Excuse me, but may I call you a big poof? Officially, it depends; the rules on which words are taboo can swing both ways these days. No wonder we are so confused about our textuality.

Ofcom has rejected 200 complaints about a female Big Brother contestant calling a heterosexual male housemate a poof. The broadcasting watchdog ruled that she had not meant it in a “denigratory” way, and that anyway “the gay community” uses the P-word in a “playful, affectionate” way, as evidenced by the awful Four Poofs and a Piano group on Jonathan Ross's TV show.

So it seems that I may playfully call you a big poof on TV if you are a straight good mate or a bad gay singer, but not if I am deemed to be offending anybody. This follows the BBC governors' ruling that it was all right for Chris Moyles, Radio 1 DJ, to use “gay” in a derogatory sense because he did so like da kids, to mean “lame” rather than homosexual.

I have long ranted about the culture of “You Can't Say That”, which seeks to outlaw views seen as offensive. Now, however, it is not just the language but the meaning behind the words that the authorities want to police. At another time that might be called thought control - a case of “You Can't Think That”.

Meanwhile, at the Emirates Stadium on Saturday to support Manchester United against the poofs of Arsenal (I'm just being playful), the confused and confusing speech codes were also at play. You rarely hear abuse like “nigger” or “queer” shouted at Premier League players any more, for fear of crossing the line. (At least one manager is often slandered as a paedophile, but that's another matter.) However, Arsenal fans near me had no compunction about loudly branding Wayne Rooney a “fat pikey” throughout - now a non-playful but apparently acceptable term for white working-class.

Can I just say that laying down the law on what words people use — and what they are allowed to mean by it — is totally gay, in a Moylesian way. To update Dr Johnson: “Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other poof has a right to knock him down for it.”

Commentators are searching the dark corners of the internet to find what inspired the Finnish school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen to launch “one man's war against humanity”. They might try looking a little closer to home.

For example, that “Humanity is Overrated” T-shirt that he was pictured wearing is from the hit TV show House, about a cynical doctor who saves patients he despises - an award-winning “anti-human humanist”?

And the misanthropic bile in the murderer's published manifesto and YouTube videos sounded like a violent echo of the humanity-as-virus views now propounded everywhere from the Matrix movies to the political mainstream.

Where could these young people get their ideas from? Who needs al-Qaeda to poison minds? The power of misanthropy in our culture is underrated.

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