Crikey. I just came across something I posted 18 years ago, when I’d just joined Twitter, which was so new I had to explain what it was. I called it
one of those sites that balances precariously on that narrow rail between “Zeitgeist-defining” and “stupid”. The deal is that users simply key what they are doing righthererightnow into a box, and then see what everyone else is doing at the same time.
and then compared it to an episode of Torchwood. Ah, such happy, innocent days.
Several points arising from the tale of Rev Dr Paul Chamberlain, who apparently brought a group of schoolchildren to tears when he told them that Santa’s not real and their parents eat the biscuits supposedly left for him. The first and most obvious is how easy it is for devotees of one myth to brusquely dismiss another. How would the reverend gentleman react if someone else told the children that Santa is real, but Jesus is just a fairy story to make people behave themselves?
Also, when I saw the headlines, I assumed the traumatised kids were five at most. In fact, they were all in Year 6, which makes them 10 or 11 years old. And they’re still shocked by the revelation that Santa is a fraud? Isn’t that a bit weird?
I ruddy love footnotes, I do, and have been told off by more than one editor for using too many of them. Apparently their presence disturbs readers, presumably because it reminds them that for every book they do read, there are several hundred more waiting round the corner to ambush them. Which to me would be a lovely feeling, but what do I know?
That said, I do share the frustration of absolutely knowing something’s true and yet not being able to find a reference to validate it. Which is why I love this passage:
I have in my head an assertion that a friend once told me was written by Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic and exemplary listener-describer. The assertion was that there were only two absolute virtuoso figures in jazz: Sarah Vaughan and Art Tatum. When did Balliett write it? I can’t say. Neither can I be sure that he did write it. Once you get inside a writer’s voice, you can imagine things he didn’t actually write. Once I troubled Whitney, in his old age, about a phrase of his I swore I had read — something about Lester Young playing “wheaty” notes. He said it sounded possible, and went to look it up. He searched for a couple days and came up-handed. I might have dreamed it.
Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. 81.
The sanctity or otherwise of an author’s intentions always offers something to chew over. I do sympathise with Beckett’s exasperation over the critical tendency to see theology at work in his most popular play: “If I had meant it to be about God,” he’s said to have snapped, “I’d have called it Waiting for God.” But at the same time I lean towards Barthes’ assertion that the Author (himself included) is dead the moment he types the final full-stop, and it’s down to the mere civilians who are his readers to write and rewrite and bestow meaning. If I think it’s about God then, in my head at least, it is about God, whatever Beckett thinks.
How then do we respond to Victor Willis’s announcement that the song ‘YMCA’, for which he provided the lyrics, is not gay at all, oh no, it certainly isn’t, despite the fact that it was all I could do to stop myself from referring not to “the song ‘YMCA’” but to “the gay anthem ‘YMCA’” mainly because for decades it’s been a gay anthem, for gays, about gay stuff? But Mr Willis, who, and I ought to make this very clear indeed, IS NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST BIT GAY IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD, has announced that in fact the song isn’t gay either, and the bit about hanging out with all the boys is about black straight male bonding and not gays doing gay things, at the YMCA or anywhere else. And in fact, from next month, if anyone says that ‘YMCA’ is even the slightest bit gay, Willis’s wife, who is a female lady, with proper lady bosoms and stuff, because Victor’s NOT GAY, will sue them with all the heterolegal fury she can bring to bear and with the blessing of her exceedingly not-gay husband.
But he’s OK with Donald Trump (also not gay – have you seen him dance?) using the song at his own not-gay rallies and ensuring lots of similarly straight dollars entering Willis’s lady-snogging bank account. Because neither of them is gay, nor is the song, nor are any of the Village People, including the one with the big moustache, nor is or was anything ever gay. Got that? NOT. GAY.
PS: The Streisand effect.
PPS: Hamlet, Act III, scene ii, line 221.
PPPS: Some other songs that have been misinterpreted, albeit not by their authors.
(Slowly realising that if I do ever write my book about What We Do And Don’t Need To Know And Why, it’ll be for the most part anecdotal and solipsistic, something akin to Perec’s Je me souviens, and what’s wrong with that?)
Jude Law was being interviewed on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House yesterday, plugging his latest, rather grim-sounding movie, which is clearly yet another attempt to break away from his pretty-boy image. Unfortunately, Paddy O’Connell chose that moment to bring up the seasonal romcom The Holiday, which he loves and, according to the bantery exchange they had to plug the lunchtime news, so does his BBC colleague Johnny Dymond.
Which gave me a slightly odd feeling as I sipped my Sunday morning coffee, as I realised I’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. And as Paddy and Jonny oohed and aahed about the doubtless hilarious and/or heartwarming goings-on, and Jude just sounded embarrassed, I wondered whether the whole thing was some sort of arch postmodern joke, “quick, let’s invent a movie and make Tim wonder how he missed it” but no, I Googled it, it’s real, it’s packed with people I recognise, whose work I’ve enjoyed elsewhere but... no. Nothing. No bells rung. Except that the casual way they discussed it, with no scaffolding, no context, implied that I really should know and that I’m somehow culturally deficient by not knowing, like someone who appears on a quiz show and gets castigated on social media for not having heard of Hamlet or Buenos Aires or nitrogen or artichokes.
Normal service was resumed later in the day, during an amiable TV show involving the unlikely duo of Bill Bailey and Shaun Ryder ambling through the Somerset countryside, when a pub landlord mentioned that Henry VIII was rumoured to have stayed at his establishment, “during the disillusionment of the monasteries” and I laughed and then wondered how many other people I know might get the (inadvertent?) joke. Indeed, how many people reading this?
PS: In news that may or may not be relevant, the Oxford word of the year is “brain rot”.
The University of Sydney (alma mater of such awkward squad stalwarts as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James) has been grappling with the issue of how to reconcile people’s right to speak about stuff that annoys them, with the right of people not to be annoyed by that speaking. To this end, they have commissioned an external review that makes a number of recommendations, most of them eminently coherent and sensible, and this one:
The University should amend its policies and procedures to make clear that each person utilising a word or phrase is responsible at the time the word or phrase is used to identify to the audience the context in which it is used. (New Civility Rule)
Um, er, OK, what? I mean, context is often useful to promote understanding, especially if a word or phrase is obscure or contentious. But does this mean every speaker has the responsibility to ensure every word s/he utters is perfectly clear to everyone present, utterly devoid of any trace of ambiguity or nuance? And then, what if the words used in the contextualisation require further contextualisation, and so on to infinity? If not, what the hell does it mean?
The end result of course will be that all public speech at the university will be reduced to the most banal, basic components, words that are incapable of offending, words that cannot be misunderstood (deliberately or otherwise), words that cannot challenge, cannot provoke and ultimately cannot educate. Which makes the continued existence of the University of Sydney look a bit bloody pointless, no?
Now, please excuse me, I need to write a companion post that identifies to the audience the context in which these words are used. I may be some time.
(Thanks to James Ley for alerting me to this.)
I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.
And it was only when a second person used the same adjective to describe the pies that I realised what was going on. “Bespoke” doesn’t have that specific meaning any more, the sense of having a suit made where every detail, the measurements, the cloth, the precise diameter of the buttons, is decided by the person paying the bill. It just means something luxurious, something posh. Something that costs £25 for six.
I wrote about this a decade ago, discussing how I no longer use certain words (“iconic”, “surreal” and so on) because I can’t be sure whether they’ll be understood to have (what I regard as) the correct, precise meaning, or a more fuzzy definition (“famous”, “odd”). I’ve subsequently learned that there’s a linguistic term for this; semantic bleaching, a sort of meh-ification of our discourse, where the meaning of a word loses its intensity and, ultimately, its usefulness. “Curate” is another example. What once suggested a discriminating expertise employed to select pieces (pots, poems, plesiosaurs) for public consumption now means nothing more than choosing.
Does this matter? Well, if you think that it’s useful to have some words with a precise meaning, even if we don’t deploy them all that often, then yes, it does. But if it matters that much, what do we do about it? That’s where discussions on Friday tended towards the full and frank. I suggested that even though this use of “bespoke” was what the interviewees actually said, it was the duty of The Guardian to find some way of indicating that it wasn’t an accurate use of language. The pies aren’t bespoke, any more than they’re purple or three miles high or made in Burkina Faso. Maybe a discreet “[sic]” after the word? Or just replace it with what they really meant, which is “posh”. This does run the risk of insulting or demoralising people who may not have all the cultural capital of the average Guardian journalist, or editor, or reader but to be honest we do it all the time. If an interviewee commits a grammatical solecism (“you was”, for example) it will miraculously become “you were” by the time it’s published. Nobody’s yet died.
And, yes, language moves on and the meaning of words changes. Which is great when the language is expanded, and we get neologisms like “skibidi” and “rizz” and “brat summer” and most of these will sound positively archaic in five years time but while they’re here they define a generation and baffle another generation and that’s what they’re for. But taking a useful word like “bespoke” and giving it a meaning that can be served by a dozen other words – essentially making the original word useless – doesn’t expand language. It makes it smaller.
And there’s a practical, mundane angle to this. I teach English to people who don’t have it as a first language. I always encourage them to aim first to be understood, and only then to worry about speaking “correctly”. But at some point they want and need to know what the correct version is, the right tense, the right conjunction, le mot juste, even if they don’t always hit the target. And if my students come across the word “bespoke” and ask me what it means, do I just tell them it means “posh”, so as not to upset two people in Suffolk?
Thinking about the scene early in the movie Tár, where the ghastly Juilliard student Max announces that because he’s a pansexual BIPOC with an overactive leg (I paraphrase), he doesn’t feel able to love Bach because he had 20 children and maybe didn’t do his share of the housework (I paraphrase further) and I wonder how many people who watch the scene think, yeah, fair point, awful Juilliard bloke.
And then I encounter this poem, which reminds us that it’s all about the art, you utter clowns.
Romantic Poet, by Diane Seuss
You would not have loved him,
My friend the scholar
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. Wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.
But the nightingale, I said.
