Wordhoard

This blog has now taken up residence over at http://wordhoard.ie 
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There's been a dispute on Twitter in Ireland about the hashtag #notinmyname. It's been used by a great many people who want to register their protest at the murder of PSNI officer Ronan Kerr who was killed by a car bomb in Omagh this weekend. 

Damien Mulley argued that '[using the] hashtag and asking for a RT [retweet] is as good as doing nothing about this. Imagine doing something tangible where you move away from your laptops [...] You know, the older generation, the blue rinse brigade would march and sign books at least.' The younger generation, meanwhile, prefer to 'click the Like button'. (@damienmulley)

I have sympathy with Mulley's case because it's perfectly possible for clicks and likes to become a substitute for the kinds of actions that might have political effects, but it's striking that the kinds of 'better' action he's calling for are themselves just other types of symbolic protest: the use of words on the pages of a condolences book, or the sounds of  feet on a street are not qualitatively different to the iterations of a hashtag on a computer screen. Only the condolences book survives to bring comfort, if not change, in the long term. Mulley writes that 'nobody is collecting the hashtags which are wiped from memory in two weeks anyway' but at our different removes from this Omagh atrocity most of our protests, whatever their form, won't prevent a few deluded men from seeing their actions as legitimate. Mulley's frustration with the limits of language is absolutely justified in the context of this vile murder, but it isn't Twitter's fault that we struggle to find language adequate to physical violence. 

Language and bodies struggle to get along: we use language to get ideas out of our bodies and so it is inevitably challenged by our attempts to communicate about our experiences of living and dying in them. That doesn't mean that it isn't worth speaking out to protest when violence occurs and I'm uncomfortable with the idea that there's any kind of public space, even the small corner of the internet peopled by Tweeters, where it is completely deprived of consequences.

There are plenty of young people in England and Ireland who use the language of Irish nationalism as if it means nothing. A Tweeter I like very much moved from Armagh to Liverpool recently and he reported back on his experience of watching the Ireland match in a pub where he had to listen to 'Ooh ah up the 'ra [IRA] every 2 mins Then the Saw Doctors on [the] jukebox for a solid hour.' (@ronymurf) That's the kind of recreational republicanism I grew up with in another English city where everyone I knew held on to a kind of cartoonish view of Northern Ireland politics and we'd go to see the Wolfe Tones on a night out long after we should have had the sense to stop. I remember my father, a placid man, raging with me not to go one night in 1990 because, he argued, there were consequences to listening to those rebel songs. It mattered, he said, if you acted like they were true or as if their sentiments didn't matter.

One day in the 1980s, a few men called to the small office in Coventry where he ran his building company and they asked him to make a donation to 'the cause'. They happened to mention, in passing, that they knew where his family lived and where his children went to school. They were just saying. My father said he would have nothing to do with them and sent them on their way, though for months afterwards he had panic attacks because of what they had 'just said'.

Of course, there is never any such thing as 'just saying.' Language always has effects and we can't set up a hierarchy of forms to pin down which kinds of language are effective and which aren't. The #notinmyname slogan wasn't invented for this crime. It's been used around the world in different campaigns to raise consciousness, and the actions or changes of heart it has provoked can't be accounted for. That doesn't mean they haven't occurred. Even when its effect is to produce an angry debate about what constitutes an appropriate response to violence, the hashtag is being productive and we have to use whatever we can, however paltry it might be, to bring about change. Leo Traynor commented last night that  'I was a peace activist in Belfast in the 80's. No laptops, twibbons or hashtags. We'd have been glad of them. Anything to make a statement.' (@Leo_Traynor) Words can fail to mean as much as we'd like them to, but they never mean nothing.

While the debate about #notinmyname is going on, another set of words has come to mean too much.  The phrase 'Omagh bombing' was already overdetermined. None of us had room for it to have its remit expanded. It was a linguistic scar that ached each time we came across it and we, none of us, wanted it to be opened up and made to accommodate more violence and sorrow. A hashtag can't do enough to give testimony to our sorrow and anger about all of this but it isn't meaningless. It's in the hashtag's very failure - in the breach between what it says and what it fails to do - that the spur to political action exists.

In recent times, Sarah Palin has been happy to use the rhetoric of gun ownership to mobilise her conservative political base yet in the wake of the terrible attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Palin has quickly tidied away evidence of that loaded language. This tweet no longer exists on @SarahPalinUSA's profile:  

She was right to expect uproar about it. We already know that words, films and cartoons - all speech acts in one form or another - are likely to get called to the dock if they're in the vicinity of one person inflicting violence on the body of another. The main witness against words is always hindsight. 

Now, I disagree with Palin's politics and her grammar but she was working on tried and tested marketing principles when she used the language of gun ownership and the imagery of a new American frontier to appeal to people who had already chosen to enhance their lives by becoming her Twitter followers. Her tweet is calling people to action, no doubt, but if you read it and obediently redirect your browser towards her Facebook page you're statistically more likely to end up, ten minutes later, grinning back at pictures of your nephews than you are to take up arms and head out onto the street to take out a Democrat. Still, we're uneasy. Even before the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, Twitter was buzzing with disquiet about Palin's use of the language of guns and conquest to persuade people to join in with the mundane, foot-wearying work of a political campaign.  

It's not every day that Palin gets thought about in relation to W. B. Yeats, but Yeats had his own moment of anguish about words and violence. After the Easter Rising in 1916, he worried that his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), had provoked men to take up arms for Ireland and ultimately lose their lives: over twenty years later he was still agonising about it in 'Man and the Echo' when he asked, 'Did that play of mine send out, / Certain men the English shot?' ' Paul Muldoon is dismissive: 'the answer is "Certainly Not."' / If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead / Would certain men have stayed in bed?' ('7, Middagh Street'). For Muldoon, the relationship between what's said and what happens is a 'twisted root' and so it can never be right to say that fighting talk has a causal relationship with violence.

The problem for Palin though is that words do have effects, and you can't just deny the existence of the ones you don't like. She should rethink her gun talk, whether or not today's shooter turns out to have been inspired by her rhetoric. I'd have her read Sean O'Casey's play, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), written when the Easter Rising was finished and the love affair between Irish writers and political activists was at an end. In O'Casey's play, a writer, Donal Davoren, lets Minnie Power believe that he is involved in political violence. He tells her casually that a gunman learns 'to throw a bomb as carelessly as a schoolboy throws a snowball' and his easy words help her to fall in love with him: 'What danger', he asks himself, 'can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?' But when she is shot dead in the complicated aftermath of their flirtation, he realises that his words were complicit and he berates himself: 'Oh, Donal Davoren, shame is your portion ... poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet!' 

O'Casey was writing in a society where the right to possess and fire a gun seemed, for a moment, to be a birthright and a way of claiming a future that was rightfully yours but O'Casey refused to glamourise that idea and, crucially, he also refused to glamourise gun talk. Reading his play might teach Sarah Palin that when you mention guns in a call to action, you can never predict the effects your words will produce. 

The biggest thrill about reading as a child is the endless discovery of new words.

When I was small I consumed books at such a rate that only the details of my very favourite ones - The Silver Sword, Carrie's War, Flambards and the novels of Noel Streatfield - stayed with me. But long after the other stories had faded from my mind, my pockets were still full of the most jewel-like, nubbly and unusual words I had come across. I rarely knew what they actually meant, still less how they ought to be pronounced. I just liked the music of them and fired them into school work and conversation wherever I thought they'd sound best. 

Much later, when I was teaching students recruited into Higher Education under the bland banner of the 'Widening Participation' agenda, I recognised the most voracious readers among them by the fact that they too threw words around that they'd never heard spoken aloud. I hate snobbery about mis-pronunciation when it's the small price that book-taught wordhoarders pay for the great treasures they amass. 

On the snowy afternoons we've had this winter, and just before bedtimes, I've been reading the Chronicles of Narnia to my two eldest children. Many of the words we've come across - precipice, cataract, gorge - have had to be clambered over or read in a 'don't look down' kind of way. As the Pevensies try to pick a trail through a treacherous landscape in Prince Caspian, my eldest two, aged seven and four, cling on for dear life to the thread of their tale. They listen avidly, sentence after intricate sentence, and they'd be hard put to tell you what a good fifth of the words mean, but it doesn't matter. They love the sound and the grandeur of all those mysterious syllables.

C. S. Lewis isn't talking down to his readers. He makes concessions where it matters. Acutely sensitive to how much of a story young readers can absorb, his narrator stops often to ask them how they're getting on or to tell them which bits of the story don't signify in the long run. The children in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the storyteller too, are dismissive of Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a boy who knows what assonance means: '"Don't ask him what an assy-thingummy is," said Edmund. "He's only longing to be asked. Say nothing and perhaps he'll go away."' Still, an appetite for new words is a condition of entry into Narnia. Just before the Pevensie children fall through a picture frame, Lewis makes this clear in a quick aside, pausing as he describes the Narnian ship they're about to board:

She was obviously running fast before a gay wind, listing over a little on her port side. (By the way, if you are going to read this story at all, and if you don't know already, you had better get it into your head that the left of a ship when you are looking ahead, is port, and the right is, starboard.)

It's not just 'port' and 'starboard' the reader has to grasp here, of course, though my children duly chanted each word a few times with much illustrative arm-waving. The child reading, or being read to, may pause to consider why a ship is a 'she', wonder what on earth it means for a ship to run, or picture - for a fleeting second - a shopping list. They might neglect the next sentence while they're doing that thinking, or, instead, sail on regardless, like the Dawn Treader herself, into uncharted waters (All books are stories about reading after all).

None of that, I say again, matters. The High King, Peter, knows that sometimes words are wonderful just for the sound of them. When he dictates a letter to an enemy before a major battle he insists on the inclusion of the word '"abhominable, - don't forget to spell it with an H"'. Trumpkin, the noble dwarf, uses words for the noise they make too and his exclamation, 'Lobsters and lollipops!', has entered into the language of our home for a spell at least. The duo here have been calling a small Playmobil horse-cart a 'bridle' all week and it seems a shame to take the word off them because they're not using it the way I might. 

My son brings home from school colour-coded books, each one carefully targeted to his reading age. His teacher is cautious about exposing him to the horrors of silent 'ks' and 'ghs'. That kind of hand-held introduction to reading is fine in lots of ways but I suspect it makes parents wary about exposing children to the vertiginous pleasures of unfamiliar words. We shouldn't worry. The Pevensie children - Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy - always start off in places where children turn to books. From unused bedrooms, and public benches, they fall into imaginary realms and there they find strength and authority enough to face every kind of challenge that new words and worlds have to offer them. 

After a summer on the move, I'm finally writing at a desk, typing on a laptop linked to a whizzy broadband connection. I'm looking out at our local heron who is directing his impenetrable gaze at the trees behind our house. All very restful and calming it is too. It hasn't been this simple in a long while though. I moved an hour's drive further west while our house was being renovated and - past Bantry where I'm based - good internet access in West Cork is hard to find.

I've used the internet ...
 
1) In the corner of a small supermarket, while minding a two-year-old who alternated between swinging on the spare office chair, launching raids on the biscuit aisle and weeping piteously. 

2) On a dongle in Dingle in a tent. This made me and my four-year-old daughter laugh for ages, but then my husband accidentally drained the dongle's credit by trying to watch real comedians at work on YouTube. (I know Dingle isn't in West Cork, by the way.)

3) Balanced on the most westerly windowsill of our borrowed house, draped in curtains like Salomé dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils to keep the sun off the screen. 

4) Standing behind the bar in a pub. The pub had Eircom wifi but, of course, it wasn't working on the day I needed it most and I was rescued by the owner who kindly let me use his computer by the till. I worked away like a mad thing while unhelpful friends emailed in drinks orders and I fought the urge to raid the optics.   

I've hummed and hawed about whether to blog on this. These kinds of stories can so easily be hijacked to confirm lazy stereotypes about Ireland and the Irish. Other countries struggle to get decent broadband services out to mountainous areas too, and it isn't as if we can't deal with high-end technology: by 2000, Ireland was the largest exporter of computer software in the world, Dublin hosts Google's European headquarters and Microsoft has been here since 1985 when the government took a punt on the future of technology in the teeth of a recession.

Isn't this picture brilliant? It popped up the other day on Rapture Ponies, an Irish blog curated by Cait who has a keen eye for 'things that are shiny'. I love hoarding here too, of course, and I find it hard to accept that pencil stubs aren't useful. It turns out that Dalton Ghetti knows what to do with them. He's fighting the good fight against the keyboard's importance and making pencils matter at precisely the moment when they seem to have lost their point.

Ghetti's alphabet hints that a pencil is always brimful with potential and untapped meaning. Pencils don't need to be rebooted or updated. They're compatible with Basildon Bond, A4, the corners of gas bills and the backs of torn envelopes. And there is always a pencil within six feet of you if you look hard enough. We type more and more, but our pencils persist. I'll bet that pens and pencils are the only tools you use regularly that have marked a permanent groove on your body. (If there are more in your particular case, I don't think I want to know ...) 

Isn't it odd though that these pencils, transformed into small sculptures, are far more likely to survive than the things they were used to write? At a time when our Facebook and Twitter updates are being stored electronically for posterity, the hand-written draft, bejewelled with doodles, is a last haven for the half-baked idea. I'd put money on the fact that when you think of pencil work you picture someone scrunching paper up and firing it into a bin. That's no bad thing. A draft is only a draft and long after an idea's first version has returned as a soup carton, lit the fire or taken flight as a paper aeroplane, it can emerge shorn of its imperfections and work better than that early version would have done.  

While it's tempting  to write on the flickering screen and press 'send' in haste, a humbling encounter with a pencil and that tiny rubber on the end can go a long way towards helping you find and sharpen your point.

We've spent the summer trying to decide what should go inside the extension we've built, so, I''ve read a lot of product catalogues, skimmed a lot of websites and given whole evenings up to looking for a cloakroom sink that represents this house and our life in it. Is that even possible? I don't know. It's all been made tricky because I can't retain a visual image in my head for more than about forty seconds. By the time I look at sink five, sinks one to four have sunk without trace.

Still, though the pictures go, the names stick with me. And there are an awful lot of different names out there for things that are fundamentally the same. When I think of grey – the word I naively presumed would do to describe a floor and a worktop – gris, gray, flint, smoke and stone shimmy up for attention. Sometimes they're alone, but mostly they're on the arm of a stylish modifier. In the last twelve weeks, I've seen more objects named after Milan than could possibly fit into the city itself.

My husband has a great eye for colour. Not a cliché that: he only has one eye for colour because the other one just sees shapes. Anyway, he worries that these shades might not match. I'm more concerned that the names will clash. What if my Bronte worktop is uneasy above my Metropolitan Berlino tiles? Surely the Brontës would be happier with some slate? Charlotte and Emily got as far as Brussels to learn French and German, so the language issue wouldn't be a problem. It must be the metropolitan thing that's out of line. I bet the decadence of the pre-war city I'm thinking of would make them say goodbye to Berlin. If I change the Brontë to their racy brother, Patrick Bramwell, I can just about make it work, though I doubt he'd have been much cop at rustling up lunch.

His sisters weren't above a bit of kitchen graft: Emily comments in her diary that 'Anne and I have been peeling apples for Charlotte to make an apple pudding.' As she writes, Taby, their maid, calls out 'come Anne pillopuate' [peel a potato]' and when their aunt walks into the kitchen and asks her teenage niece, the future author of Agnes Grey, 'Where are your feet Anne?', Emily notes down her dry answer: 'On the floor Aunt.' There's a touch of flint there, all right.

The chaos and the decision-making here is nearly finished, thank God. And whatever its Brontë credentials, I should at least be glad my new counter is branded as a 'solid surface'. After all the hard work we've done, I'd hate for my kettle and toaster to disappear without trace.

 'Fancy a beverage?'
'No, I'm alright. I had a beverage earlier. I'll leave it, thanks.'

This isn't a conversation we have much around here. That's because we like to use the word 'drink'.  'Drink' is an excellent word. I take a drink, I drink the drink and I'm no longer thirsty. The word 'drink' does its thing quietly and well. So I was a bit surprised to see this sign in my local supermarket.

I'm guessing that no-one goes into Bantry's Supervalu with the word 'beverage' in mind. A simple offer of tea, coffee, or any hot drink for €1 would hit the spot. So, what moved the writer to present us with a 'beverage'? I'm guessing he sat down in front of a computer, opened the Supervalu poster template and, with every best intention, tried nervously to impress his boss.

When people ask you to write something and you're anxious about what they'll think, it's very easy to overdress your words. When you know a wider audience will read it, it's worse again. You don't want to make it sound too simple in case it seems as if you don't care. You use formal language to show your readers that you've put effort in, and, while you're concentrating on being impressive, your message gets lost.

Now, there's no harm in putting particularly lovely, or obscure, words out there. It would be wrong to strip language down to its basic functions all the time. We drink as a basic human need, and because we do it a lot, it's right that words cluster around it. We need tay, char and a brew, sodas, minerals and pop to keep the fizz in what we've got to say. But we shouldn't disregard simple words just because they are plain. 

'Drink' fails to flummox five year olds. It has no airs and graces. It lacks the formality and raddled glamour of 'beverage'. But, do you know what? It does its job beautifully.

Beverage, on the other hand, is stuffy and overblown. It's a word that should only be let out in the company of its nursemaid, 'industry'. Even then, it should be restricted to walking the formal lawns of end-of-year financial reports. Perhaps we could sell it off to Diageo or Schweppes so it could see out its days as a museum piece, a verbal relic of times when people drank things with more syllables in them. 

Right now, for ourselves, we should take courage and stick to drink.

I sat down with a young student on Thursday to help her prepare for her Leaving Certificate poetry exam later that afternoon. Radio pundits had said that W. B. Yeats was a dead cert to put in an appearance so we decided to take a punt on him even though he has a reputation as a tricky exam prospect.  

Part of the problem lies with Yeats himself. From the 1880s to the late 1930s he bestrode Irish life as a poet, dramatist, essayist and public figure and that makes him an awkward fit for a short essay. There are an extraordinary amount of facts you might want to share about him. On top of that, his poems themselves are often full of complex imagery and ideas. One poem we read, 'Sailing to Byzantium', was so littered with mackerel, tattered coats and mosaics that my fledgling reader was at a loss to find anything confident to say about it. 

When we're afraid of sounding like we know nothing, we tend to be quiet or talk too much. We start to sound strained and formal, and in trying to sound 'right' we lose the thread of our own thoughts. My friend had become too intimidated to respond.

Yeats himself could be a clear, and engaging, speaker. When he objected to riots about J. M. Synge's play, The Playboy of the Western World (1907), he got up on stage in Dublin's Abbey Theatre and told the unhappy crowds that they were wrong. If I ring my friend in twenty years time and ask her for one line of poetry from her Leaving Cert days I'd wager everything on her replying with Yeats' line: 'I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree'. In the beautiful late poem 'The Wild Swans at Coole', his poetry achieves a stillness and simplicity that is breathtaking: 

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky; 

 

He was still scaring this young woman though, and, with hours to go before the exam, I could only try to give her some confidence in her own abilities. Oddly enough the cue was there in the tricky poem, 'Sailing to Byzantium' when Yeats, daunted by his own old age, commands his soul to 'clap its hands and sing and louder sing.'

We grabbed the line and repeated it again and again as we talked. Whatever it had meant to Yeats, for this student it became a clear instruction. She was going to go into the exam and grab the question with both hands. She was going to address her examiner in a clear and confident, distinctive voice. With the quotations she had learned as a kind of safety net, she would make big, bold claims about Yeats to get her point across.

I taught in Higher Education for a long time and it has always struck me that we don't spend enough time, in Europe at least, helping each person to find their own powerful voice. I can think of ten people off the top of my head who have fantastic ideas and wonderful things to say yet they freeze when they need to use their voices in a formal setting. This is my passionate cause: I want everyone to feel they can say things powerfully for themselves.

So I say to you - ranting like Yeats on the stage - feel the fear and do it any way, talk out loud in your own voice, unlock your wordhoard: 'Clap your hands and sing.'