports, it’s part of the conversational style of the owner of the Daily Express, one Richard Desmond, a forceful, blunt fellow not given to euphemisms who has made millions from publishing pornographic magazines (including Asian Babes). By the logic of his own editorial writer, he can hardly regard himself as civilized. But then so many of us are in the same damaged boat, drifting far from the shore of the country that for George Orwell was best characterized by its gentleness.

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News just in. After a dozen years supporting Labour governments, Britain’s biggest selling daily, The Sun, has ditched Gordon Brown and decided it will throw its editorial weight behind David Cameron and the Tory party in the run-up to the next election. A front-page editorial declares that the paper “believes — and prays — that the Conservative leadership can put the great back into Great Britain”. This is a tired and meaningless old hope, but never mind: The Sun sells three million copies and likes to think it has its finger on the popular pulse. By changing sides it has made the Labour Party even gloomier — if that’s possible — about its electoral prospects next year. I think, though, that this particular cloud has a silver lining.

One of the most nauseating sights of Labour’s years in office has been their cuddling up to The Sun and other media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, a process that began at the top with Tony Blair’s courtship of Murdoch and then spread down through the ranks so that, for example, cabinet ministers humbled themselves by turning up at The Sun’s office parties and the editor’s wedding celebrations. It was abject, fearful behaviour before a populist and instinctively right-wing paper whose interests coincided more with its proprietor’s than any belief in social progress. Now, at least, senior members of the Labour Party should be spared the duty of listening to Murdoch’s journalists advocating a witchhunt of paedophiles or withdrawing Britain from the European Union, and over their wine glasses telling their hosts that they find the idea “terribly interesting”.