Welcome to Le Mot Juste – and to my Blog, which I’m calling Ways of Words: a place to talk about language, communication, writing, word weaving.
My digitally-creative nephew Tim helped me set up the web site, nudging me through my technological anxiety, bringing me to the point where I’m now excited: not just about organizing what I do into more visible and user-friendly shape, but about the fact that I’m starting a Blog. Tim tells me it’s the right move: to work in tandem with my editing service. This is a novel thought. I’d never considered blogging; or thought of myself as a potential blogger.
But the more I think about it, the more I like the idea; and wonder why it took so long. I’m a communicator. A languager: clunky word, currently much contested in academic discourse, but I’m not going there; I’m using it in the common sense way to mean someone who is well and truly into language, and conversation, discussion, representation, reflection, storying. And that’s me.
And it always has been. I’ve probably only consciously, mindfully, officially loved language as much as I do for the last half of my now long life. But I’ve lived and enjoyed a language-rich life since I was small. And this came directly from my Mum. Now she was a languager – although she would have ruled the word right out of order, as very grammatically wrong. She disliked split infinitives and sentences that ended in a preposition. She wouldn’t have countenanced languager. But it’s what she was.
70 years later, I still hear her voice carrying us through our childhood: storying, imagining, singing, playing, comforting. She was the best story teller. I wonder now where her facility came from; and I assume it must have come down through generations.
I think it works that way. And was it always the women? I think not. Both my brothers are storytellers, narrators, spoken and written word crafters. I always assumed everyone had this facility: I now know how wrong I was.
Mum was for a short while a journalist, back in the early 1930s, when women didn’t do such things. She was simultaneously Cousin Peter and Dear Marjory on adjoining pages of a Dundee newspaper. She went on to become a governess – sent away from home to ‘get over’ a love affair deemed inappropriate, she being the daughter of a farm worker, he being the son and heir to a large neighbouring estate.
He was dispatched to the ‘colonies’, to supervise the planting of tea, and to wreck various kinds of havoc on himself and others; she was exiled differently – governess to two small girls in North Wales: a long way from her Scottish hills. She eventually became Mum to us five kids, transplanted to the even more unfamiliar world of the North Yorkshire coast.
The fact that my sense of childhood is one of warmth, love, closeness, safeness, fun – and discipline – is due in large part to her ways with words. It was war time, then post-war time, air raids, gas masks, food shortages, ration books, soldiers billeted in spare bedrooms, Dad away from home – potential and real awfulness; but threading through it all, memories of Mum’s voice.
Not just the canon of British children’s stories and songs – Wind in the Willows, Squirrel Nutkin, The Owl and the Pussycat – and chunks of Shakespeare (yes), Robbie Burns, A.A. Milne, but her own stories, peopled by all kinds of human and non-human characters; nonsense rhymes, made-up songs about us kids; some in wonderful serial form, like the story of The Bears, who lived in the flowerbeds that marked our weary climb back up the cliff paths after our daily walk down to the beach. Each flower bed belonged to a different bear. Each day brought a new development in their strangely eventful lives.
Later, when she was still Mum, but the five of us were scattered in different corners of the country/world, she wrote long, sharp, funny letters to each of us, every week; pages and pages, beautiful texts.
She did the daily Guardian crossword; worked quotes from her favourite voices into corners of her own: Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Tom Lehrer, Buddy Holly, Robbie Burns; fiddled and fixed language, sang it and told it and crafted it in wonderful ways. And so it was easy for us kids to be language people too: writers, journalists, songwriters, teachers, film makers, horse-whisperers, reporters, storytellers. Our kids – and our grand-kids – are also language people.
So I know where my relationship with language comes from.
I’ve always known how to play with it – shape it, laugh at it, cry with it, draw courage and inspiration from it, be quiet and calm with it, teach it, learn from it. As a Mum myself, and now as Grandma, I’ve used it in such similar ways to Mum that I often hear her in my voice: her inflections and her rhythms, her ways of structuring stories, introducing characters or incidents, resolving and reflecting, re-enacting interactions and dialogues; and I sometimes find myself ordering words in sentences in ways that are hers not mine.
I hear these same inflections and patterns coming back to me in my daughters’ voices, and in my grand-kids’ stories or word games; even in the telegraphic version of storying of my almost 2 year old grand-daughter, who leans her head to the side, with a canny, knowing look, and says Aha…, yes, I’ve heard you, and yes, I agree, but that’s all I have to say – in that Scottish hillside way. How clever it is – that’s three generations down.
Language has been my trade. As a radio journalist and producer, an editor in a publishing house, a teacher and a writer. I’ve mined it for all its accessible and inaccessible goods; and I’ve been lucky: it’s taken me into some really good places; allowed me to have good conversations and interactions with many people – especially students – over the years.
And there’s a lot to tell (another time) about how these exchanges and interactions have reconfigured how I think about communication, words, meaning.
There’s more to say about Flaubert too, another time. He’s famous for his (not many) novels and short stories; for his crazy pursuit – successful most of the time – of le mot juste. But when I decided to do my PhD on Flaubert, it wasn’t on his published work, his successful product; but on his personal letters: the massive outpouring – unedited, uncrafted, spontaneous – fifteen volumes at the last count.
That’s another story. A story about the man and the writer; and about very different ways with words.
There’s a lot I will probably want to talk about now that I’ve started. About language and identity; language and power (though that’s probably all talked out by now); language and gender; language and voice – spoken and written. I need to do more homework though and work out the nature of this blog genre.
I think – I hope – that it’s not just about me writing my thoughts, but about conversations and contributions from you – dialogue. I’m looking forward to this.
Tim’s advice for this first post was to keep it fairly short, just think about communicating something about myself and making links with the general format and intent of the web site. And I haven’t said anything about editing! And that’s a really interesting topic. So that’s where I’ll start next time.
Again – hello and welcome. All input, feedback, suggestions, advice, general commentary – all communication back will be great to get. Let’s see where this goes.