What's in a word?

Last week, the Daily Mirror proudly trumpeted the footage it had obtained of Jeremy Clarkson using language so abhorrent that, apparently, he should be sacked. I'm not going to link to the article because I don't want to give their website the hits.

He was using the old nursery rhyme that begins 'Eeny meeny miney mo, catch a...', except he mumbled the second line, except his mumble wasn't mumbly enough so the next word was all too obvious.

(The word begins with 'n' and is an anagram of 'ginger'.)

This footage was never broadcast. The team at the BBC (including the possibly reproachable Jeremy Clarkson) decided that (a) it wasn't funny and (b) the unmentionable word was too clear. So they reshot it with him not mumbling and this time saying 'catch a teacher by the toe'.

It's still not funny but clearly a better choice by a hugely vast margin.

Sadly for all concerned, the unused out-take was leaked to the Daily Mirror. Or, to put it another way, it was stolen and passed on to another company for them to (a) make a profit by selling newspapers and (b) cause great damage to a rival institution. It's currently unknown whether the thief was paid.

It strikes me, in my opinion (and other opinions are, of course, valid and worthy) that there are two interpretations of this footage.

1) Mr Clarkson is a hideous racist who thought it would be hilariously funny to hide inflammatory language behind a thin veil of mumbling, as though the BBC hadn't suffered enough already from the mumbling in Jamaica Inn.

2) Mr Clarkson is a cheeky chap who likes to push at the boundaries. But, when he tried pushing this particular boundary, he found out how far he was prepared to push and it simply wasn't that far. So they binned the idea, shot something else and forgot about it.

Personally, I'd go with option 2.

I'm not defending the use of this sort of language. But I'm not defending the theft of footage either. And I'm not impressed that someone can decide not to do something that's rude but still be castigated for considering and rejecting it. This was never broadcast. This was never meant for broadcast.

Just imagine this for a moment...

Imagine you're writing a document at work. Someone has annoyed you. So, in the middle of one of the paragraphs that you think no one will ever read, you write something unspeakably rude about them. You look at it. Turns out it's not particularly funny anyway. There's still a chance that someone will read item 497.23 in the terms and conditions. So you erase it. No harm done.

Next day you've been sacked because someone managed to obtain a copy of the document at just the wrong moment. You're not sure how they got it. Maybe the computer automatically backed it up onto the company's server and they grabbed it at that point. It only existed for a moment. It should never have gone any further than your PC. But, you're told, that's irrelevant.

Other than the fact that the story about Jeremy Clarkson contains some of the most inflammatory language one can use (and yet which Quentin Tarantino freely sprinkles over so much of his films' dialogue), is this situation significantly different?