grammar

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Island Blog – Shmoodleflampers

Words can turn into a new magic. to describe feelings or nounage within a sentence being described in a moment, arms flying, the right word not there for the grasping and suddenly a new word can swing in like a risk. This word aptly describes what, in the dictionary, might touch on a ‘melee’, but more, it brings in confusion, wild weather, an abundance of something with an authoritative ‘shhh’ finger upheld and a willingness to do nothing about anything, whilst the arse of it shows freedom, the don’t care flip of a. dolphin’s tail in the middle of a massive ocean.

Many of my made-up words come from my wordsmith son. We talk often in this language and as we curious our ways through language and the wildness of it, we find no boundaries within our conversations. We fly out there, laughing, playing with syllables and making verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs. There is no right and no wrong in this play. Dr Zeuss knew this place. It thinks us, thinks me. I can’t speak for him, but for me, I am a boundary fighter, a limit fighter, a don’t tell me where I stop and start woman. There is no aggression in me. I have no interest in what others see as confrontation. I am a peacemaker who likes to push limits and boundaries, gently, respectfully, curiously, definitely.

It rained today, and rained and rained and there’s a winglewangle for you. Cabin fever, yes, even though I had a wonderfull long walk this morning, sans cloud dump, with a friend and two gorgeous labradors, but, by afterlunch, the rain steady and proffering handcuffs, I had to get out. Local shop, loads of laugheroo, pulling out on the skinny village road, peat fires burning, lights ready for Christmas, I pulled into the pub. Twinkly winkly lights, gentle music, a glass of house red and a good chat, the exchange of info and warmth just perfect. Home now, wood burner aflame, candles lit, a meal ahead.

Not for the feint/fainthearted living here but here still lives the wild. It’s brutal, but so dellictrous.

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Island Blog – Grammar, Flying and My Name is Judy

There is a thing about things that thing me. Now, there’s a sentence for you. I remember English Language classes, the emphasis heavy on grammar and sentence construction. Rhythm, beat, phrasing, verbs in the right place, ditto adverbs, adjectives (steady on those), spelling and please do not use made up words, slang or swear words, however covertly disguised. Blimey! Throttled from the start was I, were we. It seemed to me, and seems still, that bothering overly much about the correct words in the correct order is like wearing a whalebone corset for gym practice. I want to flow, just roll those glorious sentences out, quick and slick and without losing the storyline. I don’t want to feel verbally, rhythmically or phrasically constipated whilst I spill out the words from my, apparently, overactive imagination. This was actually penned in one school report. An overactive imagination. What my well-corseted English teacher was really saying is that I was disruptive. My challenge of her she took personally and I cannot blame her, she who seemed to have nothing much more exciting in her life than the ‘correct’ structure of sentencing with the odd thrill of a hyphen or a colon.

So I play with words. Punctuation, however, is a different thing, not that I am perfect in the way I employ the marks, but it does bother me when I read an official document with glaring errors. It’s means ‘it is’. Its denotes ownership, ‘its tail, its banana, its wings’, and so on. It’s, on the other hand would precede a sentence such as ‘It’s hard to believe that Mary had a little lamb’. ‘Their’ applies thus. Their home, their choice of venue, their problem, whereas ‘they’re would mean ‘they are’ in a squish. They’re going on a train to Bandalouche, they’re in trouble now, they’re a right pair of idiots’.

My dad, a stickler for all things Language, taught us all and corrected us when necessary. I believe one of my sisters actually had her letter to him returned, corrected. It did us no harm, but stood us in good stead as women moving into the world of men. We knew how to speak, how to phrase, how to construct a sentence. What of the girls nowadays, as the subject of grammar recedes into the background? I obviously have not a scooby as to whether this applies to all schools in the whole country, but just going by the evidence of what I see written down by young adults, it isn’t encouraging. ‘I never would of thought of that.’ Really? ‘I never would have thought of that.’ Ah, yes.

I sound like an old stick-in-the-mud, I know it and I really don’t mean to. I am the first to make up words, to play with the fold and random flow of rhythmical phrasing, but I believe that a person has to learn the basic mathematics of anything before they can fly off piste. Drumming, piano playing, singing, dancing, writing, painting, scientific exploration, mountain climbing (no flying off piste for this one, not literally), plus a zillion more disciplines, appropriately called disciplines because of their grounding in just that, discipline. I completely loathed discipline in pretty much all areas of my life, but needed them all, the gravity of them holding down my scatter feet, a springboard for any future leap.

They say knowledge is everything, which is a tad sweeping for me even as I can taste the truth in the cliche. If I am unsure about any area of my life, anxious, perhaps, I know it is simply because I don’t ‘know’ enough about it. My imagination takes me into a future that doesn’t, and probably will never, exist. I must needs investigate the subject, thus imbibing knowledge which, in turn, grows my confidence, shifts my perspective and stabilises the chaos within. I am anxious about my journey back home. What is it about said journey back home that feels me this way? 1. Getting lost in the airport for weeks. Follow the signs and ask someone. 2. I will miss my connection. Catch the next plane. 3. I won’t get through security. Check hand luggage and remove all weapons. 4. I am frightened of travelling alone. Ah, now we get to the nitty gritty. Well you won’t be alone, not with 300 other hot and bothered travellers and the pilot will be fully trained, plenty stewards on board, you can ask them for anything. There will be food and a movie of your choice and when you land you will be in London where everyone speaks in a tongue you understand. The fact that you aren’t on speaking terms with any of those 300 other people is entirely up to you my dear. Hallo, my name is Judy. that’s all you have to say and in that sweet and simple introduction, you are no longer alone, as you perceive it.

It seems so easy, once a fear or anxiety is questioned and gentled apart all the way down to its core. I can spend weeks with my knickers in a knot of anxiety, but now I have learned to notice, question and then find solutions to each individual aspect. It’s freeing. Its hold on me lessens, loosens and, eventually, lets go. I can still feel a frisson of fear but can quickly refer back to my solution list and breathe in the adventure, fill my lungs with it, fly with it, curious as a child.

Hallo, my name is Judy.

(Oh lord, she’s going to talk the whole flight) Hallo, I’m Simon, Mary, Lord Fauntleroy.

Do you like flying?

(Here she comes) Not much.

Oh I love it.

Good.

And if that’s all there is, it’s enough for me not to feel alone.

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Island Blog – A Gentle Circle

When I write I feel better than I did with all those words and feelings and observations twinging about in my head. They circle like planets, a circumcircle within triangular sharps. As I move to sit here at my desk and lift my fingers to the qwerty keyboard, I sense freedom. From here I can fly my words , no, not fly, because flying is random and words must needs sentence up, find rhythm and then there’s grammar and punctuation and la la tiddly pom, all sharping their own sense of self, of importance, of an importance to the whole and quite right too. The one who drives the forward beast, horse, bus, train, plane is no good on his or her team. Every other who takes a part takes a vital part. I mean, just imagine the world without full stops or question marks or spellcheck? Well, I can, actually. Many and I mean ‘many’ letters (did I sound old fashioned there?) or emails astonish me with their obviously random dance into the world of grammar, spelling, sentence building, the verb in the right place, ditto the noun. For me this is basic material but, and but again, I am one who believes that language moves on and changes and so should we, even as I squeak at grammar ghastlies. But I am not a grammarphobe. Jeez no. Life needs to move on and btw She is not moving on without me.

No matter the day or the previous night. No matter the weather or the to-do list, or lack of one, I find joy in so many things. No, not things, although the things are things. Like the rose bush outside my window. I watch it. I see the blooms bud, open and fall in just 3 or 4 days. Something I could miss if I wasn’t watching. I go out barefoot (it is essential to feel the wet grass under my feet) and smell the fragrance. I know is isn’t perfect for these sentient plants, they know the climate is changing and that they need to burgeon quickquick before another and unseasonal gale wheechs their beauty into nevernever. I walk and see 3 bullfinch, such a gasp of beauty, lift from the undergrowth, chirping danger and warning to their one chick. They are teaching it to fly. I knew it. I hear gulls in a frenzy and know I will find a big bird somewhere out there, a sea-eagle, a buzzard, maybe a kite. The dingdong goes on until they wild into the sky, the big bird and the hecklers, white white against a grey skyfold. And then I write. Not about the missing, about the emptiness or the triangular sharps, for within is a gentle circle.

Like grammar. I must move on.

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Island Blog – The Sky, Skerries and Staying

Today it is falling, the sky I mean. Earlier the pocks of deeper grey sat like skerries in a white sea. A few spots of soft rain fell, hardly worth a mention, but the wind was cooler than of late. Now the sky is leaking down onto the land, covering the hills, blanking out the trees, undefining contours of a land I know like I know myself. But do I know myself, I wonder? I think I do, and yet, there are times I catch my reflection and stop, mildly astonished (oxymoron). You do know, I tell myself in my best English student remonstratory voice, that it is impossible to be mildly astonished. This is lazy ‘speke’. Astonished, is, after all, a superlative and ‘mildly’ does little more than dilute with too much milk. It blands itself. And it thinks me.

I studied and loved language. English, French, German, even Latin, and am still a devotee of the way language flows like a river. Or it can do but, if I am honest, less and less nowadays in the ways learned by me. I remember my old dad with his linguistic brilliance, puffing like an old pipe should he encounter poor English, poor grammar, the ‘wrong’ use of punctuation. I also recall a conversation with him about acceptance. As cultures collide and collude, language shifts. We adopt and adapt and before we know it, words fall away like birds. When I read a classic novel, superbly crafted and written, it seems effortlessly and in lingual confidence, I can see that without incursive verbalism such writing would indeed flow like a river for a creator of stories. So do we, the now ‘we’, who must work with the fast moving changes of our world, go with what is, or resist and remain in academic slippers? We could, but we would risk losing a load of readers because language is changing. We might find ourselves moving up a floor, and up again, until the only person left is a lonely one. All the rest have died off, and their slippers are too worn for a charity shop, and burned as litter.

I find new language dynamic and fascinating, even as my eyes roll at much of what I read. Get with it old woman, I tell myself, because if you do, you remain in the game, the game that is life in motion. To refuse to abdicate the throne of those torn and floppy slippers is to choose loneliness. As writers, and we can all be a writer if we just pick up a pen and are ready to learn and grow in the world of words, we are duty bound to be gymnasts. Not actually gymnasts, the thought exhausts me, but acceptance gymnasts. There is another type, the one that holds on to the slippers for grounding, and who does a lot of eye rolling and pipe puffing and shuffles from room to room as if there is no world out there and if there is then I want none of it. I am not this person.

We live with danger, threat and menace. We are hacked and hi-jacked. We are compromised, surprised, confined and defined. Out there racial and sexual prejudice is alive and kicking, literally. The sky is falling. But wait. Look at how the sky reaches down both to confuse and to alter our perceptional lens. See how, in the not-seeing of what we know invites us to look at something another way. We can dismiss this as an opportunity, ignore it, even, say Mist, say Fog, say Close the Curtains. Or we can actually look and if we do, we will marvel. It is the same with words, with language, with change and with people. I get that it is exhausting (nearly said pretty exhausting #oxymoron) to be always required to adapt and adopt, but it is the way the world is spinning, faster and faster. New technology brings both healing and death, the whole circle, and the greys in between are like the skerries in a white sky sea. There are millions of them and each one offers footfall. They are like stepping stones. We might not know where they lead but if we don’t keep leaping from one to the next, we remain lonely, in slippers and pipe puffing at what only we consider lost.

I can write into the mist, or it can blind me. I can see banks of clouds or I can see skerries in a white sea. I can allow new cultures to enhance me or inhibit. I can hold to the old or I can estew the new, allowing myself to simmer and to blend with whatever comes in. Together we can make a delicious meal. I am not a new writer. I am honed from past teachings but I am curious and interested and I want to stay in the game.