Calling a Spade a Spade

 I received a bit of flack recently for addressing my good friend as Taff. Apparently this is now very non-PC. But Taff does come from Wales and is proud to be called just that. I have been calling him Taff for around forty years and I did not even remember what his real name was. From now on, in the ever increasingly eccentric and ridiculous world of PC, I should, if I could pronounce it, call him by his real name, Uchdryd; in Celtic meaning the legendary son of Erim, which is a bit weird because his father is also Erim and I would not call the five feet four and whippet thin Uchdryd legendary. Taff2 is his brother Wmffre (meaning friend of the Huns) yes, because he has been turfed out of every pub in  Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and now does his drinking in nearby Trewalchmai. I call him Heuvoduro (Spanish for hardboiled egg) because he is bald and no-one in Blaenau Ffestiniog thinks this is non-PC. Truth is; Blodwyn Jones the barmaid likes the nickname so much that she is thinking of bestowing it on the baby boy she is expecting, instead of HenBeddestyr which Brongwyn, her mother, wants to call him.

My father was Welsh and my surname is a Welsh one, so when I joined the army I was automatically christened Taff or Taffy. I kept quiet about coming from Manchester or I would have been called Manky, which is a Scottish word meaning unclean person or an unclean act. No one knew me as Bryan; to close friends, due to my mop of red hair, I was Ginger and neither of these nicknames bothered me. My official military moniker was Thomas 72, as there was a whole rash of Thomas’s in the battalion at that time. The 72 being the last two digits of my army number.

What I am banging on about is; how did all this PC rubbish get to the level it has and why is it Political Correctness anyway? No one I know or have known has been offended by my calling them Taffy, Jock, Paddy. Toff, Piky or whatever.  It has always been a traditional, familiar and practical way of addressing those, whose names you did not know, but whose accents, backgrounds or distinguishing features identified them. The zealots who are calling themselves politically correct should remember that there is only one standard of correctness to measure up to; and that is good manners.