Short Story / Words, words, words

It was a winter night in Glasgow, some time in the mid-Nineties, and my friend Tim and I stopped off at the Irish pub for a couple of pints. I liked the Irish pub. In spite of the fact that it was shockingly artificial, there was still much to like about it. It was always busy, and as soon as you opened the door you were greeted with a gust of warm air and the din of people—people everywhere—laughing and shouting. They poured good Guinness. I liked the way my boots sounded, thudding around on the fat, creaking floorboards. Most importantly, it was a warm, friendly place to fill up with beer on a cold, winter night. I didn’t care if it looked like a circus of paddywhackery, with brooms hanging on the walls, and barrels instead of tables. I didn’t care if road signs saying “Dublin 18 miles” pointed in every conceivable direction. I didn’t even care that the most glaring inconsistency in its theme was that this Irish pub was located in the trendy West End of a city that was the heart of commerce in… Scotland. At least the staff were Irish—Ulstermen that had come over to study on our side of the water. The most authentic feature was the fact that you did at least have to have a smattering of Irish to figure out which bathroom to go into. ”Fir” means men in Irish, and maybe it’s because if anything, a man’s going to associate fear with the wrong bathroom, that we often got to see embarrassing errors of judgment. So the Irish pub was fun. And, midway through a trek across Glasgow from one house to another, in the bollocking cold of a Scottish winter night, we decided to make a pitstop for some warmth and refreshment.

Tim was a striking sight to any eyes. He had the face of Paul McCartney, but with all the style of Rod Stewart. Seriously. He’d go out wearing a crushed velvet jacket with leopard-print pants, maybe even a cravat, and he’d think nothing of it. Sometimes he’d wear these shiny PVC pants. He even had the hair. Most people wanted to think he was gay, but he actually had a reputation for being a bit of a womaniser. I think the only reason he dressed like that was because he was fucking hilarious. Some men carry a hip flask with a few good chugs of whisky inside. Tim went everywhere with an antique silver thermos filled to the brim with gin and tonic, complete with a slice of lemon. It was all a big joke. Tim’s best friend, (whose name escapes me), had the face of The Laughing Cavalier, right down to the triangular goatee and the waxed moustache. He was this booming, rambunctious Scot who was never seen unless he was wearing a white three-piece suit, tie and all. He might even have carried a cane, I don’t remember. When he’d drink, (and he always drank), his booming laugh could be heard reverberating across the whole bar. You’d take one look at him and the phrase “devil may care” leaped straight to mind. Happily, being friends with Tim, he always had occasion to laugh. This says as much about Tim as anything I could think of. Because Tim was truly the wittiest person I’ve ever known, and had an uncanny way with words. This Paul McCartney lookalike in Rod Stewart’s clothing was blessed with the mind of Oscar Wilde. If the English language was an unruly lion, Tim would have been the man to tame it till it purred like a kitten. Both he and his friend were philosophy students; both big thinkers and big drinkers. It may have been because of Tim’s love affair with language that he devoted his studies to Wittgenstein, and the meanings and usage of words.

So we grasped our pints of Guinness from the bar and thudded across the floor, dodging beautiful girls whose revelry knocked them out of their seats, and made our way to one of the booths. Now this is a feature of Glasgow pubs that I really like—the booths. It’s like sitting in a train carriage, where people huddle round and murmur conspiratorially behind panes of stained glass. Revolutions are born in such places, or so I imagined, and it always gave me the feeling that something big could happen at any time. I always found it all the more entertaining to note that if something big did happen, it would happen with Rod Stewart’s lovechild on the premises. So we shuffled into the booth, leaving the door open so we could watch beautiful girls falling down and drunk men staggering shamefully out of the women’s bathroom. Already there was the sense that the conversation we were about to have would be charged with significance.

“What’s your favourite word in the English language?” he asked, and I was struck dumb by the simplicity of this impossible question. Every English speaker must know tens of thousands of words, and I had to scan through them all to pick a favourite? I sat, paralysed in deep thought, with the expression of a masticating bull. Eventually, I came up with an answer and sat back to digest my cogitations. ”Stock,” I answered smugly. Because, I explained, stock is one of those words with multiple meanings: it’s a part on a rifle, and it’s something you put in your soup. You take stock of your life, and you can come from good stock. You put stock in the words of someone you trust, and you stock things on shelves. All that meaning is condensed into five letters and one syllable. It even sounds so simple, so solid and trusty—”stock”. And it’s such an old word that it goes back beyond Shakespeare: it was used by Chaucer, and probably goes back beyond the Norman Conquest, even. It’s one of those words that announces the identity of the English people because it reminds us that our language is a reflection of our history. Tim’s head was bowed with concentration, and it began to start bobbing up and down with the gentle nod of appreciation. Tim was also an Englishman, and could easily agree with what I had said. There was a woman’s scream behind us, followed by “Sorry! Sorry!” and a man strode red-faced past the booth. ”Yes, stock is certainly a very good word,” Tim returned, still deep in meditation, still nodding. There was replete silence for a moment, as we each took stock of the word stock.

I turned the question back on Tim, who was ready with an answer. I don’t remember what it was, but it was a word that was as old and sturdy, and every bit as good as stock, for many of the same reasons. We went back and forth, thinking of words that gave us similar pleasure, that made us truly appreciative of the fact that we felt privileged to be native English speakers. Knowing that the land that raised us gave us nourishment from the soil, and knowing that this soil was soaked in the blood of generation after generation who fought and died there; that centuries of war brought one foreign influence after another, and the language we spoke was the gift we were given at the cost of so many countless lives: that is privilege. That our language tied us to our land and our history, to the Celts and the Romans, to the Saxons and Vikings and Normans. There were wars with France and Spain, Holland and Germany, and even our universities brought a connection to Greek. An appreciation of our native tongue is the most earnest expression of English patriotism, and even though the language barrier alienates us from the continent, it is the very shape and form of our language—more than our laws and customs, more than our art or architecture—that ties us to Europe. Nothing more than the sounds that come out of our mouths.

We continued through many twists and turns, as we considered the nature of language and interpretation. How words are a tool we use to communicate, but being tools, they can be manipulated to get the desired result. How one word has different meanings or connotations in different contexts, and how concepts such as irony, sarcasm, poetry, and wit, elevate language beyond the mere science of sharing meaning, and into an art. And what is art, if not a form of communication? And so the discussion went on, until the haze of alcohol sated our senses and we lapsed into the dozy dullness of those that have feasted to their fill. We stumbled out from the booth and thudded across the hollow, wooden floor. We opened the door to the night, to leave it all behind us—the warmth and comfort, the shouting and singing and falling angels. We left behind the busy noise in the light of the bar and stepped out onto a dark street. And that’s as much as I remember. Where we were headed, I don’t know. Perhaps we were on our way to visit The Laughing Cavalier? I really don’t recall. We stepped out of the light, and the rest of the evening is a blank, the memory forever frozen into the darkness of that bleak Scottish winter’s night.

The memory floats isolated inside the four walls of the Irish pub within my mind, disconnected from everything else. Yet the memory persists, and will continue to float around, bobbing about in the darkness of forgotten times, because that conversation made an impression. It made me realize how much I had taken for granted. It made me realize how I am truly in love with the English language, and I remember that night with gratitude. They say you don’t appreciate what you have till you lose it, but I am fortunate enough to have learned to love something I could never lose. It is as much a part of me as the cells in my body. If I lost my language I would lose myself. But no matter what life might throw upon me, even if I’m stripped of my home, my identity, and the last thread of clothing on my back, I will always have that precious ability to set my mind down in a canvas of words. And I will always appreciate it, thanks to one random discussion over a couple of pints of Guinness in the Irish pub, one winter night in Glasgow.

Still, I wish I’d gone back inside and caught one of those falling girls.

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