The Dame, like Emma, is very grand (well, she likes to think she is). But there the resemblance ends. It would never occur to the Dame, on hearing of the brutal killing of a human being, to reach for her phone and tweet “WTF.” The Dame was raised to understand that some things are simply not done — chief among them, treating a violent death as an occasion for a four-letter aside.
There is something genuinely repellent about grand, aristo, comfortable women like Emma performing coarseness for public consumption — dropping “fuck” into a sentence about murder as though profanity were a badge of authenticity, a passport to the common touch. It isn’t edgy. It isn’t relatable. It is a woman of considerable privilege play-acting at being one of the “ignorant and debased,” presumably under the impression that this makes her sound less remote from the rest of us.
It doesn’t. It makes her sound like exactly what she is: a woman who has never had to worry about anything real enough to teach her when silence, or a plainer word, would do. The lower orders she is so keen to impersonate rarely reach for obscenity when someone has actually died — they reach for it over parking spaces and penalty shootouts. Reserving it, rightly, for something less than a corpse.
It is, in short, pathetic. And no amount of borrowed vulgarity will disguise it.
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