ONE FINE DAY YOU’LL LOOK AT ME [335]

I use the word “fine” a lot. I like that it can be used both to indicate something is better than good, but also merely satisfactory, almost sarcastically so: “And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was fine.”

For me, I have become conscious enough of how often I say “fine” that I felt compelled to look up its meaning to check I was using it correctly: having done that, it appears to be as pliant a word for use as a descriptor as “jigger” is to describe tools, measurements and people.

Outside of describing fine lines, cutting it fine, or fining someone for breaking the law, “fine” describes qualities that look impressive, or merely good, but of a level enough to say something about it. When you have to say something, this may be the point when it becomes easy to use a one-syllable word to bridge a gap of silence. You can “fine” when you want to agree, or when you don’t want to say anything more. It definitely sounds better than saying “good” especially as, if you collect comic books, “fine” is a better condition than even “very good”, although no-one would use “near mint” when grading their interactions with someone.

What I realised is that “fine” is an adverb as well as a noun, because adverbs qualify a verb if placed after it, rather than replacing it – it’s fine, it works fine, that’s fine, I’m fine. It pleases me, it works well, it’s satisfactory, it’s fine... and that’s an end to it, just like the Latin verb “finire” intended.

In short, with the world as it is, “fine” is as much a word as anyone should really expect. Ask the “Goon Show” character Eccles to comprehend a situation, and the only possible answer is “fine, fine, fine,” and the appropriate title for Diane Williams’s 2016 collection of very short stories of discombobulating situations is “Fine Fine Fine Fine Fine” – you can’t get any better than that.

GLORY DAYS, WELL THEY’LL PASS YOU BY [31]

Everything I am about to tell you happened before nine o’clock this morning.

I had arrived at work a good hour before my day was due to start, so I could go through my usual warm-up process – reading through e-mails, stretching, continuing to wake up. Meanwhile, two of my managers were talking about the latest of their Christmas dinner out from the previous night. One manager then told the other about a faux pas they had apparently perpetrated, where they had referred to putting something away as stuffing it in their “glory hole.”

This admission had already started waves of laughter, of both recognition and embarrassment. Sitting across from the conversation, I had missed the cause of the laughter. One manager looked to me, and said I didn’t want to know what they were talking about, like I had stumbled across an awkward situation, while the other, who had made the faux pas, walked to my desk to explain, clearly still wanting to get the issue off their chest. They started by apologising if what they were about to say sounded offensive – that is always a good way to start a conversation.

The origin of the term “glory hole” is unknown, having appeared in the early nineteenth century. There is the word “gloriole,” derived from Latin, which is another word for a halo, but this appeared at around the same time, so there appears to be no link. At the same time, there is no clear indication how “glory hole” came to mean an untidy room or cupboard used for storage, or a small furnace used by glassblowers, or a term used in North American mining to describe an open quarry.

The meaning most used nowadays, referring to enabling anonymous sexual activity between two rooms, came from Polari, the secret gay language that employed a combination of English and French and Italian to help save lives, at a time when being gay in the UK was illegal. While sounding appropriate in its own way, it sounds quaint and whimsical in a very British manner, just as the Polari term for public toilets were “cottages,” because they were often built to resemble small houses.

Just like it was at last night’s Christmas dinner, the meaning of “glory hole” changed with the people you were with, and what you are doing, just like the words “thing” or “jigger” might do – evidently, the other people there understood it to mean something entirely different, but it had not meant that one meaning had supplanted the other.

This was where the conversation interested me the most. The definition of “glory hole,” like “gay,” “tranny,” and numerous other words, was being defined as a generational thing, and by one other person at work, who offered to take a picture of the glory hole they had at home, as being “political correctness.” The non-sexual uses of “glory hole” are used less, but are not invalid, and are examples of how the English language continues to develop. In fact, the whole story does speak to the human condition – when someone sees a hole, they must fill it.