Literary Connections

Reaction to our new Prime Minister’s frank remarks in India are warning up nicely – and not just on this blog. Today’s lead story in the Guardian declares that Pakistan president will ‘put David Cameron straight’ over terror claims. And the cartoon shows a hyperactive David Cameron, amongst other things, burning the Pakistan flag over a ‘frank incense’ flame. Yesterday’s offering showed Pakistani delegates paying a visit to David Cameron, too. The comments on the cartoon are an indication of the ire aroused on all sides (and that’s just about the jokes), though it’s probably true that for all this the great British public will remain unmoved as the conflict in Afghanistan grinds on till – when?

As the Guardian’s story today reminds us, ‘India and Pakistan have fought three major wars since partition in 1947 and remain deeply at odds over divided Kashmir.’ This was obvious to me in the late 60s; the school I was working in had a memorial to former students who had died in the last conflict.

At least the US military are taking tea – or more accurately, reading Three Cups of Tea, the book by former army medic Greg Mortenson. This work by a humanitarian worker has recently become required reading for US high command. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the NCTE Convention in Texas in 2008, where it was obvious that this rather unassuming guy was something of a reluctant celebrity. He must be more aware than anyone that all his good work in providing schools for remote areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan is threatened by the combined action of the NATO forces and their enemies. His book is worth reading for a taste of life in a part of the world that normally only comes to our attention when riven by violence, earthquakes or floods. Find out about his Central Asia Institute here.

This week’s Friday’s Phrase is ‘blood on their hands’. OK, so it’s only Monday and I had said Word of the Day was offline until September, but the words of US Admiral Mike Mullen, joint chiefs of staff, when criticising the founder of WikiLeaks seem too ironic to miss: ‘Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.’ (Guardian, 30 July 2010). As David Leigh writes in today’s paper: ‘Damage control efforts by the White House did not improve until the weekend. We then saw the spectacle of generals, with gallons of innocent civilian blood on their hands, orating that WikiLeaks had potentially failed to do enough to protect local Afghans.’

The row over the Afghan War Logs has raised the profile of the conflict in the last week, and seemed to be the prompt for David Cameron’s frank (but rather partial) words criticising Pakistan whilst he was on a visit to India – with the proudly proclaimed aim of doing business for Britain (Hawk jets included). He might have been wise to have sought a briefing from the Foreign Office first; I’m sure they would have reminded him of the dates that a former diplomat, Geoff Cowling (Vice-consul Kabul 1970-73), mentioned in a letter to the Guardian last Thursday:

• 1842: total annihilation of the 6,000 strong British army retreating from Kabul en route to Kandahar in the first Afghan war
• 27 July 1880: Battle of Maiwand during the second Afghan war: ‘the final result was a rout for the British army that lost more than 950 men on their retreat back to Kandahar.’
• 1919: Third Afghan War: ‘totally forgotten by us too’.

As Cowling comments: ‘History tells the Pashtuns that foreign invaders are vulnerable – something the Russians too learned to their considerable cost. It’s a pity politicians did not read their history before venturing into the hostile, fiercely independent Helmand and blundering into the fourth Afghan war.’ His allusion to the humiliation of the Russians (1979-89) is a reminder that the United States and others were only too willing to arm the mujahidin – discovering later, fatally, that ‘blowback’ doesn’t just apply when a Stinger missile is launched.

David Cameron and others might also remember 1947: the partition of India by the departing British into Muslim Pakistan and secular India left the unresolved sore of Kashmir that lies at the root of much of the conflict in the area. I’m interested to read elsewhere in today’s paper that Peter Preston agrees: ‘Kashmir? The reason why Pakistan’s military stays so strong, so funded, so bent on matching India’s every move. The reason why Pakistan democracy has proved so frail. The reason why Islamabad dabbles in Afghanistan’s shifting alliances. Begin to broker a final Indo-Pakistani peace, try to set stable relations at the core of the subcontinent, and everything else begins to follow.’

Good heavens, as a former resident of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan (glimpsed above), I even told Andrew Bingham, the Conservative candidate (and now MP) all about this on my doorstep back in April. MPs, Prime Ministers: do they ever listen?

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the abolition of the QCDA comes publicity for a trendy new GCSE English course that allows the papers to link President Obama with, according to taste, Eddie Izzard (and Jonathan Ross) or Ronnie Corbett (and Ross again). Well done, OCR; as you say, it’s about image (and the students might benefit too):

This is an invaluable opportunity to give learners more control over their self-image and thus their lives. They’ll become more conscious of which registers are more appropriate in which scenarios, making them more likely to succeed when it comes to influencing and negotiating in everyday life, their education and the world of work.

If QCDA won’t protect the country from such stuff, who will? Just in time, the Times announces that ‘an Academy of English is being formed by the Queen’s English Society, to protect the language from impurities, bastardisations and the horrors introduced by the text-speak generation.’ ‘Made up of professionals, academics and self-confessed pedants,’ they’ve decided we need an equivalent to L’Académie Française. Furthermore, ‘the academy is not shunning the modern world: it has a website‘. It includes, you’ll be pleased to know, a section on the ‘tragic failure of the British education system (and the teachers that it produces) to meet the needs of our children’. I am a little puzzled, though, that each web page bears a strangely capitalised and punctuated footer: ‘Website Design by “SCOTT”‘ and that Page One is near the bottom of the contents list. Never mind, it’s only ephemera, like text-speak….

Inevitably, the Times article headlines this ‘Pedants’ revolt’. Read it online while you can, before the paywall shuts us out – and the accompanying debate ‘Do we need an Academy of English?‘ between the chairman of the Queen’s English Society and the chairman of the Spelling Society, ‘which aims to promote remedies to improve literacy, including spelling reform’. Enjoy the comments in the online discussion – and don’t stop to wonder why the Times didn’t ask anyone in education or from a university language department about this. That’s left to today’s Guardian, where John Mullan from University College London writes engagingly about the folly of preserving English in aspic. For those who want to learn about the realities of language teaching, there’s a research project on teaching English Grammar, for example, also from UCL – English teachers can find out more about it at the forthcoming NATE Conference.

It was a good job I took a screenshot of the Department for Education site a couple of days ago: Go-go Gove has now sprung into action and got YouTubed for the home page. He’s also found time to abolish another quango: the second this week (I think he must enjoy it). It looks as though he’s offering the charming children in front of him the chance to set up their very own academy. I’m sure they’re all very interested: there must be nothing they’d like better than to run a school. After all, they’ve been there for at least a couple of years so they must have got the hang of it by now (and they’d only cause trouble on the streets otherwise).

The energetic Mr Gove (doesn’t he seem bouncy, Tiggerish even?) was so pleased by his school visit that he dashed off a letter to QCDA to tell them to pack their bags – again. Poor things, QCDA have only just got used the D in their name and been sent to Coventry, now they’re being sent from Coventry to oblivion. Now that anyone, even children, can run their own schools, who needs boring things like a curriculum or qualifications? As the Guardian points out closure of the QCDA and of Becta, also announced this week, will mean 730 job losses in Coventry. Being sent to Coventry never did sound much like fun….

It may be a rainbow coalition but it’s curtains for the DCSF and with it the jolly rainbow logos. Yes, the the Department for Children, Schools and Families, fondly known as ‘the Department for Curtains and Soft Furnishings’ by those (like me) who struggled to remember the correct order of the letters, is no more.

Those of us with long memories (well, we oldies with fading memories) will recall various abbreviations for our masters in Whitehall. This might be a good time for Keith Davidson to revisit the astute article he wrote for NATE’s English Drama Media magazine back in October 2008 on the ugliness of the DCFS acronym. As he said:

There are linguistic reasons for any confusion, phonetic and pragmatic…. But there is also something wrong with the sequence of items in the full title. It’s a problem of collocation, the linguistic term for the company lexical items habitually keep, predictive in both coding and de-coding…. The new Department is styled as a market place for products not processes, the title naming the delivery outlets and the customers.

Meanwhile, you can still enjoy for a while the disjointed appearance of the new/old website and realise that all those sweet children on the old site are now hurriedly packing up all the bits of their rainbows and putting them away for the long hard winter ahead. Worse, this could well be, as in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, a winter without Christmas. Do also enjoy the appearance of a Twitter feed on the new DfE front page. When I began writing this it had a message to ‘boomnoise’ – a hip name at odds with the decidedly uncool message they’ve sent him: ‘We’re reviewing all web content now. Meanwhile all statutory guidance and legislation still reflects current legal position.’ Man, get with the Web 2.0 thing, even if David Cameron did say some very uncomplimentary (and rude) things about Twitter during the election. This no doubt explains why the unofficial David Cameron Twitter site was taken down in January ‘at the reasonable & very polite request of Tory HQ’. Of course it was very polite – but just imagine if there had been any argument….

Is it also ominous that the current home page refers to ‘Children’s workforce’ and ‘Schools workforce’? Does this mean the new guys can’t actually bring themselves to utter words such as ‘social workers’ or ‘teachers’? Or that they really are just workers now and not professionals? And I see that the ‘Schools workforce’ link goes to Teachernet not to anything on the DfE site. So: ‘Here are a few ideas and lesson plans other teachers have come up with, and some links and things. Sort yourselves out, we’ll be back in a bit with the new order and new orders.’ We can imagine they might be on these lines:

1. Ties to be worn at all times ¹ [Postscript, 18 May: Ros Asquith's cartoon shows one reason why: 'We introduce the old school tie to give them a head start in politics.']
2. Spelling: i does come before e. ²
3. Sums: ‘If a banker’s bonus is £5 million and the new boss of M&S gets £15 million, how fair is that?’ (Answer on back page: it’s the market, stupid.)
4. Drill: 8 am sharp in the playground for half an hour with the Sergeant-Major; any latecomers to be subject to Field Punishment No. 1 for 30 minutes, rain or shine (that’ll soon sort out the scrimshankers and oiks). ³
5. Music: Eton Boating Song [Daily Telegraph, 17 May: 'Eton is ready to push the boaters out for David Cameron.' Yes, the chaps get a party because a chap's in the right party!]
6. Teachers Schools workforce to be sorted by degrees: all those with less than a 2:ii marched off by Sergeant-Major to be shot dismissed. Yes, novelist and former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo – that means you.
7. More sums: lovely Carol Vorderman to make the jolly lower fourth as calculating as she is!
8. It doesn’t add up: take 6 away from 7 to find that lovely Carol Vorderman has a third-class degree too, so where does that leave one?
9. (No, I give up, I can’t take any more.)

¹ Michael Gove, this week appointed Secretary of State for Education, says it’s good for discipline. But does this rule apply to boys and girls – and staff?
² Yes, Michael says this too. In 2009, the Telegraph reported that the National Primary Strategy’s Support for Spelling said ‘that the rule memorised by generations of children is no longer worth teaching’. Michael Gove, then Shadow education secretary, declared at the time:

Having systematically dumbed our schools down for a decade, it is no surprise the Government is actively telling teachers not to bother with proper spelling. I would reverse this nonsense at a stroke.

Well, now’s your chance, Michael!

³ You’ve guessed: Michael thinks this will be fun too!

Off to update my Twitter account now before it’s closed down too!

This Friday’s Phrase from Word of the Day is topical, as always. I had thought to offer you hung parliament, but that is so last week – and anyway, it’s already been covered on the excellent World Wide Words site.

So instead I bring you the winner’s curse, inspired by Aditya Chakrabortty’s Guardian article in which his application of the term to the current political situation is of less literary interest to us than this comment:

If you want to see the winner’s curse close-up, saunter down to the discount section of your local bookshop. You’ll probably see a pile of celebrity memoirs, for which the publishers paid hundreds of thousands, only to see them flop.

So – being a loser may not be so bad after all!

‘Once the audible sound is heard,’ the Train Manager announced on the way down to London yesterday, the train will have come to ‘a complete and final stop’. I suppose this verbal redundancy (what kind of sound isn’t audible when it can be heard?) is justified in the interests of making absolutely, unequivocally and utterly clear to passengers the need to wait till the train was safely stationary. In the station. And not moving.

A speaker on a Radio 4 programme at the weekend resorted to a different linguistic trick. It actually felt more like a trap when a wine merchant said he wanted to ‘remove the mystery and keep in magical’. Fancy alliteration and fine aspirations are common in marketing – but it didn’t make much sense to me. Can something be magical without mystery?

And speaking of alliteration, the picture here shows that the Socialist Worker is happy to use tabloid tricks in a worthy cause. It was spotted at the Take Back Parliament Flash Mob outside the Lib-Dem Federal Executive Committee Meeting in Westminster yesterday (Monday). You can sample this good-humoured demonstration on YouTube here. It included the usual quota of bored policemen, noisy activists, rowdy drumming – and a purple cow.

Today’s Word of the Day is inspired by attending an election hustings in Glossop last night. The Oxford English Dictionary (thank you Derbyshire Libraries – don’t let them say you never do anything for us) tells us that hustings is ‘from OE. hústing, a. ON. hús-{th}ing, house-assembly, a council held by a king, earl, or other leader, and attended by his immediate followers, retainers, etc., in distinction from the ordinary {th}ing or general assembly of the people (the OE. folc{asg}emót, FOLKMOOT).’

My own impression of the would-be MPs was that they were a rather less sophisticatedly fluent bunch that I fondly imagined the ‘kings, earls, or other leaders’ of yore. Perhaps a folkmoot is more in tune with our less heroic times? The Green Party candidate, Peter Allen, was the most articulate and passionate and seemed to have done more homework on the questions. Literary Connections has to warm to someone whose slogan, ‘for a green and pleasant land in High Peak’ echoes William Blake and who also strongly recommended The Spirit Level, a book already mentioned here. The Conservative candidate said that now he’s canvassing he doesn’t have time to read books (I pointed out to Andrew Bingham that, rather cheekily, David Cameron cited the book in his Hugo Young lecture last year – though the authors of The Spirit Level rejected the conclusions he attempted to draw). The Tory’s real shock, however, was his praise for arch-left MP Dennis Skinner, the fabled Beast of Bolsover who represents all that Conservatism, even in its new guise, is not. Unfortunately, he bracketed him in his commendation of independence of spirit with Sir Nicholas Winterton, the Macclesfield MP who recently described standard-class rail passengers as ‘a totally different type of people’ to persons of his ilk. Clearly Sir Nicholas is not a man for meeting folk or even a folkmoot.

A journalist commented a week ago that although we knew that the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland was causing the cancellation of flights, we didn’t know how to pronounce it. Well, we do now! Chris Warren, whilst still delayed in Japan, has gained exclusive access to a top-flight linguist (his brother, Professor Nicholas Warren of Fukuoka University, Japan) and can reveal, exclusively, here that Eyjafjallajökull is pronounced AY-ya FYA-tla YEUH-kutl. Or, to put it another way: [ei.ja,fjatl.a'jœ.kʏtl]. It means, literally: ‘island mountains’ glacier’. Amongst other gems imparted by the learned Professor Warren is the nugget that, in English ‘the -s- in island was inserted because of folk-etymological association with isle from Old French from the Latin insula (compare this with the Icelandic eyja).’ Ever idiosyncratic, the English, eh?

Meanwhile, back in England, beside the fells (Icelandic fjalla, Old Norse fiall, fjall ’mountain, rock, barren plateau’) of the High Peak, the political scene seems to be subject to earthquakes of its own, as the tectonic plates of two-party politics are all shook up. As Marina Hyde puts it in today’s Guardian: ‘For those of us perfectly happy to concede we haven’t a clue at the best of times, and merely hazard this sort of cobblers in exchange for beer tokens, the sense of discombobulation is delicious and thrilling.’ Furthermore, there’s an interesting account by Ian Jack of his visit to Somerset to meet the Rees-Moggs who featured in an earlier post.

Photograph by Andreas Tille from Wikimeida Commons, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.

Regular readers (if there are any) may suspect I rarely even glance at the sports pages of the paper. This morning, however, just as I was about to toss the Guardian’s supplement into the recycling bin I caught sight of Frank Keating’s elegant column on the back page. His opening stroke, mentioning Stoppard’s The Real Thing, was followed by further evidence of the ways playwrights throw in allusions to the game. Gems include a reference to the scary brainwashing scene in The Birthday Party which includes the unanswerable question ‘Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?’ (which, Keating adds, “the Germans translated as ‘Who pissed on the Australian gate?’”). There is also a reminder of Jack Rosenthal’s beguiling play, P’tang Yang Kipperbang, woven around the commentaries of John Arlott. I loved to use this TV play with classes who had probably never heard the man himself on the radio.

The online version of Keating’s article has the rather more clumsy headline ‘Playwright’s XI would know how to bowl a good line’. Evidence, perhaps, that the possibility of greater prolixity away from the restrictions of a fixed page width is not always a good thing. To confirm this, today’s G2 supplement has an article about a sporting match headed, in print: ‘It’s just not cricket!’ The online version is the more prosaic ‘Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik: the romance that gripped two nations’. The article, alas, has nothing to match Keating’s inclusion of Beckett’s alleged instruction to imagine the parts of Vladimir and Estragon as ‘batsmen numbers five and six fretfully waiting to begin their innings at a Test Match at Lord’s’.