…it’s when they tell yeez, ‘Yeez can’t do THAT!’ …and yeez go ahead and do it anyway… that!… #TBSU…
…being of mixed Irish/Scots heritage, I s’pose it’s in this ol’ Jurassic’s DNA to display rebellion at the drop of a tartan tammy (Scottish Highlander’s hat, Mabel)… but I’m sure it’s a trait shared by others not fortunate enough to be touched with the Celtic tinge… as far as I can gather, there’s no record of my having organised institutional warfare against the nursery school as a toddler… the maverick symptoms manifested themselves a tad later… and I can pinpoint the day and the place for yeez… my life experience had stretched to all of eleven years and a wee bit… English Literature class in Glasgow… Subject: Essay Writing… even back then, WURDS fascinated me… a Collins dictionary, well-thumbed, was one of my favourite possessions… and here’s why… every week, the English Literature Master, a humourless, spiritless, English Literature-less dominie, Professor Mackay, handed out a topic, around which we motley students were obliged to concoct some essay for the following week… and every week, the budding Steinbeck residing in my soul went searching through the Collins lexicon pages, in pursuit of WURDS to use…. preferably the stranger, longer and weirder-sounding the better… noting the meaning, and then crafting sentences around the discovered WURD treasures… ‘excellent initiative’ yeez might surmise… a surmission, unhappily, not shared by the joyless Professor Mackay… on two notable occasions he rejected my use of language as being ‘non-existent’… one WURD was/is ‘flounced’… and a phrase I recall, ‘in her mind’s eye’… like the budding Braveheart that I was, my reaction was an immediate, and p’raps a bit overzealous flourishing of the precious Collins edition, with ‘flounced’ clearly annotated, and a copy of Baroness Orczy’s, The Scarlet Pimpernel, wherein the phrase ‘in her mind’s eye’ was already underscored in red ink… I do not wish to impugn the memory of the long-since-departed-to-the-Great-Dominie’s-Retreat-In-The-Sky Professor Mackay by repeating the torrent of vocabulary he demonstrated, some of which I can assure you does not appear in the Collins version that I have… he spoke not a single WURD to me for the rest of that class year… but he has bequeathed to me one precious attitude…it’s when they tell yeez, ‘Yeez can’t do THAT!’ …and yeez go ahead and do it anyway…. that!… so off yeez go and flounce away in yer mind’s eye to yer respective hearts’ content… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
The Blog by Seumas Gallacher
