Sometimes I miss Scotland. I sit here in the remote South West of France, wearied by endless sun, made blasé by the dreary round of pool-side parties, fed up with that peculiar headache known only to the Gascon, born of drinking floc under a fierce sun. And if you don’t know what floc is, don’t trouble to discover. No, sometimes one longs for the stygian days of a Dundee December, lights on all day, the river lost in cloud. It’s a dreich day we would say: even we adopted Scots (although we were wise not to risk the accent). A good word, born of necessity. If you have to live in Dundee – and, remarkably, some do - you need dreich.
There are other words I miss. It would be nice, just now and then to use fleg. Now you’re going to tell me frighten is close - why complicate life? To which I’ll reply it’s not quite close enough, and that’s really irritating. When I was writing the last paragraph of Lucy I remember thinking how blessed English was with words relating to pedestrian locomotion. I wasn’t going to have my character run, but then again, walk didn’t meet the case. Swagger smuggled in ideas I wanted to avoid and stroll was perhaps too inconsequential, and so on. The choice is remarkable (I did find a word, if you want to see, go and look).
There is still one Scots word I use quite often, and thereby hangs today’s tale. The word is shoogly: an adjective you rarely see written (the noun shoogle exists, but only in the dictionary). I’m sure you know shoogly pertains to chairs and tables that are in need of a bit of folded paper under one leg. The English have no word for this state. Unstable sounds a little too architectural, shaky a little too animate, wobbly also seems too close to the flesh. No, we have to accept - possibly as testament to the undoubted quality of their furniture - that the English, seem never to have needed shoogly.
Before I get down to the why and wherefore of all this I ought to point out the French don’t have a word for this state either. God knows, they need it. Try sitting on the terrace of the Deux Garçons in Aix-en-Provence. Virtually every table is shoogly, some in quite an advanced state. I can’t tell you the hours I’ve spent in that very spot, discussing the finer points of psycholinguistics, my precious thoughts broken by the need to wedge bits of paper under the table. Indeed, one day, so vexed that we had no word for this activity, I proposed one. That was how déshuglification was born. You may have it for free – it goes quite well in French. France had need of it.
You remember in my last I wrote, “Speech itself is, of course, a representation of thoughts – we seem to have thoughts in a kind of speech.” Now it seems I must claim we have thoughts (for example, pertaining to furniture in a certain state of instability) for which there is no speech available. Unless you live in Dundee, that is – a geographical constraint that seems rather peculiar.
There’s nothing original in this observation – I merely bring it to your attention because we are talking about writing. Tallyrand, much given to pithy comment, famously said, “Dieu a donné la parole à l’homme pour qu’il dissimule sa pensée.” God gave us language so we can conceal our thoughts from one another. Setting aside the rather cynical tone, that’s quite a fundamental claim. Do thoughts live somewhere else? Not necessarily (dare I say, not even) written in any sort of language. Shakespeare knew about this problem. His solution was not available to mortals. He simply invented words, in prodigious numbers. He maybe thought the vile jelly plucked out in King Lear seemed a little over the top when he got to The Tempest. So he invented eyeball and we’ve been using it ever since.