“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;”
“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
Words are the most fascinating things. You look at them on the page or the screen, a collection of shapes that put together make sense. Then, not only have they made sense, but they have making sounds in your imagination.
What do you hear in your head when you read words on a page or on a screen? I hear any sound other than London Estuary, I hear enough of it around me all day. The glottal stop that barely existed outside of London 40 years ago is ubiquitous. It is also very uncomfortable to pronounce in true “Lunnun” sound. Bottle, or bo-ew (that’s another thing, an L at the end of a word has now become a truncated W) is so uncomfortable for me to pronounce since the O to the truncated W means moving the sound from my throat to the front of my mouth in double quick time.
I yearn to escape the glottal, but it has seeped out from London into the whole of the country. The consonant is dying as I write. Before long “Countdown” will be words made up of nothing more than a sequence of vowels.
Enough, I hear you say, of this posh old bloke’s ramblings. I’m not posh at all. My grandfather was a guard on the GWR, an aunt or great aunt of my mother’s was in service. All very Downton Abbey and not much Maggie Smith. I was surrounded by gorgeous Gloucester accents on my mother’s side of the family.
Now my father’s family is a mystery, apart from his elder half sister and her family. My father has a touch of the Hampshire in his voice. He was the rebel in the family, that much I know. He was more black sheep than I. There was a family house that somehow or other got lost. His sister has a very clear way of speaking, almost old-fashioned cut glass, as do my cousins (somewhat less cut glass), though I am only in more regular contact with the younger one. They are half sisters. Her sons, my cousins once removed (how I hate all this complex genealogy) came home talking like the other kids at school. They were told they can talk how they like when they leave home, but when they are at home they talked properly. They have turned out to be two of the easiest young people I can understand with nice clear speech, which is well enunciated.
The late Dave Allen gave a wonderful demonstration of lazy London speaking, when he used the word “free”. In the situation he set out, it was unclear if his interlocutor was saying “free” or “three”, and there was a significant difference depending on the interpretation of the pronunciation.
This is not an attack on accents, I am all in favour of accents. It is abuse of the spoken word through laziness I am attacking. As far as “abuse” of of the spoken word is concerned, apart from the horrid glottal, I love the Bristolians’ well documented added L (Dame Eval Turnerl, the famous sopranol of the Carl Rosal Operal company - my spell checker is having a nervous breakdown) and the less well known truncated definite article in Bury. Tthe joke ran “How many cinemas are there in Bury that start with the letters T and H? There’s Th’Odeon, Th’Roxy, Th’ABC ...” - poor spell checker, what am I doing to you?.
But what is in a name? What is a Civil Partnership if not a marriage using a stupid different term in order to have got it on the statute book? Everybody at work kept asking if we were married. When we had the ceremony we considered ourselves married. I use the term that we were married and as an extension of that, I am my husband’s widower. I always referred to him as my late husband with officialdom. I am proud to have been his husband all too briefly, and I am reluctantly proud to say that as a consequence I am his widower.
When the same sex marriage bill was being discussed in the Commons I asked my MP if those of us who have been widowed could have the term applied to us retrospectively, he responded (I paraphrase) that he would ensure that religions would not be forced to conduct ceremonies. I would call that reply insulting. No intelligent person would force religions to do something they don’t want to, since no religion has ever forced people to conform to certain societal norms, have they? It also wasn’t the question I posed. If I were a mean spirited person, I would say he was hiding behind the cassocks of priests to veil his homophobia. But I could not think such a thing of a decent upstanding person as a Member of Parliament. He is an Honourable Member after all.
So what’s in a name? It depends on the word, how you pronounce it, the context in which it is placed. The previous paragraph can be read in several ways. How do you hear it in your head? With candour? With irony? With mean spiritedness? With playfulness? What accent is there? Gloucester? London? Received Pronunciation? Th’Bury way? A Scots Border accent? The generic “Brummie” accent (you have to be careful with them from the Potteries though)?
What’s in the word “Laing”? I leave you with the final words of the Eulogy (not th’Eulogy, please note) “as what I wrote” and delivered at his funeral. As a definition, it’s not that far off the mark.
“Being with him on the cancer roller coaster, from my suspicions of its presence (which he would have rejected out of hand as me over reacting as the resident drama queen of the household), through diagnosis, the palliative chemo and radio therapy, through to his death, being by his side through it all, was the very least I could do for my best friend and lover whom I will always have the privilege to call my husband.”
