In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  Chapter Seven. The need for a lingua franca and its inherent dangers

  1. This story is almost entirely based on elements taken from a television programme broadcast during the fiftieth anniversary of the Suez Crisis, including of course that of the young boy who was slapped. Interestingly, the British soldiers admitted that all prisoners were summarily executed and expressed degrees of regret, while their officers denied it angrily.

  2. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 31; David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), p. 438; and Richard Morrison, The Times, T2, Wednesday May 29, 2002, pp. 2-3.

  3. Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804-1999. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 70.

  Chapter Eight. Conclusion

  1. This poem will also appear in my collection of poetry, Presbyopia.

  2. Of course, this attitude in an even cruder form is alive and well, and inhabiting sections of the Scottish middle classes (one journalist appears to have made a career of insulting Gaels and a distinguished intellectual living in Glasgow claimed he would not have wanted one of his daughters to marry an “island boy”). In the network of prejudices and racisms that sadly affect Scotland as they do every other country, the Gaels are not the most unfortunate, but because prejudices against them don’t break the rules of “politically-correct”, they can be uttered in “polite society” which is generally so good at keeping its prejudices hidden. My translator acquaintance was not quite so disagreeable, but for that reason his views were also more disturbing. There is certainly no intended “anti-Englishness” in my example.

  3. Unfortunately this is exactly what is happening, but it is still at a fairly tentative stage. Consider that there was a time when even a great intellectual and man of the left like Shaw could write such lines as “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive” and “if we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture, we must exterminate the kind of people who do not fit into it.” These quotes appear in John Carey’s excellent work on the subject: The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 62-3.

  4. Jeremy Harding, “It Migrates to Them”, London Review of Books, vol. 29, no. 5, 8 March 2007, pp. 25.

  5. Dominic Hilton, “Wrong Headed”, The New Humanist, Sept. 2005, p. 38.

  Copyright

  © Allan Cameron 2008

  First published in 2008 by Vagabond Voices

  This edition published in 2013 by

  Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.,

  Glasgow,

  Scotland.

  ISBN 978-1-908251-25-1

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  Cover design by Mark Mechan

  For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website, www.vagabondvoices.co.uk