Amos, I disagree. You can be offended by anything, and what offends you depends on the beliefs and values you hold. It doesn't even take any skill or communication - about the easiest way to offend is to chew your food and then hang your mouth open in front of someone!

That's why I find "artists" who say that they're offending to communicate to be idiots. Being offensive takes no skill or talent, and shows no intelligence or motivation on the part of that person beyond the desire to do something generally considered unacceptable.

What you *can* do is not to get het up about it. If the person doing it doesn't know it's offensive to you, then don't shout about it, and don't blame that person. For instance, if I sang "Pretty Polly" and only later found that someone in the audience had recently had a daughter murdered, I would feel bad that I could have chosen a more appropriate song. And if that person had left the room, I wouldn't be surprised when I found why. But I *wouldn't* expect them to want a written apology from me, or for anyone to get on my case about it, if I simply didn't know. If I did know and sang it anyway, to get that person pissed off, then I could rightly expect them to dislike me for it. Whether that song is offensive *to me* or not is one issue, whether the singer/writer is intending to *be* offensive is another issue altother.

So if someone sings a pro-IRA or pro-UDA song in a club I'm in, they won't get much applause from me bcos I don't like those songs, but that's it. But if they come up to me afterwards and try to pick a fight with me for being in favour of Brit soldiers shooting the little kiddies, they have deliberately chosen to be offensive to me personally, and that's a different matter.

I would really rather ppl sang what they want and we all tone out what we don't personally like, than that we have limits imposed. Wysiwyg's point is true - political correctness should just mean that you don't *intend* to cause offense, not that you take a focus group from every corner of the world and produce something which is so vague, you can't tell what it's supposed to mean anyway!

Graham.