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image“Never ruin an apology with an excuse”

Benjamin Franklin

I have been corrected regarding a lexical matter by a much valued Canadian reader who is also a very dear friend of ours and – in particular – of the Kickass Canada Girl.

Our correspondent correctly points out my repeated – nay, habitual – misuse in these posts of the word ‘peninsular‘ for ‘peninsula‘.

She is – of course – absolutely right!

The Oxford English Dictionary gives us this:

“The spelling of the noun as peninsular instead of peninsula is a common mistake. The spelling peninsula should be used when a noun is intended ( the end of the Cape Peninsula), whereas peninsular is the spelling of the adjective ( the peninsular part of Malaysia).”

Since my usage of the term is normally as an abbreviation for the Saanich Peninsula‘ the spelling should clearly be that for a noun. The fact that the OED offers in mitigation that this be a ‘common‘ mistake is absolutely no comfort whatsoever. In a blog which prides itself on its enthusiasm for language (if not for its learning) there can be no excuse for such sloppiness.

I am only mildly surprised that my error had not already been pointed out to me by someone from my educational background, given what sticklers they are for accuracy. When I started at my penultimate school I had – as an early task – to write a five year IT plan for the governors (known there as the Fellows) in justification for the really quite considerable sums of money that we were proposing to spend on infrastructure. After a couple of weeks hard work I presented for comments to my boss – the Director of Studies – what had by then grown into quite a volume. He ignored the content entirely but corrected a couple of instances of contentious punctuation. ‘The Fellows‘ – he observed – ‘would notice such things‘.

With regard to my Canadian orthographist I did wonder whether I should argue the toss on the matter, noting such oddities as the legend that I spotted on the back of a local youth’s sports’ apparel which read “Peninsula Soccer” (is that not strictly an adjective, mayhap?) before deciding that such a course of action would simply be somewhat graceless and instead offering my humble apologies, congratulating my tutor on her perspicacity and promising not to do it again.

 

My brother – incidentally – who is currently designing us a new kitchen (a task only marginally complicated by his being resident in the UK) has replicated in his scheme a feature of the current kitchen… a peninsula!

He won’t thank me for pointing this out, but guess how he spells it…

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Image by Scott ClarkHerewith a couple of items that came to my attention over the weekend – and that I couldn’t resist sharing…

This image – brought to our notice by our dear friends in Saanichton – is part of a strip entitled ‘Grammar Pirates‘. The full strip – which can be found here – is the work of Scott Clark and can be found on his rather wonderful blog – ‘Kind of Sketchy‘.

Those who know me well will be all too aware of why I find the notion of ‘Grammar Pirates’ totally irresistable… grammar – word-play – paronomasia (look it up!)… and pirates!! What’s not to like?!

 

I found this in the magazine of The Observer – my Sunday read of choice. Their regular brief interview column – ‘This much I know‘ (which is subtitled ‘Famous faces share their life lessons‘) features a selection of edifying – and frequently humorous – ‘sound-bites’ from the well known.

This week’s contributor was the Scottish actor Brian Cox – now in his late sixties. He recalled working with Olivier:

‘Sir Laurence Olivier was quite elderly and frail when I worked with him. But he was a fox – he would wrong-foot people. I remember him forgetting his lines on set and saying, “Did anybody see Michael Hordern as King Lear? He knew all his lines. But I’m still a better fucking actor than he is.”‘

Priceless!

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Photo by Andy Dawson ReidI was intrigued by this item in The Tyee on the recent re-naming of Mount Douglas as ‘PKOLS’. For non-Canadians ‘Mount Doug’ (as it is commonly known) is on the east side of the Saanich peninsular to the north of Victoria and was the site on which – in 1852 – the then governor of Vancouver Island – James Douglas – negotiated a treaty understood to be a promise to the WSÁNEĆ people that they would not be interfered with. PKOLS is held by the WSÁNEĆ nation to be the mountain’s original and true name.

As is seemingly inevitable in this enlightened day and age the article attracted the usual brief storm of comments expressing opinions both in favour of and against the unilateral action that had been taken. This comment in particular caused me to raise an eyebrow:

“History should be respected, whether liked or not, and not appropriated by every group with a new agenda.”

This by way of reference – not as I thought first to the colonial appropriation of a First Nations landmark – but rather to the recent reclamation thereof by the WSÁNEĆ nation. Unless – by chance – the comment was intended to be humorously ironic, then it truly missed the point in spectacular fashion.

All of which cultural imperialism puts me in mind of the Irish playwright, Brian Friel’s, masterpiece – ‘Translations’.

For those who have not seen (or indeed read) this splendid play, the context is that of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland carried out during the 1830s – a process that involved mapping, renaming and anglicising Ireland, of which the British were at the time – of course – the occupiers. A good explanation of the historical context of the piece can be found here.

Friel claimed that – though the political was impossible to avoid completely – his subject was not the situation in Ireland per se, but that this was “a play about language and only about language”. His interests are in the nature of communication – and the difficulties thereof – between peoples and races.

The play has – at its centre – a quite startling conceit, of the sort that marks out a playwright as belonging to the highest echelons of his profession. The Irish villagers speak only Gaelic and do not understand English. The British Army officers conducting the survey have – naturally – no Gaelic. Neither side can understand the other. The entire cast – however – perform throughout in English! The audience must decide for themselves which language is being spoken at any point. This unexpected inversion only serves to highlight the cultural chasm between the two sides, an inability to communicate that has – almost inevitably – tragic consequences.

Friel’s piece rightly offers no easy answers. It does – however – offer insight into the effects of such cultural colonisation. Insistence on strict maintenance of a native language as a pure act of defiance runs the risk of that language ossifying and become inert. Should that happen the culture that is based upon it will die as surely as had the coloniser set out to destroy it. Language must live and evolve if the culture itself is not simply to become a museum piece – even should that require the assimilation of an alien tongue.

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Facebook_like_thumbSitting in the cafe at Bath Spa the Sunday before last indulging ourselves in a spot of post-detox lunch (one feels so much more virtuous entertaining a large glass of something white, crisp and chilled when one has just purged oneself for an hour or so in the sultry muculence of the steam rooms!) – the Kickass Canada Girl and I found ourselves sharing the ambience with the group at the next table. We had little choice in the matter since the table in question was occupied by a gaggle of raucous teenage girls!

I suppose it is an established fact that the majority of those who avail themselves of the facilities offered by these temples to the body beautiful are members of the gentler sex. This has certainly been my observation, and at Bath last week there did seem to be a preponderance both of groups of ladies of a certain age – doubtless on other occasions to be found lunching – and of throngs of turbulent teenagers. The Girl offered some pithy thoughts as to why these young shemales might feel the need to be quite so strident but I can’t really repeat them here for reasons of propriety.

Given that it was impossible to avoid overhearing the ‘conversation’ (though it is doubtful that such verbal exhibitionism could ever really be construed as an ‘informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words’ – as the definition has it) I found myself somewhat bemused by what was actually being said. Though the group as a whole seemed only too eager to demonstrate their linguistic limitations, the loudest of the three – the one sitting closest to us, naturally – appeared also to be trying to displace the definite article from its preeminence in the lexicon to be replaced by that which – according to a study by the OED of the Oxford English Corpus – is ranked no higher than fifty fourth.

I refer – of course – to the word – ‘like‘!

The dictionary definition of ‘like‘ runs thus:

      – of the same form, appearance, kind, character, amount, etc.

The Urban Dictionary adds these alternatives:

      – a term used by many junior high and high school students for having a crush.

      – in some teenage girls, a word spoken in between other words in a sentence.

      – the same as “said” or “spoke”.

The first is obvious. An example of the second might be:

      “Like, oh my God, that is, like, so wrong.”

…and the third:

      “So I was like, ‘duuuude’ and he was all ‘baaaabe’.”

Now – listening to someone inserting ‘like‘ between every third or fourth word in a sentence may set the teeth on edge in much the same way as does being subjected to the sound of fingernails on a blackboard – or indeed to the Brummie accent* – but nothing raises my hackles quite as effectively as this latter substitution. If one really must find an alternative to “said” – and is not prepared to do without it entirely – then the InterWebNet will happily furnish some hundreds of possible alternatives. None of them is – ‘was like‘!!

What I find most puzzling, however – given that these self-regarding youths undoubtedly pick up such linguistic tics from their favourite Hollywood movies or TV shows – is that they should have fixated on a meme that is getting on for a decade old.

I didn’t think that Bath was that far from the capital!

 

* Apologoys ter brummoys fer anny offence. Cor resist a cheap gag!

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theI was perusing some old posts on this blog… Yes – I know! – I know! – but I wanted to revisit some of the thoughts I had this time last year – at the point at which the Kickass Canada Girl departed for Victoria. One of the many benefits of maintaining a blog – of course – is that I can do so.

An idle comparison of my posts at that time with those more recent revealed something that I hadn’t anticipated – something regarding the way that I address my (considerably) better half. In early posts she is addressed directly as ‘Kickass Canada Girl’. In more recent posts she has become ‘The Kickass Canada Girl’.

Intrigued, I was moved to wonder at what point – and indeed as to why – this change had come about. Closer examination of archived posts revealed that it had happened over a fairly short period at the end of last year – in late November and December. This was – of course – around the time that the Girl returned to the UK.

The pursuit of the ‘why’ led me to consider more closely the ‘article’ itself. The British Council website includes the following in its helpful definition:

definite article: the

The definite article ‘the’ is the most frequent word in English.

We use the definite article in front of a noun when we believe the hearer/reader knows exactly what we are referring to:

  • because there is only one – as in “The moon is very bright tonight”

…or…

  • because we have already mentioned it – as in “A woman who fell 10 metres from High Peak was lifted to safety by a helicopter. The woman fell while climbing.”

I hardly need say more. Kickass Canada Girl has become The Kickass Canada Girl because she is definitely the only one – and because I believe that I have mentioned her previously… at least once or twice!

I like it – and thus so it shall remain. The Girl is the definite – and definitive- article!

 

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There are a very few films that – no matter how many times I have seen them – if they are on TV I will watch them again. One such is ‘Field of Dreams’. It was showing here in the UK this very afternoon on Freesat, and – yes – I watched it again.

Now – many things could be said about this film. It has been described as a ‘male weepie’ and it is certainly true that it is sentimental (whilst yet avoiding sentimentality) – which in my book is no bad thing. Certainly it makes me blubb like a baby, but I don’t mind that. In fact, to me, the opportunity and ability to blubb like a baby is of considerable import.

The film is also a fantasy that – whilst it does contain, in an almost mythical sense, much truth about our existence – could be considered slight and, perhaps, almost frivolous in the light of harsh reality. That would, in my view, diminish the mythical and thus be a mistake. I will write at greater length about the need for mythologies – of all sorts – on another occasion. Needless to say there is a good reason why films such as this touch a particularly deep nerve whilst in themselves appearing relatively shallow.

The real reason, however, that I can watch ‘Field of Dreams’ over and over again – almost purring with pleasure as I do so – is the sheer quality of Phil Alden Robinson’s screenplay, based as it is on the novel ‘Shoeless Joe’ by W.P. Kinsella. Not only is the script a splendid example of classical screenplay structure, but it is also a perfect illustration of that philosophical oxymoron – less is more! There is barely a single wasted word or spurious notion. The audience is recogised for the intelligent adults that they doubtless are and all impulses to over-explain or to patronise are resisted manfully.

Here is a tiny example:

 

Ray: Anyway, when I was seventeen we had a big fight, I packed my things, said something awful and left. After a while I wanted to come home, but didn’t know how. I made it back for the funeral.

Mann: What was the awful thing you said?

Ray: I said I could never respect a man whose hero was a criminal.

Mann:  Who was his hero?

Ray:  Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Mann considers this all very carefully.

Mann:  You knew he wasn’t a criminal?

Ray nods.

Mann:  Then why’d you say it?

Ray:  I was seventeen.

 

Put the blue crayon back in the pencilbox. Nothing to see here!

 

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The more astute reader will probably have figured out by now that I work in a school (those who know me will, of course, be well aware of the fact). Now, this is not – it has to be said – just any school. It has a full scale IT Department for one thing (of which I am the director), which should give some idea as to the nature of the establishment. In addition to my managerial and technical duties I also teach drama. This rather unusual mixture is – it need hardly be said – the result of my somewhat eclectic background.

The other day I was talking to the School’s Librarian in the Common Room. She has two sub-librarians who are both also of the fairer sex, a situation apparently not uncommon in their profession. Standing nearby as we talked were two other women – one of our history teachers and a young American graduate who is in the UK for a year on one of the School’s fellowship programmes.

The Librarian and I were discussing the replacement of the software that runs the library catalogue, which upgrade is planned for later this year. I suggested that she and the other ‘ladies’ would know more once they had seen some of the potential alternative systems in action in other schools.

At this point the history teacher interrupted us, politely but firmly, to take me to task for what I had said. I was nonplussed – and expressed same. She explained that I should not have used the term – ‘ladies’. No more ‘plussed’ I inquired as to why this should be so – to be informed that the term is now considered pejorative.

Naturally I apologised for any offence that I might have caused, however inadvertently, and made clear that I had not intended to disparage or condescend in any way. Those who know me would hopefully agree that I have always behaved in the enlightened manner of what was once called the ‘new man’, and have the greatest respect for those of the opposite gender.

I explained that, for me, the terms ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ have altogether different meanings. I address my staff – who are predominantly male – as ‘gentlemen’ (that I do not do similarly for the sole woman on my team is because neither ‘ladies’ nor ‘gentlemen’ take the singular – at least not in England!), and I do likewise to the boys in my classes – this latter because my fervent hope is that, if they are not already young gentlemen, they will become so by the culmination of their education.

I am not sure that my protestations entirely convinced. I find it somewhat sad that terms that I have always considered a mark of respect should now have gained other connotations. Language is, of course, as much defined by the understanding of the listener as by the intent of the speaker, and it is incumbent on both parties jointly to achieve consensus as to meaning. I fear that all too often this part of the deal is neglected and offence given – or taken – where none is intended.

I would be most interested to hear others’ views on the matter.

 

I had subsequently an interesting conversation with the American fellow. She told me that she been made much more aware of issues related to sexism since coming to the UK than she had previously been in the US. She was somewhat taken aback by men performing what we might consider acts of politeness – holding doors open and so forth – but even more so that these same men were less able to accept similar in return. She described instances in which she had held open one half of double doors for a man, only to see him push through the other half for himself.

Bizarre!

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