The Man Who Was Thursday

I must admit I probably would never have come across G.K. Chesterton's book if it hadn't been for the Summer School. But I'm extremely grateful that I did, because it's a fantastic book! I just read it for the 3rd time and still can't get over the brilliant surrealism. It's one of these books you can immediately imagine as a film - in my case I can see it as one of those 1960s technicolour films, but mixed with a little bit Tim Burton. Yep, it's that surreal. Maybe I should outline the plot before I go on, so that those of you who haven't read it can get at least a rough idea:

The era the story is set in isn't explicitly mentioned, but I would say it's around the Edwardian time, so early 20th century. The undercover policeman Gabriel Syme belongs to a special anti-anarchist unit of Scotland Yard. He meets the anarchistic poet Lucian Gregory and manages to infiltrate a branch of the anarchist society (which ironically only acts according to very strict and specific rules) and even to become elected as a new member of the anarchist council, which consists of the seven most powerful anarchists. They are all named after days of the week, with Sunday being the supreme leader and initiator of terrorist attacks. Syme becomes Thursday and goes to meet the council. Then a lot of things happen which I don't want to give away in case you want to read the book, but let me tell you this: Nothing is as it seems.

I knew I would like the book after I had read the first two sentences. I know, that sounds exaggerated, but let me just quote these sentences to you:

"The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild."

 I think I read those sentences three or four times before I proceeded to the next, because they're just so wonderful, bursting with alliterations, and have a great rhythm to them.
But the language is not the only great thing about this novel, mainly it's the characters, especially the seven council members. They are all too exaggerated to seem realistic, and yet you don't really question them, because the whole atmosphere of the book is rather dream-like, which always makes me think of a German play I read in school once, Kleist's The Prince of Homburg. It is also important to note that the subtitle of Chesterton's book is 'A Nightmare', which I think is spot on. The whole story really reads like a nightmare - but that doesn't mean it's not funny. It is, very very funny in fact. The humour too is mostly very surreal and at times quite pythonesque, for example in the chase scene (involving an elephant) where Sunday throws little notes out of the window of his carriage, or when Syme and the Professor invent a finger-tapping language to have secret conversations and start tapping out the most ridiculous long sentences.

There's a lot of debate going on about whether Chesterton was trying to convey a deeper meaning (one cannot deny that Sunday is portrayed very much like Christ or God), or whether he just wanted to write a cool, funny, weird book (which he certainly did). In the preface to his book, a poem to his childhood friend Edmund Clerihew Bentley (who invented the clerihew), Chesterton says, speaking about their childhood experiences together:

"This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells/  And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells - / Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men yet crash, / Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash. / The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand - / Oh, who shall understand but you: yea, who shall understand?"

So maybe we're not supposed to understand what this book is really about - but if you ask me, that makes it even more intriguing. Everytime I read it or think about it, there's something new to discover or to interpret differently. But at the end of the day, despite all those different interpretations and theories about it, it's just a marvellous book. And that is good enough for me.

I don't know how many times I have watched this sketch now, I have stopped counting. I can speak along to it, yet it never fails to delight me a lot. THIS is what language is for! Being creative with it, taking it to the most absurd places you could think of. And no-one can do that quite as well as, yes, you've guessed it, Stephen Fry. I think it's the fact you can hear the delight he takes in language, forming sentences etc that make it so wonderful to me. I think I might just watch it again now. And then I will start that piece about language and comedy I've been meaning to write for such a long time.

Swearing III

Soooo, I know it's been a long time since my last post, but I had quite a busy time (moving back to Germany and sulking about it). But now I'm back with the promised next part about swearing (here part one and two). Again, a lot of the 'expert's opinion' stuff is taken from Fry's Planet Word. This post will be a bit more about the psychology of swearing and less about the linguistic side. Still, I hope you enjoy it! (again warning: strong language used)

Well, swearwords are universally used. But the question is, what makes a word offensive? Apparently (well, quite obviously) those words are all taken from the semantic field of bodily fluids / disfunctions, intimate actions or body parts. Steven Pinker, the famous linguist and cognitive scientist states the rather obvious when he says that the areas we get our swearwords from are often connected with negative feelings such as jealousy, disgust, fear or repulsion. According to him, sexuality and sex give way to some especially strong and offensive swearwords, because we tend to connect them with derogation (e.g. rape. incest, exploitation) rather than pleasure. However, he also points out that our Western society is getting more relaxed about swearwords related to sex, while swearing connected with race is still a big taboo. But that would go more into abuse, and that's not what I want to write about. Swearing is something entirely different.

Swearwords get most of their power from reaction. We are taught from a very young age that certain words are offensive and not socially acceptable, even though we might not understand why exactly when we're young. But the first time we say a swearword in front of our parents for example, we get a very strong emotional response (and usually not a very nice one), so subconsciously we link the offensive word to strong emotions. Let me relate a little personal story here: When I was very young (around 8 I think), my cousin who is 3 years older than me taught me the phrase 'fuck you' (well, in German of course, which is fick dich). I had no idea what it meant - and to be honest, I think neither did my cousin - but we had great fun experimenting with that phrase, finding different things people could fuck, at one point shouting 'fuck your bike' after a girl. As I said, I had no idea. Later that day my cousin and I were in my room, still having fun with that versatile phrase, when my mum came in. I got up, ran over to her and gleefully told her to go fuck herself.
She reacted wonderfully, though. She took me aside and calmly explained to me what the phrase meant and why I must not say it to people. I felt very grown-up and serious about it. My cousin got a right shitstorm later.

Why do we swear, though? What was the motivation behind the first swearing? Well, one answer is that we use swearing to channel aggression. We swear at people instead of hitting or biting them like animals do. So swearing actually gives us an evolutionary advantage, if you want to look at it that way. If we would hit or bite someone every time we're angry with them, we probably wouldn't go very far. But there's another, very interesting point: Swearing also seems to be linked to feeling pain. In his documentary, Stephen Fry and Brian Blessed took part in an experiment to prove exactly this: Each of them had to put one hand into a tank of ice cold water. The first time round they weren't allowed to swear at all, but the second time they were allowed to use a swearword. Amazingly, the swearing helped against the pain and Fry managed to keep his hand in nearly twice as long as before. The professor conducting the experiment (I forgot his name) explained it thusly: When we swear aloud, we shock ourselves and the released adrenalin numbs the pain. As Brian Blessed is well-known for swearing a lot, the effect didn't set in with him, because he was so used to swearing it lost its shocking effect for him.

I think it is not just the shock effect that makes swearwords so strong, it's also their sound. They are mostly rather short, and sound very harsh. 'Fuck' has that great 'ffff' sound and the hard consonant ending after a short vowel. 'Cunt' is even harsher, with a hard consonant at the beginning and at the end. That would explain why we find 'shit' more effective than 'poo' - the latter just sounds too nice with its long open vowel ending, it doesn't sound as disgusting. Plus, those words - especially fuck - are extremely versatile.

And at the end a small link between swearing and comedy, again: Adding a swearword into a sentence - called jab-line - makes the line funnier, because it surprises the audience. And you can create such wonderful sentences with them.