Fao Fred,nj Or Barmaid

[Svejk]

Please define the legal term 'Vulgar Abuse' for ABers as I think it might be of interest to them.
( I should warn you, I tried and inexplicably had my thread removed.)

[Peter Pedant]

.

being neither, I will have a go

Vulgar abuse notably is not actionable in libel
(clearly swearing a policeman is)

This is the reason that Private Eye referred to Peter Cartere Ruck the famous and v rich libel lawyer as peter carter +uck for as long as he was in practice (long long time)

and he was unable to do anything about it.

He didnt charge fees - which were 'taxable' in the High Court
but something else which werent reviewable and very erm v large.

Note he died in 2003

[Svejk]

Sorry Peter, forgot you.
It was on R4 yesterday. I thought it an interesting quirk that you could be sued for calling someone, say, a fraud. But, if you prefixed it with a stream of invective you couldn't.

[atalanta]

Calling someone a cow or a pig is vulgar abuse. Calling them a lying cow or a thieving pig is defamation.

[Svejk]

That would seem to make common sense, Atalanta. But the gist of what they were saying is that as long as you added 'pig' 'cow' 'smelly' etc, you couldn't be had up for defamation. Whereas if you just called them a fraud or a cheat or something you could.

[factor-fiction]

This programme from yesterday on radio 4 covered it well

[FredPuli43]

The law tries to make common sense of life. An advertiser who claims extravagantly that they have the best product ever will never be held to account by some scientifically minded and disgruntled person, since the claim is what lawyers quaintly call "a mere puff". No reasonable person will take the claim literally. But when the famous Mrs Carlill sued the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company , she won because the company had said that they would give a cash prize to anyone who used their product and caught influenza or a cold, such was its efficacy. They had strayed beyond mere puffery and into the realms of contract.

So it is with bad language. A claim that a man is illegitimate or a masturbator, or both, if expressed in the vernacular of the streets, is not to be taken literally as a claim of truth; it is mere vulgar abuse and the courts, and the world, do not take it as anything more. But, in days when illegitimacy was considered a stigma, saying in terms that a man was illegitimate would have been actionable because the word used, 'illegitimate' was meant, by its very formality, to be taken as intended and true.

[Peter Pedant]

Hi Fred,

Yeah legitimacy or 'imputation of unchastity' is actionable.

ONe of my frenz was in a case where he was sued for calling someone a 'bastard' and after he had settled found he was in a position to show the label was true.....

Libel keep away from it - one of my contemporaries (repeated post) is Nigel West / Rupert Allason who sued one defendant too many was I think ruined by adverse costs when he lost (He had perjured himself in the pursuit of libel damages)

{ see wiki: In passing judgment the trial judge said that Allason was "a profoundly dishonest man" and "one of the most dishonest witnesses I have ever seen".[8][9][10] }

[FredPuli43]

One of the few cases when slander is actionable without proof of financial loss is where the defamatory statement impugns a woman's chastity. No such provision applies to impugning a man's