As is pretty clear in the text, Talk to the Hand owes a heavy debt to two excellent books: Mark Caldwell’s A Short History of Rudeness and Kate Fox’s Watching the English. A book about rudeness should start with as many thanks and apologies as possible, so I would like first to thank the many friends who have provided examples, sent me cuttings, or assured me I wasn’t barmy not to write the expected follow-up book on grammar: Cate Olson and Nash Robbins, John Robbins, Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Margaret and Bob Cook, Mary Walker, Cathy Stewart, Bruce Holdsworth, Philip Hensher, Faynia Williams, Richard Crane, Gideon Haigh, and Anne Baker. Andrew Hadfield told me the joke about Carnegie Hall. Douglas Kennedy had the experience in the French record shop. To my badminton pals – Andrew, Vybarr, Alan, Tom, Dan, Vicky, Martin, John, and Caroline – I say sorry (as always). I would also like to thank the nameless people who were quite rude to me during this period. Without them, this book would not have been possible.
Talk to the Hand shares only two things with Eats, Shoots & Leaves: (1) a title comprising four one-syllable words; and (2) its origins in radio. I would like to thank the BBC Radio 4 commissioning editors who keep allowing me to appear on the airwaves, and in particular Kate McAll, the producer who supervised the original table-thumping rants on which this book is based. “Don’t bang the table” being the first law of radio broadcasting, incidentally, I have devised a rather strange method of expressing my feelings in studio, which is to sit at the microphone with arms stretched out to the sides, flapping them slowly up and down in imitation of a giant pterodactyl. Kate has always disguised her alarm at this magnificently.
Continuing the pattern of apology and thanks, I would like to apologise to the many Telegraph readers to whose interesting and supportive letters I have not personally replied. I would very much like to apologise – again – to the kind stickler from North Carolina who sent me a beautiful wooden semicolon, hand-carved, and received no thanks until he wrote to check I had received it. And I’d like to thank my publishers and agents: Andrew Franklin, Bill Shinker, Erin Moore, Anthony Goff and George Lucas. Finally, I’d like to thank Miles Kington in the Independent for coming up with my logical follow-up title, Presses, Pants & Flies (entailing a joke about a laundryman who goes into a bar, does a few press-ups, breathes heavily and then jumps out of the window). I may still use it next time.
The author apologises for the high incidence of the word “Eff” in this book. It is, sadly, unavoidable in a discussion of rudeness in modern life. Variants such as Effing, mother-Effing, and what the Eff? positively litter the text.
If you don’t Effing like it, you know what you can Effing do. (That’s a joke.)