As those of you who followed my #walksleuth posts on Instagram and Facebook over the last three months will know, I have been out more. Currently, we live in a village surrounded by fields and my daily walks have taken me in every direction as I have learned to love living in a place that is on the edge of the counties of Rutland, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire. Who knew that one recent walk would take me on such a journey.
Two weeks ago, as I crossed the playing field to our village nature reserve known as The Deeps, I noticed a dark-haired lady over by the swings. She was holding out a biscuit to a little girl with loose blonde curls and enunciating clearly: ‘Thank you.”
I could not resist calling over. “That sounds like the voice of a grandma!”
“Too right,” replied the grandma.
“Sorry,” I began. “I’ve got a bit of a radar for grannies at the moment as I am going to be one myself soon.” Oops. Am I beginning to turn into one of those boring old ladies who force strangers to look at their boasting books?
“Congratulations,” said the grandma.
“Is that an Aussie twang?” I asked. This was turning into a lucky day. An expat and a grandma and in my village too.
“Yeah. Right.” The lady who was now destined to become my new friend gave a helpless shrug.
I invited her for a cup of tea there and then. She came. We talked non-stop, of course we talked non-stop. I told her about me and she told me about her. I guess our life stories took about 30 minutes each. Now I knew that my new friend, Catey, had had an Uncle John who was a writer and writing professor who had emigrated to the US and that Uncle John (John B Bremner) had written a book. That book was called Words on Words: A Dictionary for Writers and Others Who Care About Words and published in 1980 by Columbia University Press.
“It’s just a dictionary, really,” Catey told me. “Written for Americans. I liked it a lot. I still remember his entry for Consistency: ‘Writers must learn the thrill of monotony,’ he wrote. That tickled me.”
I’m a stickler for consistency and yes is it boring and monotonous. I drum it into my students’ heads when they take my How to Write a How-to Book programme because writing a book is not all about writing. It is about layout, patterns and consistency too. I bought a second-hand copy of Uncle John’s book online for £3.98 the same afternoon. When it arrived three days later there was an inscription in the front from Catey herself, written to her colleague, Linda. Catey is still chuckling about that. I know I’m going to love the book more than Linda did.
The etymology rabbit hole
“Many young teachers are being taught not to teach grammar. What used to be the first art of the trivium has become trivial,” he writes in the Introduction.
Trivium, I wondered? What does that mean? I turned to the relevant page in the body text and discovered that in the Middle Ages the first three disciplines of Liberal Arts were known as the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. Etymologically, tri comes from Latin and means ‘three’ while via means ‘road’. Literally, a trivium is a place where three roads meet.
Inspired by flamenco
Words fascinate me whatever the language. In May, when on holiday in Seville, Spain, we were transfixed by a flamenco dancer who was busking in the dappled shade of the jacaranda trees in a small square. Her face contorted by a combination of agony and ecstasy, she held her arms above her head in the shape of a swan’s wings just before it takes flight. Every sinew of her blood-red-tipped fingers were taut as the strings on her accompanist’s guitar. I could swear a tear swelled in the corner of her eye. The dancer was emotion in action.
Later, on the top deck of the open top bus tour that Ian and I love to take when we visit a foreign city, we plugged the cheap lime green headphones into our ears and settled back into the steaming plastic seats to learn that Andalucia is the birthplace of flamenco. The art form brings with it a host of terms that gave rise to its own expressive language. Flamenco was declared an item of intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2010 and is a mix of dancing, singing, music, dancing and poetry. Some say it is a philosophy of life. I love this kind of information. This blog has already featured a meeting of counties, a meeting of roads, a meeting of minds and disciplines and now flamenco too. I needed to know more and so looked ‘flamenco’ up when I got home. Among other things I learned that duende, is the inner force or soul and conveys intense emotion that is experienced by the artist and transmitted to the audience. The way the audience feels when watching is known as pellizco, which means ‘pinch’. These words are now destined to inveigle their way into my language because they are perfect expressions for the kind emotional states writers need to convey.
A must-listen podcast
I’ve always loved etymology and dictionaries and when I discovered that Turkish-British Elif Shafak, the author of the exquisitely written The Island of Missing Trees, has a podcast on words, I had to subscribe. Say Your Word is a simple concept. Shafak takes a single word and spends 15 minutes exploring it. Words like cosmopolitan and grandma, feminism or dirty are taken apart, etymologically speaking and investigated. And yes, she has an episode on duende.
Words are thrilling
“To love anything, you must first know it,” Bremner continues in the Introduction. “To love words, you must first know what they are. Yes, words are symbols of ideas […] They have their own historical and etymological associations, their own romantic and environmental dalliances, their own sonic and visual delights.”
Words are thrilling, exciting and take us on adventures and down rabbit holes of exploration. Catey’s uncle’s book is not ‘just a dictionary’ to me and I’m grateful that I started a conversation with her the other day. Sadly, she is not an expat after all, though she used to live here, and was visiting family for a few weeks. I look forward to reconnecting next summer and will think of her every time I use the word consistency, which is often.
[JP1]pls link to page on calendar 24 jan 2023!
