AND I’M TRYING HARD TO FIT AMONG YOUR SCHEME OF THINGS [89]

I showed 2017 the back of my hand months ago. Events, days, news cycles and realities changed multiple times daily, and questioning it drained us. Rather than try and make sense of it one more time, I offer below the choicest sentences from my last year. Happy with appearing to know what I was talking about, I hope 2018 is the peaceful and brilliant year we need – if it is not, we’ll build that lunar colony together.

*

It is not enough knowing where you can go, it’s making sense of what you find… Anyone who thinks they have it all worked out should be checked to see if they are already dead… Everything bubbles to the surface, and what a surface to pick from.

If you can put aside the usual attempts to find a rational, objective, absolute truth, and think about how truth and knowledge are constructed out of all the discussions and interpretations that led to it, then you will understand it more than just having it handed to you on a plate.

We must now also contend with the new term “alternative facts,” i.e. facts that counter the facts most unhelpful to your own cause… Failing to inform the public could even be considered as anti-social… If there is a moment to be seized, you have to make a persuasive argument. If it has been made before, then it has to be clear why it is worth making the case again.

George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” gave us the idea of “Newspeak” as a way of restricting the population’s ability to articulate itself, allowing the rulers to control them more easily – but what if the head of state does it to themselves first?

When the on-off-volume switch fell off, it was replaced by the end of a used chapstick, jammed into the hole to serve for nearly a full decade.

We rely on “Big Data” to anticipate our needs, demands, and wishes. What that means, however, is that companies can no longer be in a position to guess what people might need.

You may have always identified as a Range Rover driver before you could own one, or it could be something you have only recently recognised about yourself… My view of Range Rover drivers, and their cars, has come from prejudice, and that is only because I don’t know enough about the subject… I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover.

For many, libraries are still a valuable resource that are too useful to lose, even if I find it harder to find a use for mine. Even for something delightfully obscure, knowledge should not be made harder to find and, if we going to stay online instead, nothing can be left behind.

This is not the first time I bought something because the packaging made me laugh.

If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I think Nick Knowles was there too.

Good debate needs everyone to speak the same language to each other, and good society allows everyone to participate without pissing about over using language to exclude people.

Donald Trump uses “fake news” like the main character of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, calls everyone “goddam phoneys.”

Does this mean that any attempt that writing something that is deliberately nonsense is doomed to be made sense of by the next person to come into contact with it? Possibly, so long as there was a reason to do it.

People can believe whatever they want, but if you do want to cut your nose off to spite your face, don’t be surprised if people happy with their own noses decide to offer you a scalpel – and if you think this will work instead, trying to sound reasonable will not work either, especially if the words are not there.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

DON’T TALK OF DUST AND ROSES [55]

It is a tragedy that George Orwell, one of the greatest writers in the English language, and one of the most vociferous defenders of the correct use of the English language, did not live long enough to see the neologisms he created with satiric intent – Big Brother, Room 101, doublethink, and so on - pass into regular usage, to lance through perceived injustices.

Orwell preferred that we should be as clear and accurate with the use of our language as possible, so we will never know if he was pleased that we had to borrow from his own work to help achieve that. However, I do imagine that your name becoming a term, like “Orwellian,” referring to the control of language through misinformation, propaganda and denial, is a secret hope of any writer.

Newspeak, the fictional controlled version of English featured in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was, of course, never meant to help people find exactly what they want to say, which its words have since done. While the uses and intentions of Newspeak are adequately covered elsewhere, including within the novel itself, the possibility that it can create the two-word sentence “Oldspeak ungoodthinkful” should be unsettling enough.

“Oldspeak” is the Newspeak term for the English language that it sought to replace, and the assertion that Oldspeak is described by the following word means you can do without the word “is.” In the novel, “goodthink” is described as having orthodox thought, i.e. the type of good thoughts that are in line with the ruling party, in that they keep everyone in line. Therefore, the notion of “good,” and the word “good,” can only be described in relation to the party. The suffix “-ful” makes an adjective out of any noun in Newspeak, just as “-wise” makes an adverb out of a noun, and using “un-“ makes any noun into a negative, deliberately removing the need for something to be described as “bad,” while placing anything that is “un-“ against the notion of what the party regards as “good.” Therefore, for the party, speaking “old” English is not something a good citizen would do.

I will say that my heart sank while typing that last paragraph. If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” published three years before “Nineteen Eight-Four,”  Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five “than say something outright barbarous.” These days, the point that makes is more like using  social media to immediately say what you feel,  without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.

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.