‘Cutting Up Didoes’

JAMES REANEY 'Cutting Up Didoes' My title is reference, in an oral situation, actually sitting at table with a hired man whose colourful speech owed much to an orphanage in Southwark , the London suburb where the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, in Chaucer kept his hostelry, and I'll explain it later on. But I give it here as a sample of the sort of thing that happens in conversation all the time, at least I hope it does. That is, you hear a phrase or word or expression that puzzles you, and you're eager to know, to be in the know, trusting that your cultivation will be thereby increased as well as your ability to communicate. 'Hype' was such a word two decades ago and parents, fondly thinking that the generation gap might thus be closed, inquired eagerly what 'hype' meant. Such acronyms, dreadful really, as 'aka' and 'asap' pose similar problems. 'When you are in the catacombs,' Professor Ernest Dale of University College used to say, 'you have to struggle to be above par.' Contemporary friends and students may also have a struggle with this if they don't know that catacombs were subterranean or what they were at all. I myself have an expression that goes like this: 'That is above the Plimsollline!' That is, that's too much and the reference is to a Mr Plimsoll who established the loading limit for ships by drawing a line on their hulls which, if the water rose above it, warned inspectors that the vessel was unsafely overloaded. On student evaluations of my lectures, I frequently received complaints about my knowing and referring too much. 'We can't understand all those references.' It was then I realized that I was in danger of getting a pedantic reputation like that schoolmaster in Love's Labour's Lost, and indeed he does overdo it; but I bravely kept on because, actually, there were enough students stimulated by the challenge to respond positively, and anyway, modern life presents verbal experience so simplified and pureed in its TV and radio programmes that university students need the medicine of greater vocabulary and challenging referral. Therefore, there are those among us who, for one reason or another, actually avoid, or try to avoid, literary reference, or reference of any sort to the point of 'silence,' or, at least, much talk of silence. The range here is from an underclass caught in the web of the media whose executives would not let a BBC commentator use 'recalcitrant' when broadcasting in North America all the way up to some very sophisticated and verbally UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1992 I 372 'CUTIING UP DIDOES' 373 ingenious literary critics. Perhaps the whole problem is best described in a statement by one of my high school teachers, Miss Rose McQueen, when she announced that 'in Elizabethan times it was fashionable to be clever; to-day, it is not.' So, let's start at the bottom and work up. Twenty-five years ago, I heard a bus driver, irritated at some simple but big breakdown in his vehicle say: 'This would try the patience of Job,' only he didn't know that 'Job' is not pronounced as in the phrase 'job-description.' But the use of a biblical figure in a bus yard really touched me at the time and still does. Since then I haven't heard anyone like him use the Bible that way, and I am saddened by that, because I think that it is part of a sinister phenomenon noted by my wife and self at breakfast one morning when we found ourselves reading a small Associated Press article on the decay of swearing and cursing; and the reason cited was the decline of workingclass vocabulary from ten thousand words in the immediate post-war period to today's miserable two thousand words! Because of the meagre verbal outlet, violence has increased and my reaction was to write a controversial poem on reviving the art of swearing in which the hired man aforementioned was prominently featured - his curse vocabulary had been immense and startling to me, for I grew up with a father...