Words Matter!
Sticks and stones will hurt my bones but words will never hurt me.”
I remember hearing this as a child. At the time I thought all such aphorisms were based on years of experience so made the assumption it must be correct. Experience has taught me that this one is totally untrue. Words hurt far more than a cracked rib. Words are far more a bad or good memory than a broken leg or a good report card. As I write this I recollect that rugby report card in the January of my last year at school.
“He has surprised many people, not least himself, by holding down a First XV place this rugby season”.
Forget academics, and I did, these words were the highlight of my 5 year boarding school career and are with me now.
The reason that I am writing this today is that Irene, my wise and thoughtful wife, was reading about a gentleman who had recently lost his wife after a long illness. He was dealing with the bureaucracy and red tape which so often accompanies the death of a loved one. Some heartless ‘suit in an office’ had referred to his late wife as his ex-wife! Now I don’t know about you, Dear Readers, but that term seems to imply divorce, maybe irreconcilable differences, possibly an amicable separation. It suggests legal proceedings. Who has the right to see the children when and where; who gets the family dog; financial flounderings; “Downton Abbey” or “Hockey Night in Canada”; Parent-Teacher interviews; Child allowances; how to handle the wants and needs of the children. It does not, I suggest, Friends, suggest the demise of a much loved wife after many years of marriage. Your man here was, plain and simple, a widower, as his wife would have been a widow had her husband died. To me this is one example of how certain groups of people or, indeed, individuals use language inappropriately. OK, I will come clean, I am one of the guilty ones.
Watching a documentary on the people who developed the atomic bomb I heard the commentator express the opinion that simply because people are very intelligent, that is nuclear scientists in this case, does not mean that they are wise. Of course, Dear Reader, we know this to be true, there have been very many wise illiterates throughout history just as there have been bibliophiles who have not had an ounce of common sense. Wisdom and intelligence are two separate skills although wisdom may be categorised as a type of intelligence, I think. Words matter.
Anybody who has worked for a living, and many of you still do, are only too aware of the dread that we feel when an expert is called in to help us solve a problem. Suddenly we are faced with a pontificator, mostly possessed with the people skills of a rock, who long since left the coal face for the ivory tower. He or she has found themselves a professional niche which suits people who shower in the morning rather than the evening. He has long since been removed from the day to day where hands on is the job of the great unwashed. She has become a trouble shooter in a suit; her awareness and wherewithal caught the last train out many years ago. In short, such people are about as welcome as flatulence in a space suit. Dear reader, we all need saving from a certain type of expert. “Expert” is a word that cannot be fumbled because it is too often dropped.
The world does, however, need to progress and move onwards through innovation and science. But, I suggest, some things can surely be left as they were. I have been reading much that is political at the moment. It seemed appropriate to read Jonathan Manthorpe’s excellent new book “On Canadian Democracy” at the time of the BC provincial election. The clarity, vision and wisdom of his book are going to have me referring back to it for the foreseeable future. Mr. Manthorpe’s words are exceptionally clear. Reading Bob Woodward’s recent publication, “War”, is very current and is based on many insights and interviews with the leading players and the one idiot in American politics. I read both these books in double quick time but felt the need to think of something else before sleep of an evening and thus settled on “Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius, an inspired Roman Emperor who lived almost 2000 years ago. The wisdom of the ancients, his stoicism in particular, shows that there is hope for the leadership of human kind, once the people realise that they have been duped by a self-serving clown. So with the upcoming American election, maybe the last time that democracy appears in that country for many years, I have been listening to political pundits, yes OK, experts in their fields. Once such was a political science professor at UBC. She had some interesting points but she could not predict the outcome of the election any more than you or me, Dear Reader. And this is my point, yet again, about the use of terminology. Science is a subject whereby things are improved and discovered through rigorous research, it is where things are tried and tested and found wanting or otherwise. Science, Friends, is, in my opinion, supposed to have a proven conclusion. Political Science is unpredictable and therefore inaccurate, I therefore suggest that it cannot be called a science, political studies might be more appropriate. But what do I really, really know?
There are two magnificent words which have entered the language in a different context to what they originally meant. They are beige and hinterland. I love their new usage dearly. Billy Connolly, the comedian, uses beige to mean something bland and boring. Small talk at cocktail parties; household chores; automobiles; the qualities or lack thereof of various airlines; the British royal family; recipes; a long, long discussion between a Welsh and Aussie miner about the benefits of wooden pit props over metal ones! (There was no escape from this last one as we were in a pub waiting for a bus that was several hours late. It was, by a long way, the beigest experience of my life!) Exciting hinterlands are the solution, Dear Friends. Simon Barnes, an outstanding sports journalist, gave me hinterland. To him everybody needs an hinterland some distance away from the routine of their professional lives. Hinterlands are hobbies and pastimes, forms of relaxation that alleviate stress, methods that round a person off rather than allow him or her to persist in a cyclopean vision of life. They allow us to recreate and refresh. Hopefully, Dear Reader, none of us has a beige hinterland!
Spelling also matters. “I can still smell your colon on my pillow’, believe me is not perfume. ‘Due to unforeseen circumcisions, we are closed’ is unfortunate. Certainly, Friends, we can all chuckle at these but, of course, if we are prone to write we too are prone to mistakes. Because I am the victim of too much Latin at school, a decade spent studying a dead language always provokes the question ‘Why?” This is my excuse for writing exceptionally elongated sentences. If anybody dies because they couldn’t get a breath before the end, I could be held liable. I have a tendency towards the elongated sentence:-
“Having opened my eyes, having decided to swing my legs out from under the bedclothes and placed them on the floor, I stood up, not noticing that the room was still dark, that dawn had not cast its first light on our eastern fence, that ‘jocund day’ was nowhere near ‘standing on the misty mountain top.”
It’s a disease, Dear Reader, and one which I have struggled hard to overcome. Keith Waterhouse said,
“If your sentence needs a comma, just to stop the reader collapsing in a heap before the end, you would do better to cast it as two sentences.”
I am trying to learn from Keith Waterhouse.
And “Remember to close all parentheses, we are not paying to air condition the entire paragraph.”
But, you see, Friends, I am a simple soul who really needs things spelled out to me. So I had no chance with the following:-
“Regulatory practices operating within discursive regimes that circumscribe the materiality of the subject through the citationality of norms”
And
“The illocutionary hallucination of the performative as a material event of subjectivity that emerges as a discursive nexus that can generally be named ‘impersonation’”.
The above is from an article from ‘The Times’ dated April 6th, 2021 entitled “Academics are embracing gibberish studies” by Melanie Phillips. She is quoting The Wall Street Journal and describes what she has read as ‘gobbledegook’. Admittedly this is taken out of context but it is supposed to be a learned piece of work and, if that is the case, then spellcheck reveals that there is no such word as ‘citationality’ although perhaps there should be.
So this subdued rant has all been about words and such but maybe it should have been about meaning and understanding. OK, Friends, I’ll come clean, this blog has become a therapeutic polyfilla because we now know all about the American election and I am lost for words.
Here is a German word to finish up with:-
Danaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan
I have the meaning written down somewhere but what it should mean is:-
“Not on any account should one ever play Scrabble with a German”
Thanks for reading.
