Hunter S Thompson used a quote from Dr Johnson as the epigraph for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’ Johnson may have been influenced by a reading of Donne’s Sermons: ‘Inordinateness of affections may sometimes make some men like some beasts; but indolency, absence, emptiness, privation of affections, makes any man, at all times, like stones, like dirt.’ (1640.)
The first and greatest of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is that ‘existence is suffering’. To be alive is foremost to suffer but, if one characterises suffering as a breakdown of order, even inanimate objects are not immune. Wind and rain wear down the mountain; the very core of the planet is cooling; apparently the entire solar system will at last be swallowed by a black hole.
Inherent in any system is its decay. The physicist would describe this as an increase in entropy. Entropy can be defined as ‘The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.’
Language itself cannot escape, as neatly evidenced by the decline of the original Greek word for suffering, pathos, which we find today in such compound terms as pathology, sympathy (sym indicating ‘together’) and apathy (a indicating ‘without’). In classical Greek, apathēs simply means ‘without suffering’, but entropy has been at work on the word in English and it means something very different now. In fact its meaning has rotated almost a hundred and eighty degrees. The apathetic suffers more than the man of purpose: his inner life is about as grim as it gets.
Something analogous has happened to our related borrowing from Latin. Cicero wanted an equivalent for the Greek word apatheia in its sense of ‘freedom from pain’. The Latin word for pain is dolor (by the way, it’s tempting fate to name your daughter ‘Dolores’), so he came up with indolentia. This didn’t much catch on (Seneca proposed impatientia instead) but nonetheless ‘indolent’ had that meaning among some English writers up till the eighteenth century, and even now a doctor terms a tumour ‘indolent’ if it causes no pain.
Thus words decay along with everything else. They get knocked about, mangled, eroded, during transmission from one human to another, especially when the transmitter is not well educated or, perhaps, well intentioned.
The latter phenomenon is all too evident today. Consider the pejorative poison being absorbed by ‘denier’, or indeed the evolution of ‘bigot’ – a word which, at its first known use in 1598, simply indicated a hypocrite. Later it also meant a superstitious person, especially one ‘obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a creed, opinion, or ritual’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which, under ‘bigoted’, says ‘obstinately and blindly attached to some creed, opinion, or party, and intolerant towards others.’) Nowadays it simply denotes anyone I disagree with, provided I am on the left of the political spectrum. Somehow the word has been appropriated by one side. Rightists are reduced to casting around among inferior alternatives to demonise their truly bigoted (in the sense of ‘intolerant’) counterparts.
Entropy is working its magic on ‘bigot’. As an over-used insult it is becoming almost as ineffectual as ‘Nazi’. The insultee merely shrugs his shoulders and views the terms as identifying his opponent.
With all the hysterical mud-slinging characterising, say, the recent presidential election in America, it is tempting to withdraw: to become apathetic, indolent, inert, indifferent to the unreasoning nonsense spewed by both sides, but that would be to yield too soon to entropy.
No, we must observe the culture war and its ideological skirmishes not just as a freak show but also as a source of instruction. In the intense heat of its rage and intolerance, certain words are being eroded so quickly that we can observe, in a matter of months or even weeks, philological decay that might previously have taken years.
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
4 March 2017
18 August 2014
Whither Hither and Thither?
These three words, for a long time merely literary, have gone out of fashion altogether except in compound use (“hitherto”, “hither and thither”) or when the writer or speaker wishes to introduce a whimsical note (“whither Obama now?”). It is a shame, because their loss also deprives us of shades of meaning.
The modern replacement for “hither” is simply “here”, doing away with the sense of movement. Consider these quotations from the dictionary: “Come hither unto me” (1550, and by the way “come hither” is still, just about, used adjectivally to describe a coy, arch, or seductive look bestowed by a woman); “hyther tendeth al prudence and pollycy” (1538). I believe that “hither” is the intensive form of “here”. The command “bring him hither!” implies “from that place to this” more imperiously than “bring him here!”
Likewise, “thither” intensifies “there” and “whither” intensifies “where”.
“Here”, “there” and “where” are ancient words, as one might expect of such important tokens of meaning. “Here” and “there” are closely related: the latter probably grew out of the former, a pleasing idea since we always start from “here”, unless of course we are Irish and giving directional advice (“I wouldn’t be starting from here”). “Where”, however, comes to us through the interrogative Anglo Saxon form “hwár?”, which is a relative of “hwā?”, “who?”
“When”, “what”, “where”, “who”, “why”, “which” and “how” all begin with aspirants. This somehow suggests, to me at any rate, the state of ignorance. When we are puzzled or confounded by something we often exhale through partially pursed lips. Might the initial aspirant have arisen, in the very deepest past, from association with this? After all, words have to begin somewhere. If they are onomatopoeic (e.g. “crow”, “crash”, “whip”) their etymology is easy to explain, but the expression of abstract ideas is so subtle that there must originally have been some common ground, however tenuous.
One of our vital abilities is to take things for granted. Without it we would never get anything done. Yet sometimes it is instructive to stop and consider an aspect – any aspect – of life to which we have never before given much thought. These three words, passing from use, remind us of the mutability and great age of our language, that gigantic construction built from nothing but a need to understand the other fellow and in turn tell him what we think. English is more than a means of communication: it is a teeming city, continually being redeveloped, partially demolished, rebuilt, the product of millions of minds and sensibilities.
Below the ground, slowly becoming buried by new layers of construction, the archaeology is there for anyone who cares to dig.
The modern replacement for “hither” is simply “here”, doing away with the sense of movement. Consider these quotations from the dictionary: “Come hither unto me” (1550, and by the way “come hither” is still, just about, used adjectivally to describe a coy, arch, or seductive look bestowed by a woman); “hyther tendeth al prudence and pollycy” (1538). I believe that “hither” is the intensive form of “here”. The command “bring him hither!” implies “from that place to this” more imperiously than “bring him here!”
Likewise, “thither” intensifies “there” and “whither” intensifies “where”.
“Here”, “there” and “where” are ancient words, as one might expect of such important tokens of meaning. “Here” and “there” are closely related: the latter probably grew out of the former, a pleasing idea since we always start from “here”, unless of course we are Irish and giving directional advice (“I wouldn’t be starting from here”). “Where”, however, comes to us through the interrogative Anglo Saxon form “hwár?”, which is a relative of “hwā?”, “who?”
“When”, “what”, “where”, “who”, “why”, “which” and “how” all begin with aspirants. This somehow suggests, to me at any rate, the state of ignorance. When we are puzzled or confounded by something we often exhale through partially pursed lips. Might the initial aspirant have arisen, in the very deepest past, from association with this? After all, words have to begin somewhere. If they are onomatopoeic (e.g. “crow”, “crash”, “whip”) their etymology is easy to explain, but the expression of abstract ideas is so subtle that there must originally have been some common ground, however tenuous.
One of our vital abilities is to take things for granted. Without it we would never get anything done. Yet sometimes it is instructive to stop and consider an aspect – any aspect – of life to which we have never before given much thought. These three words, passing from use, remind us of the mutability and great age of our language, that gigantic construction built from nothing but a need to understand the other fellow and in turn tell him what we think. English is more than a means of communication: it is a teeming city, continually being redeveloped, partially demolished, rebuilt, the product of millions of minds and sensibilities.
Below the ground, slowly becoming buried by new layers of construction, the archaeology is there for anyone who cares to dig.
18 July 2014
A nice new word
Quote of the week, with the bonus of a new word for me!
"Obviously Amazon has a very definitive point of view on what should be done in the publishing business. Those in the publishing world are not totally copacetic with it," Moonves said.
5 February 2013
Ratio and Oratio
According to Skeat, the Anglo-Saxon word word is derived from the Indo-Germanic root wer, “to speak”. It is cognate with the Dutch woord, the Icelandic orð, the Danish and Swedish ord, the German wort and the Meso-Gothic waurd. He compares it with the Lithuanian wardas, “a name” and the Latin verbum, “a word” – literally “a thing spoken”.
All these forms retain the original ur sound, which seems fitting, because “ur” is one of the most basic productions of the human voice. It is nice to think that “ur”, with its intensifying “w”, was one of the earliest terms agreed upon by those who named the animals.
Compare our word with the Greek λόγος (logos), which is defined in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon as “(A) the word or outward form by which the inward thought is made known;” and, giving us a glimpse of the Hellenic mind, “(B) the inward thought or reason itself; so that λόγος comprehends both the Latin ratio and oratio.”
Among the definitions of ratio in Cassell’s Latin Dictionary is “the faculty of mind which calculates and plans, the reason”; the primary meaning is “a reckoning, an account, computation, calculation”. Oratio simply means “speaking, speech, language”, and we may infer that it proceeds both in concept and etymologically from ratio.
To the Greeks reason and speech were inseparable, which helps to illuminate the glories of their language and civilization. However, to the northern βαρβαροι (barbarians), who were probably so called because of their unintelligible utterances (“baa-baa-baa”), the ur came first.
Speech and reason are like the chicken and egg. In the evolution of the human brain each gave rise to the other. The more precise and logical (those Greeks again!) one’s mental language, the more precise and logical, the more reasoned will be one’s conduct. That is why precision in language matters. At our peril we fail to teach our children syntax and spelling; relativists fail to expose them to the glories of our own language, and with every failure of teaching a little of our civilization dies.
That’s quite enough polemic (πόλεμος, a battle). This post is about the word that underlies our classification of the world: without agreeing among us what a word means, there can be no communication, and before doing that we need a word for “word”.
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεός ἦν ὁ Λόγος.
In the Vulgate:
In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.
In the King James translation:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In the Chalcedonian creed, Christ is the very Λόγος itself, the essence of reason. Without wishing to offend, I would point out that this is an early, and very powerful, attempt to hijack language for religious or political ends. The technique has been used more recently and to great effect by disciples of the Frankfurt School. By making some words taboo, they try to make the thought taboo as well. This exchange between ratio and oratio was perfectly understood by George Orwell; his Newspeak (in Nineteen Eighty-four) predicts the rise of political correctness.
To resist the hijackers we first have know where a word comes from. Etymology is the study of the origins of words and how one word begets or influences another. For a writer it is both fascinating and fundamental. One of my favourite books (acquired second-hand and inscribed: “Margaret with bestest love from R. Xmastide : 1915”) is A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter Skeat. It is a treasure-trove of revelation and connection. We see the way words can subtly but innocently change their meaning over the years: the principle of Chinese Whispers is at work every time we communicate with our fellows.
Though our language is imprecise, it is the best we have. The more exact we can be with it the more clearly we will understand one another and the better we will get along. This is an old argument, but it bears repeating every day. It is too easy to become a Humpty Dumpty; etymology is one antidote, and to begin this occasional series of etymological reflections I thought it proper to start with the Word itself.
All these forms retain the original ur sound, which seems fitting, because “ur” is one of the most basic productions of the human voice. It is nice to think that “ur”, with its intensifying “w”, was one of the earliest terms agreed upon by those who named the animals.
Compare our word with the Greek λόγος (logos), which is defined in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon as “(A) the word or outward form by which the inward thought is made known;” and, giving us a glimpse of the Hellenic mind, “(B) the inward thought or reason itself; so that λόγος comprehends both the Latin ratio and oratio.”
Among the definitions of ratio in Cassell’s Latin Dictionary is “the faculty of mind which calculates and plans, the reason”; the primary meaning is “a reckoning, an account, computation, calculation”. Oratio simply means “speaking, speech, language”, and we may infer that it proceeds both in concept and etymologically from ratio.
To the Greeks reason and speech were inseparable, which helps to illuminate the glories of their language and civilization. However, to the northern βαρβαροι (barbarians), who were probably so called because of their unintelligible utterances (“baa-baa-baa”), the ur came first.
Speech and reason are like the chicken and egg. In the evolution of the human brain each gave rise to the other. The more precise and logical (those Greeks again!) one’s mental language, the more precise and logical, the more reasoned will be one’s conduct. That is why precision in language matters. At our peril we fail to teach our children syntax and spelling; relativists fail to expose them to the glories of our own language, and with every failure of teaching a little of our civilization dies.
That’s quite enough polemic (πόλεμος, a battle). This post is about the word that underlies our classification of the world: without agreeing among us what a word means, there can be no communication, and before doing that we need a word for “word”.
“There’s glory for you!”In its original Greek, St John’s gospel begins:
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεός ἦν ὁ Λόγος.
In the Vulgate:
In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.
In the King James translation:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In the Chalcedonian creed, Christ is the very Λόγος itself, the essence of reason. Without wishing to offend, I would point out that this is an early, and very powerful, attempt to hijack language for religious or political ends. The technique has been used more recently and to great effect by disciples of the Frankfurt School. By making some words taboo, they try to make the thought taboo as well. This exchange between ratio and oratio was perfectly understood by George Orwell; his Newspeak (in Nineteen Eighty-four) predicts the rise of political correctness.
To resist the hijackers we first have know where a word comes from. Etymology is the study of the origins of words and how one word begets or influences another. For a writer it is both fascinating and fundamental. One of my favourite books (acquired second-hand and inscribed: “Margaret with bestest love from R. Xmastide : 1915”) is A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter Skeat. It is a treasure-trove of revelation and connection. We see the way words can subtly but innocently change their meaning over the years: the principle of Chinese Whispers is at work every time we communicate with our fellows.
Though our language is imprecise, it is the best we have. The more exact we can be with it the more clearly we will understand one another and the better we will get along. This is an old argument, but it bears repeating every day. It is too easy to become a Humpty Dumpty; etymology is one antidote, and to begin this occasional series of etymological reflections I thought it proper to start with the Word itself.
25 January 2010
Favourite words, #1: Dwarf
I once fantasized about making a movie. The slow-burning hero and his feisty heroine, the baddies, the townsfolk, the lynch mob, the crooked speculator, the sheriff and his reformed drunk of a deputy (it was to be a Western): all would be dwarfs. The buildings and props would be to scale, and the horses tethered outside the saloon would be Shetland ponies. Most importantly, the script would be serious, and no reference whatever would be made to the stature of the characters.
By the time the credits rolled, it would be the full-sized people in the audience who felt at odds with the world. For a few minutes, at least, as they spilled into the street, they would feel like giants. The experience would give a true insight into what it is like to be physically different.
You see from this that I have sympathy ("together-suffering") for dwarfs, at least for those who would rather not be small. Hence I refuse even to try to dredge up some horrible, politically correct euphemism. A euphemism is a sure sign that whatever is being described is considered unpleasant, and so is doubly pejorative. If I were a dwarf, "a dwarf" is what I should insist on being called.
This is a splendid sound, beginning with the rare and noble combination "dw", shared by only a fistful of other terms in English, viz, dwale, dwang, dwell, dwindle, dwine. The "dw" helps to convey an air of medieval complexity, the complexity of gloomy, untamed forests where anything can happen. The dwarfs dwell there, in a vast cavern-city where they practise their arts and hoard their treasure. Wagner's dwarfish race of Nibelungs has its origins in the earliest folklore.
The word is august. It carried across the North Sea, from the Teutons - the probable source of those legends - to the Anglo Saxons, who at first pronounced it dwergh. Dr Johnson seems to like it too, and expatiates in his Dictionary thus:
Behind her far away a dwarf did lag,
That lazy seem'd in being ever last,
Or wearied with bearing of her bag
Of needments at his back.
Her dwarf is wise as well faithful. At the mouth of Error's cave, standing beside Una and her Redcross Knight, he counsels:
"Fly, fly!" quoth then
The fearful dwarf, "this is no place for living men."
But full of fire and greedy hardiment,
The youthful knight could not for aught be stayed,
But forth unto the darksome hole he went.
... which leads us back to the subterranean and the paranormal, if not to the Nibelungs, and there I think this particular discourse has found a place to rest.
By the time the credits rolled, it would be the full-sized people in the audience who felt at odds with the world. For a few minutes, at least, as they spilled into the street, they would feel like giants. The experience would give a true insight into what it is like to be physically different.
You see from this that I have sympathy ("together-suffering") for dwarfs, at least for those who would rather not be small. Hence I refuse even to try to dredge up some horrible, politically correct euphemism. A euphemism is a sure sign that whatever is being described is considered unpleasant, and so is doubly pejorative. If I were a dwarf, "a dwarf" is what I should insist on being called.
This is a splendid sound, beginning with the rare and noble combination "dw", shared by only a fistful of other terms in English, viz, dwale, dwang, dwell, dwindle, dwine. The "dw" helps to convey an air of medieval complexity, the complexity of gloomy, untamed forests where anything can happen. The dwarfs dwell there, in a vast cavern-city where they practise their arts and hoard their treasure. Wagner's dwarfish race of Nibelungs has its origins in the earliest folklore.
The word is august. It carried across the North Sea, from the Teutons - the probable source of those legends - to the Anglo Saxons, who at first pronounced it dwergh. Dr Johnson seems to like it too, and expatiates in his Dictionary thus:
dwarf, n.s. [dweorf, Sax. dwerg, Dutch; sherg, Scottish.]To which I would add "dwarf willow", that crucial plant of the north; but I would rather hurry along and expand on definition (3). Dr Johnson has unerringly chosen the most felicitous of Spenser's lines, in Book I, Canto i of The Faerie Queene, about Una's dwarf. Yet there are other contenders. The character's introduction, in the sixth stanza after the proem, is wonderfully evocative:
1. A man below the common size of men.
Get you gone, you dwarf!
You minimus, of hind'ring knot-grass made. Shakespeare.
Such dwarfs were some kind of apes. Brown's Vulg. Err.
They but now who seem'd
In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow room
Throng numberless. Milton's Paradise Lost, b. i. 779.
2. Any animal or plant below its natural bulk.
It is a delicate plantation of trees, all well-grown, fair, and smooth: one dwarf was knotty and crooked, and the rest had it in derision. L'Estrange.
Saw off the head of the stock in a smooth place; and for dwarf trees, graft them within four fingers of the ground. Mortimer's Art of Husbandry.
3. An attendant on a lady or knight in romances.
The champion stout,
Eftsoones dismounted from his courser brave,
And to the dwarf a-while his needless spear he gave. F. Qu.
4. It is often used by botanists in composition; as, dwarf elder, dwarf honeysuckle.
Behind her far away a dwarf did lag,
That lazy seem'd in being ever last,
Or wearied with bearing of her bag
Of needments at his back.
Her dwarf is wise as well faithful. At the mouth of Error's cave, standing beside Una and her Redcross Knight, he counsels:
"Fly, fly!" quoth then
The fearful dwarf, "this is no place for living men."
But full of fire and greedy hardiment,
The youthful knight could not for aught be stayed,
But forth unto the darksome hole he went.
... which leads us back to the subterranean and the paranormal, if not to the Nibelungs, and there I think this particular discourse has found a place to rest.
19 January 2010
Politics and fiction
Political fiction is not to my taste, unless, perhaps, it confirms my prejudices. The short story or novel is not at its best when used as a megaphone. Dickens's agitation for reform was always subordinate to his vocation as a storyteller. Even that most political of novels, Orwell's Animal Farm, succeeds primarily as fiction and is happily read by schoolchildren who know nothing of Stalin and the USSR. Whether he intended it or not, Orwell's talent for engaging the reader's humanity trumps the political message, powerful and memorable though that is.
In the hands of lesser writers, the political novel is not only lumpen and dreary but soon dates. Characters whose sole function is to embody some political idea have no life outside themselves. We cannot identify with them. They have no organic interaction with the other characters or the plot. That is because they are a product of the conscious mind: the calculating mind of the author, who is trying to persuade the reader to his point of view.
The best fiction is produced in the subconscious. Employing certain skills that he has acquired (for example, a knowledge of vocabulary and usage), the author uses his taste and sense of rhythm to order words on the page, but the ideas spring from a deeper source. He is often unaware of exactly what he is doing. He supposes that the story has taken on a life of its own, or that this character or that demands more attention than he intended, whereas all that is happening is that he is following the dictates of the mysterious vat where the story has been fermenting - his subconscious.
The act of composition is of two kinds. First, there is the Monday-morning, blank-screen, must-do-500-words-today kind, which is not only unmitigated torment but usually produces little that is not pedestrian. But then there is the other kind. Somehow, the author's brain slips into a different state. He puts self to one side: perhaps, as in meditation, there is some change in electrical activity. At any rate, he finds the words suggesting themselves. He imagines the scene and it is transmuted into prose. The more vividly he imagines it, the more vividly the reader will recreate it.
This second state is fragile and precious. When it is shattered - for example, by some trivial interruption - the author knows at once what he has lost and is angry with the interrupter. His anger may seem exaggerated and irrational, but it could have taken him an hour, a morning, a whole day, or even a week, to reach that magic state.
There is a widespread misconception, then, about the cleverness of authors who seem to have a God-like overview, who are aware of every nuance of symbolism that goes to reinforce the thrust of their work. If credit is due, give it to the subconscious, that receiver of all experiences and impressions, that vessel shaped by upbringing, class and personality. The conscious author is merely its clerk.
That is what makes good literature so engaging. As readers, we connect with it also at a subconscious level. Mind speaks to mind. Our subconscious can quickly spot a fake, which is why overtly political fiction is so dull.
The unwitting content (political and otherwise) of good fiction is fascinating. In telling his tale, the author inadvertently reveals much about himself and his beliefs.
These thoughts were prompted by a re-reading of Billy Liar by the late Keith Waterhouse. It is one of my favourite books, not least because it is, especially in the early chapters, very funny. Billy Fisher is nineteen and living in 1950s Yorkshire. He rails against the small-mindedness of his surroundings: his dead-end job at an undertaker's, his lower-middle-class parents and grandma; and he rails even more against the philistinism that assails him on every side. His solace is fantasy. To relieve his boredom he tells lies, many of them pointless. Of course, these land him in trouble, not least from the two girls to whom he is engaged simultaneously and who share a single ring. And he regularly escapes into his imaginary country of Ambrosia, where he sees himself as progressive leader and hero.
Keith Waterhouse was born in 1929, into a working-class household in Leeds, Yorkshire. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow and his mother was a cleaner; she encouraged young Keith to apply himself to his books in the hope of getting a place at the local grammar school.
Grammar schools then were a stepladder to the professions for children of all backgrounds: the tuition was freely provided by the state. I went to one myself. I had to pass the 11+ (an exam taken at the end of one's time in primary school, ages 5-11), then sit an I.Q. test. Finally I was interviewed.
Once inside the school we were streamed. Half of us were earmarked for an academic education. The curriculum for the others was weighted towards vocational subjects like technical drawing and metalwork. Boys (it was a single-sex school) who failed to pull their weight were chucked out. They landed at the "secondary modern", the school for the also-rans. Here the teaching was as unashamedly vocational as ours was unashamedly elitist: such subjects as plumbing and typing were taught in addition to the core curriculum. Just as underperforming children could be demoted from the grammar schools, so pupils in the secondary moderns could be promoted.
Perhaps the worst defect of this system was its reliance on the 11+, for which some comparatively gifted children were not, at that age, ready, and which (if exacerbated by ambitious parents) put intolerable pressure on the candidates. If you failed, you were perceived to be a failure, doomed to a lifetime of servitude - a palpable untruth, by the way, since many graduates of the secondary modern schools went on to become successful business-people earning far more than their grammar-school peers in the Civil Service, say.
The system's blatant meritocracy also offended on ideological grounds. In 1965, under a newly elected Labour government, its abolition began in earnest. Anthony Crosland, Harold Wilson's Secretary of State for Education and Science, is quoted by his wife as saying: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland". By 1970 my former school had been turned into a "comprehensive", admitting children of all abilities.
A debate has raged ever since about the destruction of the grammar schools. Some say that the socialists (many of whom themselves attended such schools) spitefully kicked the ladder away; that the abolition was part of a larger, Gramscian, and entirely successful, plan to dumb down the voters and make them more susceptible to propaganda and, by impoverishing their life chances as well, to make them ever more reliant on the state. Others say that the comprehensive system allows all children to flourish, not just the privileged few who happen to be able to pass an exam; that such inequality so early in life can lead only to a perpetuation of the class structure which is such a curse on Britain. The issue, as neatly as any other, divides left from right.
Waterhouse failed his 11+ and the experience scarred him for ever. Thanks to an inspirational teacher at his secondary modern, he did not give up his ambition to write, but the going was very hard, and it was not until the success of Billy Liar, published when he was thirty, that he was freed from poverty.
Yorkshire, the north of England generally, has a tradition of supporting the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. Coming as he did from a lowly background in the Labour stronghold of Leeds, it is not surprising that Waterhouse espoused left-wing views. These are on display in Billy Liar. Billy is contemptuous of the middle-class pretensions and capitalistic attitudes of Shadrack, his boss at the "funeral furnishers". Because Shadrack, a former car salesman, inherited his share of the firm on the death of his father, his position is seen as undeserved. When Billy's grandmother dies, he recommends that his mother enlist the Co-op (a socialist organization) rather than Shadrack. When Billy fantasizes about standing for Parliament, he unquestioningly casts himself in the role of Labour candidate. During Billy's daydreams about Ambrosia, his arch-enemy is categorized as the "reactionary" Dr Grover; and so on.
Yet, reading more closely, one detects something else at work. On almost every page we see that Billy is an individualist, a lone wolf who refuses to be bound by convention. His burning ambition is to be a scriptwriter: he has already submitted jokes to a famous comic in London, whose vague but encouraging response Billy tries to twist, in his own mind, into an offer of work. Billy and society are at odds. It is very hard to picture him living by the socialist creed.
Besides the two girls to whom he is engaged there is a third, Liz, a free spirit whom Billy genuinely loves. Each of the other two is a parody of the mindless voter for Labour or Conservative, but the enigmatic Liz is different. We do not know her politics, even though, in Ambrosia, she is cast as Billy's Home Secretary. She plays an increasingly important part in the story, becoming pivotal at the climax when Billy must decide between the adventure of London and staying at home in Stradhoughton.
After Billy Liar, Waterhouse actually lived Billy's dream and went on to great success as a journalist and writer for theatre, film and TV. In 1970 he joined the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror as a columnist and remained there until 1986, when that paper was bought by the fraudster and quondam Labour M.P., the late Robert Maxwell. In what might be seen as a surprising move, Waterhouse went to another mass-circulation daily, the rabidly rightist Daily Mail, where he remained for 23 years. To quote from his obituary in the Times:
I used to read his column whenever I got the chance, for his use of language, for his wit and inventiveness, and for his wry point of view. Even before Tony Blair's victory of 1997, I was struck by what seemed a drift to the right. It is likely that Waterhouse and his many friends believed himself a socialist to the end, an adherent of old rather than New Labour, but I am not so sure.
The seeds of my doubt are in Billy Liar. As an employee, a member of the team, one of the collective, Billy is hopeless. He is late for work, idle, and accomplishes the minimum. He steals from the petty cash and, when tasked with sending out promotional calendars, dumps them and trousers the postage money. He has no respect for his family or anyone else except himself and Liz. These are hardly socialist virtues: yet they make a sort of vague prototype, however repressed and transmogrified, of the author himself.
I am not suggesting for a moment that Keith Waterhouse was ever like that in reality. It is the subconscious, contradictory portrait I find interesting: the portrait of someone who would be unlikely ever to vote at all; or, if he could be bothered to vote, it would certainly not be for Labour.
But then ... contradiction within contradiction: let me end with a quotation from the book itself.
In the hands of lesser writers, the political novel is not only lumpen and dreary but soon dates. Characters whose sole function is to embody some political idea have no life outside themselves. We cannot identify with them. They have no organic interaction with the other characters or the plot. That is because they are a product of the conscious mind: the calculating mind of the author, who is trying to persuade the reader to his point of view.
The best fiction is produced in the subconscious. Employing certain skills that he has acquired (for example, a knowledge of vocabulary and usage), the author uses his taste and sense of rhythm to order words on the page, but the ideas spring from a deeper source. He is often unaware of exactly what he is doing. He supposes that the story has taken on a life of its own, or that this character or that demands more attention than he intended, whereas all that is happening is that he is following the dictates of the mysterious vat where the story has been fermenting - his subconscious.
The act of composition is of two kinds. First, there is the Monday-morning, blank-screen, must-do-500-words-today kind, which is not only unmitigated torment but usually produces little that is not pedestrian. But then there is the other kind. Somehow, the author's brain slips into a different state. He puts self to one side: perhaps, as in meditation, there is some change in electrical activity. At any rate, he finds the words suggesting themselves. He imagines the scene and it is transmuted into prose. The more vividly he imagines it, the more vividly the reader will recreate it.
This second state is fragile and precious. When it is shattered - for example, by some trivial interruption - the author knows at once what he has lost and is angry with the interrupter. His anger may seem exaggerated and irrational, but it could have taken him an hour, a morning, a whole day, or even a week, to reach that magic state.
There is a widespread misconception, then, about the cleverness of authors who seem to have a God-like overview, who are aware of every nuance of symbolism that goes to reinforce the thrust of their work. If credit is due, give it to the subconscious, that receiver of all experiences and impressions, that vessel shaped by upbringing, class and personality. The conscious author is merely its clerk.
That is what makes good literature so engaging. As readers, we connect with it also at a subconscious level. Mind speaks to mind. Our subconscious can quickly spot a fake, which is why overtly political fiction is so dull.
The unwitting content (political and otherwise) of good fiction is fascinating. In telling his tale, the author inadvertently reveals much about himself and his beliefs.
These thoughts were prompted by a re-reading of Billy Liar by the late Keith Waterhouse. It is one of my favourite books, not least because it is, especially in the early chapters, very funny. Billy Fisher is nineteen and living in 1950s Yorkshire. He rails against the small-mindedness of his surroundings: his dead-end job at an undertaker's, his lower-middle-class parents and grandma; and he rails even more against the philistinism that assails him on every side. His solace is fantasy. To relieve his boredom he tells lies, many of them pointless. Of course, these land him in trouble, not least from the two girls to whom he is engaged simultaneously and who share a single ring. And he regularly escapes into his imaginary country of Ambrosia, where he sees himself as progressive leader and hero.
Keith Waterhouse was born in 1929, into a working-class household in Leeds, Yorkshire. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow and his mother was a cleaner; she encouraged young Keith to apply himself to his books in the hope of getting a place at the local grammar school.
Grammar schools then were a stepladder to the professions for children of all backgrounds: the tuition was freely provided by the state. I went to one myself. I had to pass the 11+ (an exam taken at the end of one's time in primary school, ages 5-11), then sit an I.Q. test. Finally I was interviewed.
Once inside the school we were streamed. Half of us were earmarked for an academic education. The curriculum for the others was weighted towards vocational subjects like technical drawing and metalwork. Boys (it was a single-sex school) who failed to pull their weight were chucked out. They landed at the "secondary modern", the school for the also-rans. Here the teaching was as unashamedly vocational as ours was unashamedly elitist: such subjects as plumbing and typing were taught in addition to the core curriculum. Just as underperforming children could be demoted from the grammar schools, so pupils in the secondary moderns could be promoted.
Perhaps the worst defect of this system was its reliance on the 11+, for which some comparatively gifted children were not, at that age, ready, and which (if exacerbated by ambitious parents) put intolerable pressure on the candidates. If you failed, you were perceived to be a failure, doomed to a lifetime of servitude - a palpable untruth, by the way, since many graduates of the secondary modern schools went on to become successful business-people earning far more than their grammar-school peers in the Civil Service, say.
The system's blatant meritocracy also offended on ideological grounds. In 1965, under a newly elected Labour government, its abolition began in earnest. Anthony Crosland, Harold Wilson's Secretary of State for Education and Science, is quoted by his wife as saying: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland". By 1970 my former school had been turned into a "comprehensive", admitting children of all abilities.
A debate has raged ever since about the destruction of the grammar schools. Some say that the socialists (many of whom themselves attended such schools) spitefully kicked the ladder away; that the abolition was part of a larger, Gramscian, and entirely successful, plan to dumb down the voters and make them more susceptible to propaganda and, by impoverishing their life chances as well, to make them ever more reliant on the state. Others say that the comprehensive system allows all children to flourish, not just the privileged few who happen to be able to pass an exam; that such inequality so early in life can lead only to a perpetuation of the class structure which is such a curse on Britain. The issue, as neatly as any other, divides left from right.
Waterhouse failed his 11+ and the experience scarred him for ever. Thanks to an inspirational teacher at his secondary modern, he did not give up his ambition to write, but the going was very hard, and it was not until the success of Billy Liar, published when he was thirty, that he was freed from poverty.
Yorkshire, the north of England generally, has a tradition of supporting the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. Coming as he did from a lowly background in the Labour stronghold of Leeds, it is not surprising that Waterhouse espoused left-wing views. These are on display in Billy Liar. Billy is contemptuous of the middle-class pretensions and capitalistic attitudes of Shadrack, his boss at the "funeral furnishers". Because Shadrack, a former car salesman, inherited his share of the firm on the death of his father, his position is seen as undeserved. When Billy's grandmother dies, he recommends that his mother enlist the Co-op (a socialist organization) rather than Shadrack. When Billy fantasizes about standing for Parliament, he unquestioningly casts himself in the role of Labour candidate. During Billy's daydreams about Ambrosia, his arch-enemy is categorized as the "reactionary" Dr Grover; and so on.
Yet, reading more closely, one detects something else at work. On almost every page we see that Billy is an individualist, a lone wolf who refuses to be bound by convention. His burning ambition is to be a scriptwriter: he has already submitted jokes to a famous comic in London, whose vague but encouraging response Billy tries to twist, in his own mind, into an offer of work. Billy and society are at odds. It is very hard to picture him living by the socialist creed.
Besides the two girls to whom he is engaged there is a third, Liz, a free spirit whom Billy genuinely loves. Each of the other two is a parody of the mindless voter for Labour or Conservative, but the enigmatic Liz is different. We do not know her politics, even though, in Ambrosia, she is cast as Billy's Home Secretary. She plays an increasingly important part in the story, becoming pivotal at the climax when Billy must decide between the adventure of London and staying at home in Stradhoughton.
After Billy Liar, Waterhouse actually lived Billy's dream and went on to great success as a journalist and writer for theatre, film and TV. In 1970 he joined the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror as a columnist and remained there until 1986, when that paper was bought by the fraudster and quondam Labour M.P., the late Robert Maxwell. In what might be seen as a surprising move, Waterhouse went to another mass-circulation daily, the rabidly rightist Daily Mail, where he remained for 23 years. To quote from his obituary in the Times:
By that time the tone and content of his columns had moved a long way from those of his early days on the Mirror. The socialist convictions nurtured by his upbringing in the industrial North had been sorely tried by the direction he felt the modern Labour Party was taking, and he came to see its years in Government from the famous electoral victory of 1997 as being rudderless and without conviction.
I used to read his column whenever I got the chance, for his use of language, for his wit and inventiveness, and for his wry point of view. Even before Tony Blair's victory of 1997, I was struck by what seemed a drift to the right. It is likely that Waterhouse and his many friends believed himself a socialist to the end, an adherent of old rather than New Labour, but I am not so sure.
The seeds of my doubt are in Billy Liar. As an employee, a member of the team, one of the collective, Billy is hopeless. He is late for work, idle, and accomplishes the minimum. He steals from the petty cash and, when tasked with sending out promotional calendars, dumps them and trousers the postage money. He has no respect for his family or anyone else except himself and Liz. These are hardly socialist virtues: yet they make a sort of vague prototype, however repressed and transmogrified, of the author himself.
I am not suggesting for a moment that Keith Waterhouse was ever like that in reality. It is the subconscious, contradictory portrait I find interesting: the portrait of someone who would be unlikely ever to vote at all; or, if he could be bothered to vote, it would certainly not be for Labour.
But then ... contradiction within contradiction: let me end with a quotation from the book itself.
The strange, poppy-like flowers seen nowhere else in the world were in full bloom in Ambrosia, or what was left of it. We had won the elections, and I was pressing forward with my visionary plan to build an entire city over the dunes on a gigantic wooden platform. The reactionary Dr Grover had got a commission set up to investigate me, but I knew for a fact that he had been bribed to put forward a rival plan for another city to the west, over the marshes. In the inner layers of No. 1 thinking, Grover got his way and the houses began to sink, seventy-one dead and fourteen unaccounted for. "We will rebuild," I announced in The Ambrosia Poppy. "We will build on the dunes."
17 December 2009
Fuzzy Computing
Fr xmpl, y r bl t mk sns, jst abt, f sntnc dprvd cmpltly f vwls. Your brain has filled in the gaps. It is helpful: it co-operates with an inexpert author in the business of communication. This is the way it has to be, or you would understand no more than a tiny proportion of the text you are presented with each day. If your mind operated like a silicon-based computer, it would baulk at the first misspelling or grammatical howler. An error message, or even a Blue Screen of Death, would be generated and that would be that.
I have long been a private collector of literalisms. These are a species of lexical, rather than optical, illusion. Capable of more than one interpretation, they confuse the mind -- or at least the mind of one who demands adherence to the rules.
I found the following pleasing headline in a local newspaper: TRADERS EXPRESS SQUARE FEARS. The story, obviously, was about the redevelopment of a shopping square, but I prefer the literal sense. Or what about this beauty, collected by that connoisseur, Mr Vladimir Nabokov, from an American paper? TORSO KILLER BEATS CHAIR.
Once you start to look out for them, literalisms are everywhere. My favourite might just be this, seen on a canister of bleach:
KEEP UPRIGHT IN A COOL SAFE PLACE WELL AWAY FROM CHILDREN
Literalism is the very substance of life for someone suffering from autism. Such a one, deficient in useful fuzziness, has great trouble dealing with the imprecision of others.
"The imprecision of others" includes the baggy language used by politicians, many of whom are lawyers, know exactly what they are saying, and rely on our innate decency and helpfulness to draw the wrong meaning from their words. Our fuzzy brains enable them to tell lies while apparently speaking the truth, to confess failure while apparently applauding their own success, and to promise nothing while assuring us that our expectations will be fulfilled.
This form of deception is analysed in George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language. Though published in 1946, it is even more relevant now. It also provides valuable advice for writers:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
Much bad writing is the product of laziness -- (i) and (iii); and of a wish to impress -- (ii), (iv), (v). Both these traits are lethal to the development of an authentic voice. The former earns the impatience of the reader, the second his contempt. He may not understand exactly why he finds a piece of writing turgid or preposterous; he just rejects it.
Orwell, with typical modesty, says that he himself frequently breaks his own rules. Any writer would have to be superhuman not to. Rather, he urges on us all, writers and readers, the need to analyse language, to develop the clarity of thought that only linguistic clarity can bestow. It is the most effective weapon against the lies of politicians.
Orwell belonged to the British left. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was an honourable man. He spoke out against Stalin, notably of course in Animal Farm, a book that the champagne socialist, Victor Gollancz, refused to publish.
What Orwell would have made of Tony Blair and New Labour, of Gordon Brown and the quagmire of deceit in which British politics is conducted today, is easy to imagine. His essay belongs in the survival kit of every modern citizen.
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