I Love Cherries

The surgery waiting-room was a virtual morgue.  Lots of old people, sitting silently, looking down at their knees as if willing themselves to rise and walk.  The Lazarus act just won’t GO!  — “I don’t like cherries, mummy!” bursts a young lad standing between his father’s legs.  — “You will one day, son.” says the father quietly, ripe with double entendre that escapes the boy.  His parents blow the age-curve of those of us waiting in what is, fundamentally, a clinic for people with the problems of advancing age.  The boy blows the curve yet again. 

Surgery is simply the British word for doctors’ offices.  This one is more dreary than most.  It’s aging badly too.  The boy’s remark conjures a vision of cherries forming on trees in the cemetery.  Last year’s fruit was juicy and sweet.     — I love cherries. —     The vision is a charming diversion from my purpose here.  I’m in the bowels of the University hospital.  I am meant to be an object lesson for future doctors.  My anaemia can’t be explained.  There’s no evidence of bleeding, neither on my outsides nor on my insides.  Yet, I’ve been bleeding profusely every day for more than a year.  The blood is the colour of dark red cherries.

Waiting, I humour myself with the British pronunciation of die-version.  This might otherwise be the melancholic version of my life’s story in which I die of boredom.  As I spell the word out, D. I. E., my German-speaking ancestors haunt me with their very own pronunciation, dee.  The the word.  As if I require a reminder that this is the definitive version of my life.

A nurse comes to draw my blood.  — “A small prick’” she says.  It’s the shorthand of someone with experience for someone with clear sight of a long needle.  As she becomes crusty with experience, I imagine that she will have dispensed with the nicety of a preface, and will lead simply with “prick”.  As I become crusty with age, I suspect that this will be an apt characterization of my personality.  I am already perturbed at having had to give my ‘details’ often, and, publicly enough for an identity thief to have confirmed them.  I feel my willfulness increasing. — “Maybe, this time,” I tell myself, “I won’t tell them what drugs I’m taking or allergic to.”  I should print cards for my next visit to the hospital.  I am deaf and dumb, it will say and have the implied context of How could you not know this already!

The needle glides in.  I imagine Biblical camels passing through the eyes of needles.  I refuse the flow of blood.  It’s a party trick that I learned, having to suffer through clinical examinations as a child.  I’d been subjected to all sorts of prodding, poking and pricking as doctors sought reasons for my malevolent migraines.  It was an era when children were still thought as likely to be affected by poltergeists as by physical affliction.  — “Doctor, I can’t find a pulse.” exclaimed one nurse.  “I think he’s dead.” she winked.  It was encouragement enough.  I’ve been trying to refuse blood-taking ever since.  Nurses have their own party tricks in response to mine.  — “That’s strange.” they often mime curiosity.  Then, they jig the needle as if it was a rubber tube, and, they were stealing petrol through a siphon.

My doctors regard the body as a globe.  It’s an adequate characterization given the shape of the old men and old women in the waiting room.  The neurologists who tried to understand my migraines — how one half of my tongue fell numb while the other still felt pain — they divided the globe into right and left hemispheres, to match those of my brain.  My present doctors shift their attention to my northern to my southern hemispheres.  Their Amazon, their Congo is my colon. 

I have trouble concentrating on the answers I must give to their questions.  I find myself distracted by medical terminology spoken with a British accent.  I hold onto their pronunciation like a child made to linger over the meaning of the present in one’s hands.  ‘Colon’ is just one of several distractions.  Co-Ion, the British say.  Co-LON, I tease the word out between my lips and teeth.  Co-LON-Don.  I think of the conductor of the morning train announces our passage to LON-Don.  And, I smile, in turn, remembering my best friend in grade-school.  We’d just discovered sex in the form of printed porn left in our forest encampment.  Thereafter, he wanted the role of Long Dong Silver* whenever we played pirates in the woods.  In LON-Don , I ride the Tube, which is the very Co-LON of LON-Don.

I have lost myself in the diversion.  My doctors must be thinking of calling in the neurologist to assess my repetition of the word.  CO-Lon, I shift the accent.  This not only throws the switch on a light in my brain but blows the bulb as well.  Pop!  It’s a moment of discovery.  — “Well, I‘Il be damned!” I can hear myself.  “I do have co-Ions.  Big and small ones.  Intestines.”  One of the doctors has a dumb founded expression.  — “Oh, sorry!” I exclaim, aware that I’m within an explanation of being called away in a white jacket.  “I’m American.  We have coI-ons and inn-test-inns.  We pee you’re-in rather than your-eye-in.  I pause to see if he’s okay.  The explanation is making things worse, especially when I feel compelled to add, “I suppose, you have in-tes-tines here?”  At least the other doctor is laughing nervously.

David says that I have away with doctors.  I make them nervous.  Before we left Florida, I went to my doctor complaining of symptoms of appendicitis.  There, I was left to await the doctor in a small room with a small bench, the doctor’s chair, a narrow bed, and plenty of open floor.  I suppose that he’d never entered a room and found the patient curled up on the floor.  It must have thrown him.  He quickly dismissed my symptoms as arising from General Tso’s chicken.  I would see him twice more with the same symptoms before landing in Britain.  Each time, he’d fidget as though locked in his own skin, with a cannibal caressing the surface, making hairs stand on end.  David reported his experience of the doctor as of a wholly different man, one at ease with both doctor and patient.  British doctors removed my necrotic appendix a little more than a year later.  I was overjoyed with the British National Health Service.

I’ve come to today’s appointment having now learned a new lexicon, not just new pronunciations.  I now dare to visualize wooden Galleons sailing through the Straights of Magellan, the back passage between my Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on the force of the wind.   I find it odd that a people who can speak so di-rect-ly about urine, need to take refuge in metaphors for the opposite hemisphere.   When the doctor comes to review my history, I tell him that Stanley’s already met Livingstone.  Tethered cameras have ventured down my throat and wormed their way into my gullet, while equally invasive cameras have spelunked through my back passage, not once but twice.  They’ve found nothing. Nothing unexpected in the deep, dark continent of me.

But, doctors are a literal tribe who otherwise speak a language devoid of metaphor.   It comes as a shock when they ask me yet again to describe the colour of the blood that I am losing, and, prime me with “Bright cherry red?”  — “Cherries, maybe.” I say, “but deep red cherries.”  Like the child in the waiting room, my response twists the curve.  — “That’s impossible,” they say.  “The kind of blood you describe.  No.  It’s got to be bright red.”  I’m perturbed.  — “Why did you ask?” I demand, “if you’re not going to listen to my answers . . .”  I resolved upon previous dismissals to take an evidence-based approach.  — “I have pictures!” I say triumphantly, “want to see?”  I pull out a kind of photographic colostomy bag.  A photo album labelled “Blood Diary”.  I’m still surprised that they agree to see the images, when I hear the words that will vindicate me.  — “Is that BLACK?!” they say.  I can hear myself gloating, “Yes, I am a medical mystery.”  — “You should be dead” a colleague whose mother is a doctor tells me.  Black means that the blood is oxygen deprived.  On my tombstone, I want these words inscribed: I loved cherries.  Deep red cherries.

---

* Long Dong Silver, the porn star, was actually our age.  For all I now know, my childhood friend may have grown into a career as Long Dong Silver.  But, let's face it, it doesn't take a pubescent boy very much time or forethought to make the short linguistic leap from the pirate, Long John Silver.

fLEXICOLOGY

f LEXICOLOGY

or, How to Speak English in England:

An irreverent introductory lesson.

A Norwegian friend visits.  Flights from Bergen to Cambridge are relatively short and inexpensive.  We’re having beers at a pub overlooking the River Cam.  Out there, on the river, the punts are hopelessly self-guided.  They are more like floating cigar-shaped billiard balls, crashing into one another, than the genteel watercraft of a bye-gone age.  It is easy to suspect that most of the punters have been drinking.  Indeed, many raise a bottle in greeting as they pass beneath our windowed roost.  Most of them are tourists.  Nearly all attempt to ward-off inevitable collisions with the waving of hands and a Babel of words, spoken in nearly every imaginable tongue, roughly meaning watch out and turn now, you senseless idiot.  Contemplating these failures of navigation and communication can generate conversation that runs as deep as the River Cam.  This afternoon, however, it is just good fun.

Back inside, my Norwegian friend is holding forth.  Her English is perfectly accented.  She loves to talk.  And, she relishes engaging people.  One of our party, an American, compares her to the turret of a Bradley tank.  She’s become the center of our attentions, and, fires-off with striking accuracy at each individual’s interests.  We are an international party: Norwegians and Americans; English and Scots; a Dane; a Canadian; and an Australian.  English is our common language.  And, what strikes me about her English is that it is accented differently and perfectly for each person to whom she speaks.  When speaking to the Englishmen, she speaks flawless British English with a beautifully cultured accent.  A Norwegian who masters English can be expected to speak English with a British accent, as the availability of British TV and radio is prevalent across Europe.  Even so, she directs spot-on Midwestern American English to the Americans.  And, when she speaks to the Dane, who learned his English in Ireland, it is his Danish-accented Irish English that she is using.  I can barely understand a word of its tick-broke; the thick brogue of his airs (i.e., his Rs) roiling like water over a rapid.  And, her English, the Scots remark, is perfectly Glaswegian.  One of them is so astonished that he address her as “lass”, before telling her that her sweet tongue is as “surprising as, though much more delightful than a Glasgow kiss”.  This is the Scot who plays rugby with the take-no-prisoners spirit of a Klingon.  Who knew that he had rough poetry within him?  Another of the Scots — the one who has been rendering the Dane’s English into British English for me — explains that a Glasgow kiss is a headbutt.  Our Norwegian friend, meanwhile, has gone on to demonstrate her command of the Canadian and Aussie accents in their colloquial English.

We are so amazed that the conversation lingers not simply on her — turning from her tales of new motherhood — but on her speaking abilities.  “You Americans,” she says to the fellow across the table from her, “you can finish reciting a paragraph in the time it takes a Briton to recite a sentence.”  I suspect that she is exaggerating a tad, but there’s a kernel of truth to it.  “You speak English like the French speak French.  Fast.”  Consider that Americans “while” away their time, whilst amongst Britons the world moves at a different pace.  Even in our indecision, Americans “um” and Britons “erm” — though both words are pronounced in exactly the same way, the British require an extra letter.  And, it is true that American English sometimes swallows whole syllables with the intake of the breath needed to speak; and, that it prefers contractions, like I’m or there’s, as if words need to quicken their pace for time is fleeting, or, as if for every moment describing the action an action was wasted.  Odd then that Americans love to tell stories.

Here, my thoughts were diverted.  One of my grade-school grammar teachers preferred the word allision to contraction.  Contractions are what women have before childbirth, my mother would explain, attempting to clarify my teacher’s choice of word.  As my teacher was a woman — indeed, as all of my grammar teachers had been women, my mother’s clarification only lead me to wonder what grammar and childbirth had in common.  The puzzle of contractions in the English language remained an enigma for some time thereafter.  “An allision is a collision between a moving vessel and a stationary object.”  Thomas J. Shoenbaum wrote in his Admiralty and maritime law (4th edition — St.  Paul, MN : West Publishing Co., 2004).  That’s American English.  Like the actions of punters lacking common skills, language, sometimes even common sense, it is the product of so many immigrants — and, apparently, child bearing women — screaming to be heard.

British English has the patience to be heard as to be understood amidst the cacophony of languages that is neighbouring Europe.  The Norwegian turns to the most proper of the Englishmen in our company.  “British English,” she says, polishing every consonant, then pausing for emphasis, . . . “British English pronounces ever syllable, distinctly and clearly.”  It’s a right fine posh accent she’s usin’, indeed.  And, there’s the rub.  I’ve heard more English accents alone among the native English than I’ve heard across the whole of North America.  She is, it seems to me, nonetheless right to say that there is a cadence in the oratory of an Englishman’s English that is wholly different from, or, at least slower than the cadence of American and Canadian English.

Certainly, it might be said, some British English sounds, like that of the letter /a/, are drawn out as no one would draw them in the Americas.  . . . Except, perhaps, in the heart of Boston, or, as a Southern Belle — who must wait for her hoop skirt to catch up — must speak them.  My high-school music teacher, a mannerly woman from Dothan, Alabama, was a human metronome.  She would count out the beat of the music: “Quwah-tah.  Quwah-tah.  Quwah-tah.”  [The face of George Washington is on the Quwah-tah, the USA's twenty-five cent coin.]  For a northerner, Dothan was as back-woods as you could ever hope to be.  Yet, my music teacher’s Quwah-tah is a direct relation to the upper-crust English mother, calling out to her children playing rough-and-tumble beneath the summer sun: “Children, wah-tah?  Wah-tah anyone?”

These two words, quarter and water, are wonderful examples of the syllabic rhythms of the British, or shall I say the English accent.  They make subtly apparent what may be the most profound difference between North American English and English English.  It’s all about Location, Location, Location as any (real) estate agent will tell you.  It’s about where one places stress within a word.  Stressing a letter, as my captivating Norwegian friend claims, can change more than the music of a language.  If we were speaking Turkish, stressing or elongating the /a/ sound would change the word sat (/sawt/) into saat (/saw-aht/), and, the meaning from sell to hour.  . . . Elongation would put time on our hands.  But, English is not Turkish.  Meaning does not change, not necessarily.  Active listening is required, nonetheless, to ensure understanding.  — You can axe me, anything! Here’s a simple example from increasingly-used American English that the casual British listener might presume to be evidence of a truly violent US culture.  Of course, you may ask me anything.

While Britons quwah-tah their wah-tah, North Americans usually quart-er their watt-er.  There’s something oddly appropriate about quarts to water.  It’s almost electric!  So, how much does the placement of stress suggest the character of a people?  Consider the following examples, current in British English.  They stress the letters “er” in such a way as to give them a long /a/ sound.

At the 2011 Brit Awards, a London rapper by the name of Tinie Tempah — as in, that’s one small temper and one large talent for mankind — was nominated for British Male Solo Artist of the year.  The name telegraphs the up-bound beat of Tempah’s rap on subjects as rosy as a love of tea.  Who’s a tempest in a little tea-pot, eh?  In this United Kingdom, there is none of the big bad-tempered rap of those United States as anyone having voted for Plan B will attest.  Plan B, of course, was another British rapper also nominated for British Male Solo Artist of the year.  At the age of 27 — as of anyone over the age of twenty-five, he’s considered a geezer.  That’s a rap gee-zah, as in, The pyramids at Giza were built by some old Egyptian.  I suppose that we might think of Plan B as a gee-zah rap-pah, but that could easily be taken to refer to the day old news-pay-pah in which a take-away meal of fish-and-chips is sometimes wrapped.  He may be old-ah, but there’s nothing fishy about Plan B.

Myself, I prefer the more dangerous and racy examples that litter the language from A and Z, from adult to zebra.  These examples are more about the placement of stress within a word than upon a particular letter or letter combination.

The common definition of geezer is adult.  For speakers of English-accented English, the word, adult, remains close to its Latin roots.  An adult, is the sum of its Latin parts: ad and ult — as if an addition of ultimates, meaning someone of advanced age.  Now, for added emphasis, speak the word as if it were two words, giving equal emphasis to both: ad [breathe] ult.  With its added emphasis, ult should sound like the German word “alt”, meaning “old”.  An adult is someone not just old but someone very old.  For speakers of American-accented English, the word, adult, offers the possibility of less erudite, but perhaps more nuanced meaning.  An American divides the word not at “ad” but at “a” rendering the spoken word as /a/ + /dult/.  Now, just for fun, swallow the /u/ sound.  Say it with me: a dolt.  I’m not saying that most Americans are dullards compared with the British.  But, that meaning might be taken without careful, contextual listening.

I am reminded, here, of a former employee who told me that I should write such things in the presence of the irony-face emoticon —   ;-)   — to signal my perverse sense of humour.  I love the fact that “dolt” enters modern English as a noun having formed from a past participle.  The word dolt is akin the British English “learnt” or, as it is spelled in American English, “learned”.  ”Dolt”, one presumes of American English, might be spelled, “dolled”, as in, Perchance, when I am old and grey, and batty as a three dollar bill, I may doll myself up and stroll down the street: “Lolly too dum day!”  What’s that?  You’re too young to remember the Burl Ives song of that title, “Lolly too dum day!”  Dolt, originally spelled “dulte”, meant made dull.  One would not doll-up but, rather, dull-down.  I digress.

By the way, or, by way of continued digression, a “nine pound note” is the British idiomatic equivalent of the “three dollar bill” of American idiom.  At today’s exchange rate, £9 is roughly equivalent to $14 US or $14 Canadian, or even $14 Australian.  Quite a bit more than $3, eh.  It’s nice to be valued.  But, almost everything is more expensive in the UK, or, "more dear" as they say here.

At the far end of the English alphabet, zebras may be more colourful than they might at first appear.  I’ll spare you the etymology of zebras.  Let’s get straight to the hunt.  The British have “Zeb Rahs” … as in Zebulon sounds like a lion defending a kill.  How odd, to hear a horse-like creature roar!  The American, meanwhile, has “Ze Bras” … say it as if a fictional Frenchman, say Inspector Clouseau, perusing a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, ou là là.  I imagine a horse photographed wearing a bra for a two-page spread in the Sunday Times’ fashion section.  Until, I remind myself that “bra” is French for “arm”.  So, I redraw the image.  Eh voilà, a Centaur.  That’s much better than playing on the American stereotype, to suggest that a zebra is a horse bearing arms.  An AK-47, perhaps.  Wild zebra use their stripes to conceal themselves, while zebra in zoos have been shaken down for the public’s protection.  As if to confound the matter all the more, I’m unable to remove my mother’s colourful description of her bra as her “gun holsters” from my brain.  So, a zebra is a horse hiding a weapon in its bra!  This much — I apologize, especially to my feminist readers — has been nurture, not nature.  On second thought, perhaps we should stick to the bra alone.  Make love, not war.

Back in the pub, my Norwegian friend announces to no one in particular that she has to “use the head”.  No sooner than she’s spoken these words, she excuses herself for their use.  The phrasing she’s chosen is out of character with stories about motherhood and banter about what it means to find herself an adult buying kiddie lit filled with pictures of talking zebras doing housework.  She has been a salty dog, in recent years, who has spent almost as much time at sea in the company of rough men as she has spent on land.  She corrects herself, asking, “Will you excuse me?  I have to use the loo.” Perhaps because she is speaking to all of us, for the first time we hear her speak English using a Norwegian accent.

Each of us has been in the United Kingdom long enough to know what she means by the word loo  (that's "restroom" in polite American parlance).  Those of us who speak French as well as English even take the word back to its archaic French, lieux d’aisance, literally, places of ease, long since replaced in Paris by the British English invader: WC —Winston Churchill’s quaint water-closet.  But, her accent rounds the word lovingly with her lips.  And, to some of us, it sounds as though she’s incongruously invited them to join the mile-high club of lovers using the lavatories for sex on a long-distance flight, albeit here at sea level.  It is the Scots who are taken aback.  In some parts of Scotland, the word loo survives as a shortened version of the English word “love”.

Give me a moment here.  I need to savour the thoughts swelling with the intonation of loov and, perchance, the war-weary Frenchman who is speaking it.  He had been sent to Scotland, in 1545 during the War of the Rough Wooing, to help the Scots resist the advances of an English king’s drive to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland through arranged marriage.  Pity the poor French lad.  As he spoke the word to a Scottish lass, he couldn’t help but think of his own king, ensconced in the Louvre, then a royal palace, and, of other places far away in his beloved France.

The old Scots loo survives in the new world’s children’s song, “Skip to My Lou”.  It uses slang to tell the tale of a young lad who has lost his partner to another man.  He encourages her to return and to skip to his lou . . . to skip to his love, the beat of his heart, or, else to free him to find himself another love.  Why is it always the men who get hurt?  I should be clear, perhaps, for English readers - skip : that's archaic British English — still used in the States, meaning a sort of hopping walk.  It is not what American's would call a "dumpster", though I am sure that a dumpster of love, a skip for love's refuse has charm all its own.

It is a good thing that my Norwegian friend is not a man.  She might have confounded us with the word “urinal”.  A urinal, for the sake of clarification, is a kind of passive bidet (/bee-day/) that hangs vertically on a loo wall and that serves a slightly dissimilar purpose.  My father, a plumber, thought that I’d gone soft the first time he heard me use the word bidet.  To him, the observation that you’re not likely to find a bee day in the country just didn’t seem to make much sense.  Bees are more likely to have country days than days in the city.  My bidet was his bid-ette.  My English friends, hearing talk of bid-ettes, might conjure the image of a bouncy blonde calling out, Place your bets now.  Place your bets, beside a casino’s craps table.  Oh, my father did love the craps!

That diversion into the world of the bidet was for my amusement.  I’ve used the time to humour myself, hearing each of you say the word “urinal” as though there’s nothing funny about it.  To illustrate the humour, I want to take you to a men’s room in the international airport at Kingston, Jamaica.  Now, there are dee smahl Jam-ay-kahns, and there are dee tahl Jam-ay-kahns.  This loo was made to serve both of them: dee smahl and dee tahl.  The loo had two urinals.  One urinal at its base hung less than 1 metre or about 2.5 feet off the floor, while the next urinal at its base hung more than 1.5 metres or about 5 feet off the floor.  A man of average height would have to make this cruel choice: to pee, he could either kneel or jump.  A spliff might have helped one to see the music in the joint.  But, if you took the grout-lines of the tile on the wall as music’s staff lines, it was easy to see the two urinals as musical notes.  If we’d then asked two men — one American, the other English — to sing the notes, to sound the word “urinal”, we would have heard two very different notes.  The American would have sung to the Englishman: ♫ you’re in all ♫.  And, the Englishman of our little, two-man opera might have taken offence.  So, in response, the Englishman might have criticized the American singing, ♫ your eye in all ♫.

I pause here to get it out of my system.  I am reminded of the schoolboy humour with which an American teases out the pronunciation of “Uranus”, the name of the seventh planet from the Sun.  But, Uranus has other, and, quite different business in the loo.  The American would naturally croon, your-an-us, as offering an Appalachian homage to partnership: you and us.  In this instance, however, the schoolboy prefers the British pronunciation, your-anus.  In the mouth of the schoolboy, it’s as sophomoric as a “Your Mama’s so big” joke.  But, no British astronomer will hesitate to confirm that Uranus is the seventh planet from our sun.

[I pity the poor ESL — English as a Second Language — learners who may have been pointed to this essay as a means of testing their English.  Many are now wondering if they haven’t stumbled into a Tardis of science-fiction rather than an essay on speaking English.  This is not about speaking English as much as it is about having fun with the language.]

I first heard the word, urinal, with its British accent in Birmingham, after landing on a trans-Atlantic flight.  I hadn’t been able to sleep on the red-eye coming over.  I was groggy and had been searching the baggage hall for my luggage.  Not finding my bag, the possibility had just dawned on me that it may have flown to Birmingham, Alabama rather than with me to England.  And, now, the bag-check receipt was confirming it, when a perturbed voice beside me suggested, got to use your eye in all, son? As I looked up, I thought, Well, that’s cheeky of you, now, isn’t it.  Kick a man when he’s down.  The speaker was a man walking away; his young son, dancing a jig beside him as they made their escape.  It was rude, I thought, to criticize and then just turn your back on further discussion.

Since our Norwegian friend went to the loo, our table has fallen silent, like the open-mouthed balloon released by a party several tables over and that now lay scuppered between our glasses.  None of us would ever be the life of any party —   ;-).  Outside, there’s a commotion.  Two lads are running what we’ll later learn to be the “First Annual Cam Underwater Bicycle Race”.  The River Cam, as it turns out, is not that terribly deep.  I’m afraid that one or both of the riders may be speared by the punters’ poles.  I need to contain the thought for fear that I might leap out of the window to save them proactively from their certain fate, or, to save me from mine: boredom.  But, just then one of the Englishmen continues our language lesson.

He’s been asked about his up-coming travels.  First, he’s off to visit his wife’s family in Poland, before flying off to a lecture at Michigan State University in the USA.  Po-Land, he says, as if he were referring to the Land of the Po.  His pronunciation is actually rather faithful to the Polish, polanie (/po-lan-yah/), the word meaning “field” from which Poland is likely derived.  Incidentally, Po is the Polish word for “about” or “of the”.  So Po-Land might as well be an odd graft of Polish and English, appropriately taken to mean “of the land”.  The North Americans are more used to hearing Pole-Land — a land of pole-makers, no doubt.  Pole is another Polish word meaning “land”, albeit a slightly different, more generalized type of land than is meant by polanie.

It’s the Englishman’s pronunciation of Michigan that pulls the wheels off of the acoustic go-cart.  To North American ears, it is the equivalent of poking a stick into a turning bicycle wheel.  Mitch Egan, I hear the Englishman say.  Where is Mitch Egan State University?  This is the /ch/ of the English “church” rather than the softer /sh/ of the French fur traders who worshiped in the wilds of Michigan and borrowed the name from the native Ojibwe people.  It’s similar to the name of the French tyre (tire) company, Michelin.  Here in England, a country that prefers the French word “flambeau” to the older Middle English “torch”, the proximity of England to France is for naught.  The English, who incidentally have reserved the word “torch” to mean “flashlight”, know the Michelin Man as Mr. Mitch E. Lan.  Given this glottal stop mid-word, Michelin has the sound of a flat tyre, going thumpity thump in British English.

The penchant of British English for men’s names doesn’t end with Mitch Egan and Mitch E. Lan.  Mr. Nick On is a Nikon camera man for example.  At those prices, I once overheard a middle-aged woman in an electronics store remark, I dare say he will nick on, right out of me pocketbook!  Nick, in common British parlance, means to steal, you see.  It’s been my experience that, in the world of cameras, however, you get what you pay for.  A North American photographer might say, It was a nigh con.  I just couldn’t buy that camera.  I’d have to buy a whole new set of lenses as my Canon lenses just will not fit this camera.  Fortunately, “nigh con” is now rather archaic American English, meaning “to be nearly taken in”.  Meanwhile, in its corporate offices in Japan, Nikon — pronounced /knee con/ — actually means a feeling of extreme gratitude, even for the smallest things in life, like Thank God, we didn’t build a car and market it as a Nova in Puerto Rico, where “no va” means “it does not go”.

I’m beginning to wonder if our Norwegian friend will ever return from the loo.  It’s possible that she’s gone outside, to teach the punters a thing or two.  Let a real salty dog tell you, she might say, a thing or two.

   

  

Une bonne idée, comme un bon fire!

(This was originally published on 05 November 2009, on my now defunct blog.)

[Warning: this may be bawdy - it's from England afterall.]

The Americans gave the English Haloween, the least I can do is give America this reminder of a very British holiday.

Tonight is Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes Day ….
In case you’d forgotten!

We all head over to Midsummer Common at sundown – which is at 4:23 p.m. today.  (… which means I’ll be in the dark before the end of lunch time in Florida or not quite the end of breakfast in Texas.)

We’ll all join hands around a huge, literally flam’n fire.  There’s already what looks like the worlds tallest wooden Christmas tree on the spot where the Circus – Zippos : yes that’s a lighter in the states: they were hot – tent stood just last week.  And, on the pile (a word that means "stately mansion" in the British English of the posh, the well-to-do, or "home-sweet-home" in the British English of the common folk), which is formed from remnants of shipping pallets, there is hung the dried cow-pies (pats in British English) left on the Common by the grazing chocolate cows only just days before Zippos arrived.

And, once our hands are locked, we will all sing Who-Ha Who-Ha – or whatever Who-s hear when they’re not being heard by Horton.

And, then, … then, we will set off bigger-than-Fourth-of-July fireworks to commenorate the Gunpowder Plot that might have blown up a Reformation Parliament if ol’ Guy weren’t caught and, himself, set alight first.   Fawkes told those who stopped him that he was just rolling a kegger into the keep for the Parliamentarians to get high on after a hard-day’s work.  (Days are short here, if you haven’t gathered, in an English Fall and Winter.)  No one bought it.  But, that’s why they don’t serve beer on the Common.  That and, I suppose, they don’t want any drunken Yobs stumbling out of the Common, across Butt Green, an adjacent expanse of pitted lawn, and into the traffic of Maiden’s Causeway, which is a road.

I understand that a local Vicar – that’s a priest who is married – our former neighbour, Roger Williams, may give a benediction.  David just can’t stop marvelling: he came all this way from Road Eye-lan, only to encounter the reincarnation of the State’s founder, erm (that’s how we spell “um” here – same pronunciation … the “r” - when not at the beginning of a word - is like an “h”), Roger Williams.  The name is even pronounced Rog-ah Williams as it is in Providence, RI.  (Yes, Barbara Walters fans, Pwahvidence, Roe d'Eye-lan.)

After the fireworks, we’ll try to clog our various blood vessels with deep-fried fish’n'chips or toad-in-ah-hole (that’s something like a pig-in-a-blanket, only much, much bigger) and either served in a dur-ee news-pay-pah, which they call “dead common” here.   Don’t ask me what "dead common" means.  “I’m dying!” used to be shouted during the act of procreation.  So, maybe they just mean that they weren’t born royalty.  British slang is like that: backward after a fashion.  Say in ain’t so: you don’t say NO you say it’s ON.  (I jest.) … Like your American “bad” meaning like Michael Jackson when he was still alive, or, Phat with its Khmer (oh, Cambodian) spelling.

I understand that chili is a more traditional food for the night – but it kinda won’t stay in the newspaypah.  The Cambridge News doesn’t hold much news as it is.

Anyway, I’m actually looking forward to the candy floss.  It is perhaps the only floss you don’t want between your teeth.  No more said.  No more.  You all call it cotton candy in the States.  Unlike fish and the toad that’ll be wrapped in newspaypah, the floss will be wrapped around newspaypah.  We like recyclin’ ‘e-ah.

We were all told to bring our torches and to watch out for the Yobs.  When they said “torches”, I assume they meant flashlights – British English is so quaint.  But, if a flashlight is torch, what then is torch?  I keep seeing that Frenchman’s painting: Zees ees not a peep, and, envisioning a scene from Frankenstein: the villagers carrying fire at the end of a fag – speaking of quaint, a burning fag is not what it used to be in the American deep south, i.e., not me set on fire; it is, rather, a bundle of sticks – fire wood, in other words.

Nor do I know how a flashlight helps you watch out for the Yobs, unless they really meant a torch.  What, you ask, is a Yob?  You can be forgiven if you think it a troglodyte, arisen from the pages of H.G. Wells 1895 Time Machine.  Like tonight’s fireworks, it is set in England too.  But, those were Morlocks.

The first time I heard the word “troglodytes”, I thought I had heard “frog luddites” - some frogs, you know, do savage themselves away in caves, adverse to the technological progress of home building, as depicted in 19th Century kiddie-lit (in evidence I offer you Caldecott’s 1889 Frog a would a wooing go), or, the wonders of high speed Internet.

No, a Yob – literally boY, spelled backward – is just a social misfit.  Maybe they take their Swift – the writer, not the bird – seriously here in Cambridge.  I’m refering to his treatise of 1729 on eating Irish babies; A Modest Proposal, it was called.  Why should it not be turned on the wayward, hoodie-youth gathering in our parks, on our greens (that's a park, not a salad) and lurking amidst our commons (that's a park too, just more sociable)?  I understand that, like chestnuts, they’re best over an open flame.

You ask me, that’s what happens when you go holding a mirror “up to society”.  The social contract fails you, ev-ery time.  Socialized medicine, indeed.

A swift, by the way – the bird, not the writer – is a troglodyte too.  It gets confusing.  That’s why we have fireworks this evening.  Clears the mind in the same what it clear's the night sky of birds.  Though apparently, it may make getting to work a bit difficult tomorrow morning, what with all of the bonfire smoke laying over the low, rolling East Anglian landscape.

Oh, yeah … now I remember.  When in doubt as to an English word, speak French.  If a British torch is an American flashlight, then an American torch is a British flambeau.   Flambeau: that’s French, for flambeau.

Expect to hear it during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.  “Dame Brindley is now carrying the Olympic flambeau into the stadium.”  Of course, they may duck the issue for the international audience and call it simply, "the Olympic flame".

Forgive me for thinking of Dame Brindley.  1948 was the last time that the Olympics was held here, in London – Austerity Olympics they were called; post-war deprivations and all that rot.  It's austerity England again.  And, with so many librarians being put out to pasture, I imagine Dame Brindley, THE Librarian, would jump at the chance to enlighten a stadium.

Rot, by the way is an example of that other fine tradition in British slang: the Rhyme.  You see it all over children’s books.  No wonder there are Yobs and Lirgs bounding to the assistance of old ladies everywhere as they cry out: I floss me teeth in a glass of wahtah on each an’ every night!  Translation: she looses it when frightened, calls the bobbies ’round, who rolls them Yobs off to a jail cell for the eve-nin.  Rot doesn’t mean rot.  It means lot … as in all that lot.

Anyway, the Olympics previous to 1948 was the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

My mind is just crack’n, I suppose.  ‘36.  Berlin.  Nazi.  Fire.  Book burning. – Librarian’s humour. -  And, voila (that’s English for “sha-zam!” and French for "told you so") … Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library.  I can just picture it, she places the flambeau into the Olympic cauldron, and, racing outward around the stadium’s electronc displays …. pages of books and manuscripts held in British libraries: Magna Carta, Doomsday Book, etc.  And, what could be finer for the Austerity Olympics of 2012.  The Magna Carta, which started it all!  And, the Doomsday Book … it is going to be 2012, after all.

Well, the world’s not going to end this evening – okay, this afternoon.
But, I wish you were here!  It's Bonfire Night!

   

International Departures: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

This is a story about transportation.  I have none.  Well, actually I have a bike and my own two feet.  But, I have no motorized transport to speak of.  I suppose I could ride the bus, though Cambridge is so walkable that I’d feel ridiculously shameful.  I have occasionally taken the train to distant places: Birmingham, Ely, London, and York, so far.  But, a train is on the order of airplane.  It is not something I ride - not yet anyway - with any regularity.  And, as long as I may remain a tourist in London, the subway is more amusement ride than means of getting here or there.

I have to say that the Tube, London’s underground transport, scares the hell out of me.  But that’s another story, here only in brief.  I should clarify that it is not the tubular stations and roundish trains that scare me.  It is the narrow platforms.  Most of them leave me dizzy.  I’m one of those people that Tube station announcers refer to as having gotten “sick on the tracks”.  That’s a euphemism.  What they mean to say, though English civility prevents them, is “suddenly severed” into, oh, let's see: head, two arms, torso, and two legs.  What’s that: six parts.  Some people might count that as better than drawn and quartered.  But, I hug the station walls, hunched over like a lower-case f and looking to the world like a man who has been homeless for too long.

I have begun studying the Highway Code and other driving instruction manuals helpfully issued by the British government.  The road guide is 250 pages long.  The road sign guide is 100 pages long.  That’s much longer than the short little pamphlets drivers get in the U.S.A.  In one hundred and eighty-five days,  when I can legally take my driving tests, both theoretical and practical - I imagine that I will have a reasonable chance of passing.

One hundred and eighty-five days is the amount of time that the British give foreigners - those of us, anyway, who learned to drive on the wrong side of the road - to forget our bad habits and to learn new ones.  

David isn’t having anything of it.  He is afraid, I suppose, that an old dog can’t be taught new tricks.  When asked recently to lead next summer’s geology study-trip to Spain, his remark was, “Well, at least I can drive there.  I’ll be on the right side of the road.”  Don’t ask me which the right side of the road is.  I’ve never learned to tell my right from my left.  So, I guess David figures that I’m kind of a blank-slate, here.  Ready and able to learn.  That will make me the designated driver in the United Kingdom.  And, that’s saying quite a lot for David who’s never trusted my bat-out-of-hell style of driving.

A Brummie - that’s someone from Birmingham, England - a cab driver once told me that Britons drive on whatever side of the road they drive on because that’s the side of the road they used for jousting.  The comment conjured up visions of cars equipped with harpoons.  It is something I could have used back in Florida with all of its old, slow driver.  But, I haven’t seen it here yet.  I imagine that I will when I really get out on the road.  A country that maintains driving on the jousting side would almost certainly have maintained a jousting tradition of some sort, right?

The jousting comment is easily rationalized.  Most people are and would have been right-handed.  So, they would have carried the jousting pole firmly in their right hand.  Let’s just imagine that a horse, unlike a car, steers itself pretty much with little or no attention.  All one’s left hand would have to do is


hold onto the reins.  If my pole is in my right hand, that must mean that I’m driving on the left side of the road.  On second thought, the logic is kind of counter-intuitive.  It’s far easier to simply maintain that the steering wheel is always near the middle of the road.  Unless, you happen to be in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where all bets are off.  Driving an American car on the left side of the road, as is their custom, is probably necessary to keep the tourists off the roads.  Anyway, here in the United Kingdom, it doesn’t help that Britons park on either side of the road in any direction they please.  It confounds one’s sense of the proper flow of traffic.  And, not a lick more helpful, Britons seem to prefer, when able, to drive in the middle of the road.  That sense of owning the road is probably what gave rise to jousting.

So, why do you think the French drive on the right?  They too had a jousting tradition.  I am certain that the reason had little to do with contemporary Continental advice to Drive right!   I have an idea, thinking ahead to the day I can drive again.  Maybe it was practical experience shifting.  While a lazy leftie can hold the reins of a horse, that left hand has to take charge to shift gears.  Just thinking about it makes the fingers of my left hand slightly dizzy.  - I won’t say “spastic”.  The term is politically incorrect here in the U.K.   The disability of palsy with which the term is associated here, however, more aptly describes the motion sickness of my left hand than does the American sense of “spastic” associated with the self-deprecating awareness of the off-spring of the nouveau riche.  I’m going to have to get a car with automatic transmission to pass my practical test.  Driving a standard transmission here might just trigger one of my, so called, classic migraines.

David’s uncertain ability to drive on the wrong side of the road isn’t the only thing that unnerves him.  ”I’ll be able to read the signs”, he also said of driving in Spain.  I was puzzled by the remark.  ”But, they’re in English here.” I observed.  ”Exactly!” came his reply.  In Spain, you know that you have to translate.  You’re always translating.  In our experience driving in the Mexican highlands, when the sign translated as “The road dissolves ahead of you”, you knew that the road was literally going to dissolve.  And, experience soon taught that it would usually dissolve on a hair-pin turn, falling away into a mountain-side ravine that the locals tried to fill with a bus-load of tourists on their way to Palenque or Oaxaca or San Cristóbal de las Casas.

In the United Kingdom, all of the signs are in English.  If a road sign indicated that the road ahead would dissolve, you'd probably stop in panicked disbelief.  A more likely encounter with a sign indicating a soft verge might leave an American, familiar with converging traffic, wondering if skating across lanes were not only possible but encouraged.  You don’t know what needs to be translated, really.  A “carriageway” is eventually sensible enough as to be understood.  But for the newly arrived American, it might just as readily elicit a sense of driving through Pennsylvania Dutch country.  You go slow, keeping an eye out for horse-and-buggy.

The U.S.A. is the country where the French yogurt company, Danone, decided to go about its business without its e.  Americans would be more likely to think Dan-One than Danon.  We’re a simple people.  Some of us would end up in the supermarket asking for Dan One thinking he might be the store-manager.  ”I need to speak to Dan One.  The commercial said he’d know where to find the new yogurt that will restore my health.”  What then do you think we make of a road sign reading “adverse camber”.  What the hell is a camber?  The more educated of us might recall that Camber was the legendary king after whom Cambria, or ancient Wales, was named.  We might take “adverse camber” as a reminder that we’re not in Wales.  Mindful of dry British humour, such a reminder might make perfectly quirky sense.  Wales, being something like the U.K.’s Oz.  I am not actually certain how an American road sign might label an “adverse camber”.  ”Turns into the gravitation forces of the bend” probably wouldn’t be understood.  My guess is that an American would find the sign “Speed


Kills” on the approach to an adverse camber.  Or, maybe more poetically “Death Awaits” in certain parts of Appalachia.  I’m pretty sure that the simple sign “Bend” suffices.  But, I’m also certain that “Bend” means nothing to us.  ”Yep.  That was a bend!” I’d tell myself taking a curve in the road at 75 mph in a 45 mph zone.  Adverse gravitational effects have always acted upon cars travelling roads made for horses and buggies. 

This is to say nothing of signs indicating multi-lane round-abouts.  They might as well read “three ring circus in hell”.  But, most bear no English other than the names of nearby places.

Neither signage nor the Highway Code is helping me much as a pedestrian.  Road crossings, in the United Kingdom, sometimes present considerable risk.  It doesn’t matter if I’m in a Zebra, a Pelican or a Puffin, or even a Toucan crossing.  What I feel that I sometimes need is a massive Trojan horse.  A prophylaxis.  A personal crossing guard, if not the national guard.  I am not a cat.  I have one life.  I have no aspirations to live it out as a hood ornament.  Not even the slightest curiosity, though I am intrigued by what it might feel like to be a lolly on the windscreen of a lorry, in need of scraping off.  I should Americanize that: I am intrigued by what it might feel like to be taffy on the windshield of a truck, in need of scraping off.

The rule is simple: traffic stops the second I plant one foot inside the crossing.  And, until I do that I’m fair-game to be taken as target practice.  ”Bag the buck, blokes.  C’mon, can’t ya see that target on me vest?”  I prefer to live by a simpler rule: Rock-Paper-Scissors.  Only, rock never crushes scissors.  He might paint them a different colour, however.  If you’re ahead of me you can see why I’m so intrigued with lollies on windscreens.  Bikes take out pedestrians.  Cars take bikes.  Buses take cars, or, lorries take small caravans (um, trucks take out small vans and SUVs).  And, trains on level crossings take buses and lorries.  The rule is based on one simple principle: the more metal you’re pushing, the more clear your right-of-way.  I should put that in terms Americans can easily understand: might makes right.  

Honestly, I am amazed, actually, that Cambridge is rated as one of the United Kingdom’s safest cities vis-à-vis traffic accidents.  Mindfully, as a pedestrian, one has to realize that one is at the lower end of the food chain.  No one crosses the road without looking both ways.  This caution lends a keen sense of irony to driving scenes in the British sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.  That oft-repeated line, “Mind the pedestrian, Richard”, spoken by character of Hyacinth Bucket to her husband is awfully hilarious.  Drivers do yield to a pedestrian crossing an intersection, but the pedestrian yields to the bike and car more generally, except at a signalled crossing.

For a cyclist, the fun begins in the bike lane, presuming there is a bike lane.  Bike lanes are easily followed where they exist.  They’re painted blood red, probably with real blood.  There aren’t many bike lanes.  So, if they are painted with real blood, that is probably good.  There certainly seems to be enough cause for blood to be spilled.  Just before the year-end holidays, the local newspaper ran as series of He-said/She-said articles.  He, by the way, was the driver of a sport-car.  She was a cyclist.  It just happened that way.  In reality, the sexes are equally represented among both car drivers and cyclists.   The commentary of each on the other, however, was a vicious as any arising out of the 1970’s sex wars.  The enmity of the opposing camps aside, real circumstances: road quality and the number of people on the road regardless form of transportation, render selfishness a third and distant wheel.

I’ve seen bikes travelling 15 mph passed by cars going 30 to 40 mph with just inches between them.  One delivery driver came to my door not so long ago, muttering.  Mine was his last stop in Cambridge.  He couldn’t wait to get out.  ”Too many cars, on too narrow streets, headed right for you!  Whilst too many cycles seem as though they’ve got a right to the motorway!” he said with a certain exasperation that print can’t capture.  The rub is that these streets weren’t designed for the traffic that they carry today.

Something has to go first.  Rock-Paper-Scissors is as sensible as any rule of the road.

At another time, I might have been logging an experience from the road, in Ankara, Turkey.  There I once hired a taxi to take me from the city centre to the airport.  With all direct routes in grid-lock, the driver turned onto a one-way street.  We were headed in the direction we needed to go, but we were travelling against the traffic.  The experience was very much as David feels now.  It had movie-qualities.  Rush Hour 2.  Goods were flying and pedestrians, running for cover as the driver made a lane of the broad sidewalk.  Reading the fear telegraphed from my eyes into the rear-view mirror, the driver explained in broken English, “You pay me.  They no pay.”  I could only mutter: “Dış hatlar gidiş, lutfen.  Dış hatlar gidiş.”  International departures, please.