Comedian Danny Bhoy gave a terrific show last night at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre. After learning that some audience members were from the States (he didn’t hear me in the second row, when he asked where people were from, calling out “Canada!”), he incorporated into his routine at several points that words have different meanings depending on the speaker’s nationality. For example, if the Scots make the World Cup in 2022, they will have to travel to Qatar, which will be a hardship because one cannot drink alcohol in Qatar. He imagined the Scots players arriving and being warned by government officials that if they drink, they will be lashed — which in Scots slang means “drunk”.
“Oh aye!” says Bhoy in the scenario. “Just like back home.”
“No!” replies the official. “You don’t understand. You will be beaten in the streets by the police.”
“Oh aye! We’re used to that, too. No worries!”
Pondering words and how we use them has emerged as a bit of a theme for me in the past week. I began reading Simon Winchester’s “The Surgeon of Crowthorne”, one of his excellent books on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary — an enormous undertaking that involved hundreds of people in the 19th century and an effort whose discipline and coordination would be difficult to duplicate even in this era of the internet. Add to that the fact that one of the major contributors was criminally insane (possibly, it has to be said, because he suffered PTSD during the American Civil War), and you’ve got a story that reads better than most fiction.
Then, still on the subject of words and their meaning, The Independent ran a couple of excellent opinion pieces on Sunday, February 5. The first involved the activities and actions of a government minister, Chris Huhne and the captain of England’s football team, John Terry. Huhne stepped down after it was revealed that he tried to get his ex-wife to accept demerit points for a traffic offense that he had committed, thereby perverting the course of justice. Terry resigned after a public outcry at blatantly racist slurs he screamed at an opponent during a game. The op ed was about the fact that neither of these men did the ‘honourable’ thing by stepping down when the offenses were committed, favouring instead to hope that no one noticed or cared. The public did, and there was an uproar. The writer went on to talk about the recent fall-out from bank executives forfeiting (again, after much public protest) enormous bonuses that were to be paid out as incentives to continue to do their jobs well, rather than understanding that, given the current economic climate, to refuse would be the honourable thing. Public protest arose because no one could prove these folks had done their jobs particularly well — or at least certainly no better than the average grunt who usually doesn’t even get a ‘thank you’, much less a reasonable standard of living that can come close to that of corporate executives. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with incentives and bonuses, but ensuring they are commensurate with the job done, rather than paying out wads of cash and stocks to the folks who worked diligently to line their pockets while putting most of us (and possibly a couple of generations to come) in the hole is only sensible.
The author ruminated on how the word ‘honour’ has been perverted from something that once connoted “duty and loyalty, trust and taking responsibility, standards and self-discipline” and led people to act out of concern for one’s reputation, “rooted in what Dr. Johnson defined as ‘nobility of soul, magnanimity and a scorn of meanness’,” to something degraded. So-called “honour killings”, for example, have less to do with honour than control and chauvinistic face-saving. In the Army, so-called honour “holds sway… where men’s lives depend more upon friendship and bonding than on conscience or law” — and it is this aspect with which “honour” has become construed in most modern societies. So called “Honours Lists” are more about wealth, acquisition and power among in-groups — honour among thieves — than about social justice or philanthropy.
And on this topic of bonuses, another op ed piece wrote of Ed Milliband, who rose in the British House of Commons last week to propose that banks should be required to disclose the names and earnings of all those who are paid more than £1M, and that a shop-floor employee should be on every pay committee. To the first proposal, David Cameron begged that it would have to happen in every country across the European Union in order to be effective. So much for taking the initiative and showing leadership. To the second, Cameron responded that having shop-floor employees on pay committees would break “an important principle of not having people on a remuneration committee who will have their own pay determined.” So much for openness and accountability. The statement makes Mr. Cameron’s earlier protestations that, with regards to the current economic crisis, we are “all in it together” just a tad hypocritical, so it’s particularly gratifying that Mr. Cameron was forced last week to withdraw charges of hypocrisy against Mr. Milliband.
Still, as politicians use words to parry in the House, with reporters or constituents, we must all remember that actions still speak much louder than words — and in that respect, most politicians are pathetically mute when it comes to addressing greed and the gross inequities it creates. Sadly, that’s true both here in the UK and in Canada.