Growing up, given a choice between Jerry Lee Lewis and one of these Genesis-Yes-Marillion prog rock bands, I'd go for the Killer every time. It was his brevity that I admired. He could get in, get it done, and get the hell out again in two and a half minutes. No messing. Say everything you need to say, then split.

I have the same attitude to swearing. I'm retro. I'm old-school. Gordon Ramsay: far too fussy for me. All those clumsy juxtapositions, when a simple syllable uttered with feeling would suffice. Goes down well with the media set, of course; snob swearers, I call them. Always banging on about invention and beauty, when basically nothing in the field will ever match the coming together of the F-word and the C-word, in just about any combination.

There is room for the poetic in swearing, but only in the field of entertainment. I would recommend a documentary called The Aristocrats, just about any episode of South Park or the US comedian Bill Hicks's visualisation of the death of his former girlfriend, in a segment entitled “...You can't get bitter...”

Real people don't swear like that, though. If someone cuts you up, there is no time for ostentatious conceits. My grandfather was a world-class swearer, Olympic-standard. He used words I did not know existed until I was older, such as tinnuck (although, coming from South London, he pronounced it tinnick).

Took me ages to work that one out. It was backslang, a dialect developed for talking in front of the boss, in which words are mostly pronounced backwards and phonetically. Those that cannot work out what a tinnuck is might be a bit kaycuffed by that anecdote. Get it now? Right, we're getting somewhere.

Anyway, the point is that I am no prude. I find most outrage over profanity faintly ridiculous, not least because it is always subjective (in parts of China the biggest insult is to call a person a turtle). I appreciate a well delivered curse-word as much as the next man, even if the next man has just hit his index finger with a hammer.

Yet there are boundaries. And we should consider drawing them.

This week, Peter Buckroyd, chief examiner of English for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, an examination board responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 pupils and for training 3,000 examiners, advocated giving two marks to a candidate whose reply to the question “Describe the room you are sitting in” was “F*** off”. These marks were for accurate spelling and successfully conveying meaning.

Had the imperative been appositely punctuated with an exclamation mark, it would have scored an extra point. Now, we could waste time analysing the appalling flaws in Buckroyd's philosophy or we could cut to the chase and just say: what a stupid f***er. What is this man doing assessing any English exam paper when he obviously has no clue about the parameters of successful intellectual analysis. Does that convey sufficient meaning? I hope so.

A few years back, at the Turner Prize exhibition, I followed a local school whose pupils, asked to comment on the work, could barely stretch beyond the level of abusive text messages. “Very shit” was as profound as it got. That year, it largely was; but while critical faculties were present, the children had no idea how to express them in any meaningful way and, more worryingly, no concept of how inappropriate it was to post vulgarities on a public wall, and no fear of punishment or shame in being caught or thought dim-witted.

Now Mr Buckroyd aims to enshrine this blurring of the acceptable and unacceptable in our education culture.

Playing Devil's advocate, maybe the student who told him to f*** off on his exam paper was responding to what appears to be an unchallenging prose test; maybe he felt patronised by the simplicity of the question and protested by refusing to engage. If so, these concerns could have been moulded into an essay worth marking, and might even have earned a pass mark were the argument constructed deftly. Instead, Buckroyd settled for f*** off as an articulation.

He no doubt feels that he is radical in thought when, in fact, he is unwittingly contributing to the degradation of a society that has seen 32 children stabbed to death this year. Gang culture is to blame, we are told.

Yet gang culture has been with us for centuries. This wave of violence is something new; a by-product of the blurring of acceptability that begins in the classroom. If the examiner accepts being told to f*** off, and the teacher shrugs as louts invade an art gallery, it is not such a big step to the concealed blade, and then the willingness to use it because, inch by inch, the reinforced message is that anything goes.

In our desperation to connect rather than instruct, we have tolerated, and are now finding ways to reward, antisocial behaviour. There are no boundaries and, as the repercussions become evident, we do not know how to replace them. To put it in language that Mr Buckroyd might understand: we're f***ed.

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