3.2.15

I found this fantastic article via a librarian friend on facebook. Facadebook? It really is my nemesis. (an aside--I was lamenting privately that the content on social media seems to be overwhelmingly related to the "lower" cultures of music, writing, acting, etc, showing pop fiction, current film, top 40 and meme-as-news over pretty much any other genre of well-though-out, classical (not necessarily in style!), analytic media. Maybe your feeds are more cultured than mine, but I wonder why I don't see more articles like this)

The Word-Hoard by Robert MacFarlane is the article in question. He writes about his and other's collections of words that are unique to place and dialect. These lexicons (lexica?) reflect uniqueness of plant and animal life, and give color to our understanding of locations and people. It is a long article, but worth reading. I often hear my peers lament that other languages are so much more expressive and evocative than English. Well, these words that MacFarlane has identified for sharing are often from dialects of the very same, but ones that would be tough for a modern American English speaker to understand. Still, they can add beauty and value to our world. From the article, something I particularly liked:

Yet it is clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between things”.

and

Why should this loss matter? You can’t even use crizzle as a Scrabble word: there aren’t two “z”s in the bag (unless, of course, you use a blank). It matters because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.” 

So, on to the thing we do. Here is a poem Old Tongue by Jackie Kay. At the link you can also listen to her reading to get the richness of the words. This was suggested to me by someone on a forum, where we were sharing fun with colloquialisms.



When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit

stummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
so you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!

My own vowels started to stretch like my bones
and I turned my back on Scotland.
Words disappeared in the dead of night,
new words marched in: ghastly, awful,
quite dreadful, scones said like stones.
Pokey hats into ice cream cones.
Oh where did all my words go—
my old words, my lost words?
Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,
did you ever try and call it back
like calling in the sea?
If I could have found my words wandering,
I swear I would have taken them in,
swallowed them whole, knocked them back.

Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil.
I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,
my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.
Sing-songy. I wanted to gie it laldie.

I imagine there are a lot of poems that connect us to words that are locative, colloquial, or otherwise little-used. Is there a poet who represents your local dialect?