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24.05.11
No. 407

Young Scotland

Gillian McMahon

of the Scottish aid charity Mary’s Meals delivered the winning paper at the spring course of the Young Scotland Programme.
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Katie Cunningham

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Chloe Thomson

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The Young Scotland Programme, encouraging the intellectual development of people in the early stages of their professional lives, is organised by the Scottish Review.
     The spring course was made possible by a generous individual donation by a New York-based Scot, Alan McIntyre.

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Reflections on the Clyde of the squinty bridge

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Why there is no room

for ‘meh’ in a dictionary

of modern Scotland

Kenneth Roy

In a restaurant by the sea battered by the gale, three of us were quietly discussing over Sunday lunch the single-minded tenacity of James Murray (1837-1915), the son of a draper, born in the village of Denholm, near Hawick, who left school at 14 and went on to edit the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from a corrugated iron shed known as the Scriptorium.

     The volume of correspondence at the Scriptorium was so great that the Post Office erected a special pillar-box on the site. Murray worked at the Herculean undertaking for 36 years and died 13 years before the dictionary was finally published in 1928. One of our number thought that, by the time of his death, Murray had reached the letter S; in the end, the OED contained the definitions of 414,825 words.
     As we were contemplating James Murray’s mind-boggling achievement, a voice from the next table piped up:
     ‘You’re a friend of George Galloway, aren’t you?’
     We were so engrossed in conversation that I had been only dimly aware of the questioner’s arrival. I turned to face him. I had never met this man before. I had no idea who he was or why he had suddenly taken it upon himself to engage me on the subject of George Galloway.
     ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘Actually, not at all.’
     My mind went back to an evening in Glasgow when the gorgeous one and I had fallen out over what he considered a less than completely flattering introduction of himself at a public meeting. We have not spoken since. But I was not about to share this information with the bulky figure at the next table. I thought my assurance would finish the matter.
     ‘But you wrote recently in support of him,’ he persisted.
     That could not be denied. In this space I had written, a few weeks before the election, that it would be a good thing if George Galloway, an independent voice in a sea of various conformities, were elected to the Scottish Parliament. He was not elected, falling some distance short; and that was the end of that. These things happen. Or, rather, don’t.
     But the man continued to press.
     ‘So what do you think of the people in the new Scottish Parliament?’, he asked.
     I replied that I had no view of them; that it was too early to form any judgement of their quality.
     He responded with unpleasant emphasis: ‘There’s no place for comics like Galloway’.

 

As I reflected on this mean-spirited word, I came to the conclusion that there is no room for ‘meh’ in the dictionary of modern Scotland.

     Was this in danger of becoming an argument? If he was looking for one, I might have invoked the opinion of the late Alan Watkins, the doyen of political journalists, who, at another lunch in another place, once assured me that the best speaker in the House of Commons by some distance was the same George Galloway: that there was no one to equal Mr Galloway for his eloquence without notes, his mastery of a subject, his command of the House. The inexperienced, rather awkward public speakers in the Scottish Parliament since 1999 would have profited from a close study of Mr Galloway’s oratorical methods. There is always something useful to be learned from sitting at the feet of a maestro.
     But I had not come for Sunday lunch to become involved in a row about the merits of George Galloway with someone whose company I had neither sought nor wished for. There were more than enough fish rising to the bait out there in the stormy Firth of Clyde.
     I turned back to my own table, but not before a parting shot from the advocate of a comic-free Scottish Parliament.
     ‘Overall majority,’ he said in a chilly, admonitory tone. ‘We can do what we like now. But we won’t be pushed. We’ll do it in our own good time.’
     We skipped coffee and left the scene of the confrontation, continuing our discussion of James Murray in a more congenial setting. We got around to talking about new words entering the language, and perhaps the OED, including one that I had not heard before: the word ‘meh’ – meaning ‘so what?’. As I reflected on this mean-spirited word, I came to the conclusion that there is no room for ‘meh’ in the dictionary of modern Scotland.
     The man of vision at the next table, with his messianic certainties about what is to be done and when it shall be done, about who is acceptable in the Scottish Parliament and who is not, has probably done me a favour. Those of us temperamentally indifferent to the saviours in our midst, political or religious or otherwise, must reluctantly stir to the realisation that ‘so what?’ is no longer an appropriate response to the unusual situation in which we find ourselves. Hell, no. We had better get real.
     Respectful to the spirit of the age, I am prepared to concede that there is no room for comics in the new Scottish Parliament, although, heaven knows, the occasional shaft of irreverent wit in the self-regarding body politic would not go amiss. But for the moral health of the country, to say nothing of the moral health of our governing party and its supporters, an opposition must be summoned somehow, from somewhere. If only to – well, oppose. But there is a problem. There is no opposition nor, frankly, any likelihood of one.
    Despite the disturbing condition of Scottish democracy, I intend to go on eating in restaurants – until someone tells me to drop my fork. At that point, I will consider my next move.

 

Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review