I would like to raise a toast this week to Barney, a blue and gold parrot at a wildlife sanctuary in Nuneaton, who during an important civic visit told the local mayoress to “f*** off”. Not content with mortifying his keepers with merely one outburst, he then turned to two police officers and a vicar and added: “You can f*** off too, w****rs.” The rejoinder made national news.

I don't know about you but this is the sort of thing that keeps me snickering like a Viz-reading schoolboy for months. Maybe you think I have a puerile sense of humour. Maybe you are right (reading a new book on amusing names, it took me about a week to get over someone calling their child Fanny Tickler). But it was that final use of “w*****rs” that did it for me.

The idea of a parrot growing to resent the worthy but dull guests who troop round his home, snapping at them like a narky OAP and adding that extra profanity as a closing barb is just very funny. I envy Barney. He has his timing and context right. He is a talented swearer.

Unlike Madonna. Madonna is crap at swearing. She got on stage at the Live Earth concert which millions of children were watching and said: “If you want to save the planet I want you to start jumping up and down. Come on motherf****rs.”

Apart from being pathetically gratuitous (why should all these people who have, after all, come only to support the environment be accused of having carnal relations with their mothers?), how square does it sound? It's like an embarrassing auntie at a family wedding getting drunk and saying things like “gimme some skin”.

Where's the wit, Mrs Ritchie? The originality? This week the BBC was ordered by Ofcom to make a grovelling apology after viewers complained about this and various other p***poor swearers at Live Earth (that includes you, Phil Collins). It should serve as a lesson to the BBC. Few people mind if the swearing is funny. It's when it's done artlessly that it most aggrieves.

We should celebrate those who swear well. Genius swearers, in my book, include Eddie Izzard, Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It, Ricky Gervais, Jack Dee, Stephen Fry, Jo Brand, Ray Winstone, Robert De Niro, Kevin Spacey in Swimming With Sharks and, wonderfully, Richard E. Grant in Withnail & I (“Monty, you terrible c***”, being a favourite).

Morrissey, however, is someone who manages to be a lyrical genius without practically ever resorting to swearing.

Meanwhile, rubbish swearers include Gordon Ramsay (84 f***s in one episode? Less is more, Gordon), Richard Madeley, Donny Tourette (the plastic punk who sounds like he's still trying to shock his parents), Sharon Osbourne (who said “p*** off you pi**** bastard” to Vic Reeves at the Brits, sad old mare), Paris Hilton, Jade Goody and anyone under 16. As everyone knows, restraint is the key.

It is a fickle mistress, the F-word. If exploited, like alcohol, it makes a predictable, crashing bore of the user. If used sparingly and at precisely the right moment, it is unparalleled as a from-the-soul cuss. As even fifth-formers know, it is one of our most versatile tools, delivering equal verve as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb and creating splendid compound nouns (f***wit, f***face).

It always surprises me that, as a female, I'm supposed to be most affronted by the C-word. Far from it. Like many women, I think it a sensational word and believe that, actually, men get more het up about it than us. Being called a “bitch” can be far more vicious. Though, granted, coming from the mouth of, say, a London taxi driver it can be vile.

We seem to be confused by what should and shouldn't offend us (I am using asterisks throughout because this is how sweary words must appear in the press). Those red top newspapers that openly feature topless models will then, quite bafflingly, write tits as “t*ts”, as though four letters in formation will offend, but an actual pair of naked clackers won't.

In February there was a hoo-ha when the 70-year-old actress Jane Fonda inadvertently said “c***” during a live broadcast of NBC's Today show. “She certainly meant no disrespect. She was just quoting the title of her scene in The Vagina Monologues,” said her spokesman.

Well, exactly. A scene that is supposed to challenge our irrational fear and horror of this word and reclaim it, ended up with a craven apology to America. Oh, the sweet irony.

In Merseyside, where I live, there is a local campaign to change the name of the village of Lunt because scallies keep changing the sign to - guess what? Oh, please. Why is it that we laugh along with Chaucer's queynte (see, you can get round the asterisks with these olde worlde spellings), accept Pepys' cunny but recoil from Fonda's c*** and destroy a village's Viking heritage to defend our frail selves against one small word?

Sir David Attenborough, 81, this week lamented the overuse of swearing on television. “I was at BBC2 when the F-word was first broadcast and the uproar was extraordinary,” he said. “But now you hear it everywhere.” He's right, and I am as displeased as the next person by a lazy “f***”. What we need is for swearwords to be used with more skill.

But I'll never agree with those who say: “Ooh, is your vocabulary so limited that you haven't the imagination to think up another word?”

That's the point - there is no other word. Our swearwords are unique. And this is why in the right hands - hands such as Barney's - they are f*****g gold dust.

What a lotta Potter prattle

Though I never took to Harry Potter (airborne boarding school kids don't really do it for me), I have always, like most people, fiercely admired J.K. Rowling. As a one-time struggling single mother from Edinburgh, who wrote in a café to save on heating bills, she seemed, despite soaraway success, to have kept her feet firmly on the ground. Mmm. Time to reappraise. In a courtroom in Manhattan, where she is trying to stop Steve Vander Ark publishing a lexicon of Harry Potter, Ms Rowling seems to have transformed into a fully paid-up, precious luvvie. When a judge asked what her seven books meant to her she wobbled on the verge of tears, had to ask for a glass of water to regain her composure and said: “The closest that I can come is to say to someone, ‘How do you feel about your child?', adding ‘I really don't want to cry because I'm British'.”

Oh, do get a grip. We are talking here about a die-hard fan who is trying to publish an A-Z guide to Harry Potter. Like people write glossaries and guidesto, say, the Beatles' work, or Agatha Christie's.It's what tends to happen when you have been talented enough to have created a global phenomenon and a £545 million fortune. It comes with the territory that you're fortunate to inhabit. As they'd probably say back in Scotland: “Get over yourself, hen.”

A scoop on poop

My local paper reveals that Gordon Lorenz, who co-wrote the 1980 No1 hit There's No One Quite Like Grandma, sung by the St Winifred's School Choir, Stockport, has been fined £200 for twice failing to use the poop-scoop while out walking his dog, Bertie, in Llandudno. There's no punchline. I just thought you'd like to know.

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