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Mind your language

What Benedict Cumberbatch didn’t understand about ‘coloured’

The history of a powerful but changing taboo

31 January 2015

9:00 AM

31 January 2015

9:00 AM

Benedict Cumberbatch apologised at length: ‘devastated’, ‘shaming’, ‘offended’, ‘inappropriate’. What had he done? Been caught in a compromising situation or stolen from a shop? No he had used the word coloured with reference to black people.

It is the strongest current form of taboo, worse than defecating in public, though I admit that this would have quite an effect on an American chat show.

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