Swealed in a barrie an liggin intil a heck

  I've never much been one for dialect writing: the way some authors try to render speech phonetically, particularly when it's used to heighten the freakshow exoticness of a speaker with a vernacular other than standard English (such as Gullah, French Creole, or Appalachian mountaineer). My attitude is colored by the reaction of one of Horace Kephart's Smoky Mountain neighbors upon seeing printed "hillbilly" speech, as rendered by John Fox of Trail of the Lonesome Pine fame. Here is Kephart’s account:

    One day I handed a volume of John Fox's stories to a neighbor and asked him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, then suddenly stared at me in amazement.

"What's the matter with it?" I asked, wondering what he could have found to startle him at the very beginning of the story.

"Why, that feller don't know how to spell!" [italics in original]

Gravely, I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced, so far as     possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was of no use. My friend was outraged. "That tale-teller then is jest makin' fun of the mountain people by misspelling' our talk. You educated folks don't spell your own words the way you say them."

Kephart acknowledges this as "a most palpable hit" that gave him a "new point of view," even if it didn't prevent him from going ahead and misspelling mountain talk. In fact, the account is the very opening of the chapter entitled "The Mountain Dialect" in Kephart's classic Our Southern Highlanders.

The problem with the novelists like Fox and others -- among them Mark Twain, George Washington Cable (whose New Orleans Creole characters "toke lak theez") and of course Joel Chandler Harris of "Bre'er Rabbit" fame -- is that they are outsiders panning linguistic curiosity for publishing gold. In some cases they purport "scholarship," there is never an acknowledgment of a debt. It's high-toned circus barking.

However, when it comes to reading dialect, I do make one exception: Scots. And that is because its literary purveyors -- Robert Burns, George MacDonald -- are themselves Scots. It is their own native vernacular that they are rendering, not anything outlandish (c'mon, groan, fans of Outlander). With the ethical ground thus cleared, the modes of appreciation are given free rein to enjoy it as much as any foreign language.

My principal way of enjoying foreign languages has always been through singing, and as I'm writing this in high Advent it seems appropriate to mention that most of the songs I know in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, or Macaroni (bilingual Latin-English) are Christmas carols culled from the official books of the Christmas Carol Canon (pictured here).

Regrettably, Scots is not well-represented in the Christmas Carol Canon. If it were competing in an EU Wassail Derby, Scots would finish so far behind other regional dialects such as Flemish or Catalan that it might almost be said not to be trying.

The reason is probably to be found in Reformed theology, which particularly in Scotland reviled anything smacking of a popish "mass." With Christmas it's right there in the name; not much use trying to get around it. What the reformers objected to were the centuries of cultural encrustation. It was the Bible or nothing. This put an emphasis on Biblical text as the only true basis for religious observance. All else was suspect.

But there I have discovered a new music, as it were. It comes out of where poetic recitation is itself a form of music. Familiar passages of the Bible are chief among this kind of music, particularly (to me) the passages in the second chapter of Luke that describe the "adoration of the shepherds." I recently discovered it as it appears in the Scots Bible, and to me it is thrilling:

    Nou, i that same pairt the' war a when herds bid in the rout on the hill and keepin gaird owre their hirsel at nicht. Suddent an angel o the Lord cam an stuid afore them, an the glorie o the Lord shined about them, an they war uncolie frichtit. But the angel said tae them: "Binna nane afeared: I bring ye guid news o gryte blytheness for the haill fowk -- this day in Dauvit's Toun a sauviour hes been born til ye, Christ, the Lord! This gate ye s'ken it is een as I say: ye will finnd a new-born bairn swealed in a barrie an liggin intil a heck."

    Syne in a gliff an unco thrang o the airmies of heiven kythed aside the angel, giein laud tae God an liltin: "Glore tae God in the heicht o heiven, and peace on the yird tae men he delytes in!"

    Whan the angels quat them and gaed back til heiven, the herds said til ither, "Come, lat us gang owre-bye tae Bethlehem an see this unco at the Lord hes made kent til us." Sae they hid owre tae Bethlehem what they coud drive, an faund Mary an Joseph there wi the new-born babe liggin intil the heck; an whan they say him, they loot fowk ken what hed been said tae them anent the bairn. Aabodie ferliet tae hear what the herds tauld them, but Mary keepit aa thir things lown an cuist them throu her mind her lane. Syne the herds gaid back tae their hirsel, praisin an ruisin God for aa at they hed hard an seen; aathing hed been een as they war tauld.

    Behind the appreciation of this is of course the familiarity of the passage in King James English. What  a delicious, savory contrast between "baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying a manger" and "bairn swealed in a barrie and liggin intil a heck."

    Mythical shepherds for the shepherding: The Scots have been among the world's chief pastoral peoples. Famously, their sonic identity attaches to the chief instrument of pastoral peoples, the bagpipe. But judging from the extant, seasonal music associated with the instrument, Christmas pipes are for the most part continental: Italian, Provençal, German, Polish: all those minority dudelsacks, cornemuses, and zampgnas that any other time of the year get short shrift in the public imagination of bagpipes.

    The only remedy for any Christmas-loving Highland piper is to ran(dudel)sack the canon, an appropriately military-sounding activity for everyone's favorite musical weapon. Where the tunes don't "work," bend them to the instrument's will. The First Nowell doesn't "work" on the bagpipe's scale, because the instrument's "ti" absolutely refuses to toe the line. The bagpipe is going to do what it's going to do. But how else to participate in all that liltin o the unco thrang o the airmies of heaven?

Deaf Diary

I don't know who needs to hear this,  but I'm really quite deaf.

Get it? Hear. Deaf. Haha.

It's not as bad for me as it might be for other people, because I grew up "hard of hearing." I'm well prepared for the daily embarrassment that accompanies the failure to interpret the sounds that come out of other people's mouths, along with the ensuing struggle to get to a sense of what is actually being said.

It's work. It helps unimaginably to "read lips." So what happens when we have to "wear masks"? Zoom and gloom.

E.g. a masked woman checker is telling my masked wife something, and the masked me (complete with hearing aids) has no idea what she's talking about, but it's something about the upcoming holidays, and there's something in it that sounds funny, so I'm smiling as hard as I can. Out in the parking lot my wife tells me how the checker was talking about losing her job up in Boston and being forced to move and not being sure that there'll be anything for her kids under the Christmas tree. It horrifies me that what the woman said registered with me as funny. Thank God my smiling was concealed by my mask. I hate them anyway.

E.g. 2 the family zoom. No masks! But there are micro-second time lags, ambient reverberation, and shifts from speaker to speaker that dizzy me: whose lips do I read? What I do hear at one point is one dear nephew talking about how he'd just "quit his God," and this is a family that does not do that, but there's everybody nodding and smiling! It turns out (as you probably have guessed by now) that my nephew's announcement was that he had just quit his job, and for very positive and commendable reasons, thus the nodding and smiling.

It can be funny in an absurd kind of way.

These kinds of interactions are made more complex than they are for most people because of my hearing loss. But, as I said above, I'm prepared because I've lived with it to some degree since that long-ago time before the onset of memory when an ototoxic antibiotic started me on this road. Pity the poor person who has had perfect hearing for a long time and has to adjust to losing it.

Still, it's somewhat startling these days when I take out my hearing aids, and a smothering silence descends. It didn't used to be this way. Sure, my coping mechanisms are well-developed; they include excellent hearing aids and a wise audiologist. But the moments without hearing aids when I look at a grand-daughter and I can see that she is speaking to me, but I. Hear. Nothing. For a moment I'm staggered.

Naps are easy, though: Smothering silence is a good pillow.

Don't cry for me, Sergeant Tina.

Suffrage, by Ellen Carol Dubois

In the present climate of re-examining the appropriateness of certain types of monumental public art, one of the things that's said -- by way of arguing that those certain types of monumental art should remain -- is that the men in question "should be judged by the standards of their time," or some such variant of the sentiment that people in the past didn't have available to them the same ethical or moral norms that we have today, and thus can hardly be blamed for thinking, speaking, or acting outside of them.

We could let this slide by if -- let's say in the context of the mid-19th century -- we were talking about such scientific concepts as germ theory: there was no scientific knowledge available to contradict the firmly-held belief among Civil War battlefield surgeons that boils populating the site of a wound were filled with "noble pus" and therefore to be encouraged.

This is most emphatically not the case when it comes to human relations, particularly in the Christian West in any of the Anni Domini following 33 (or, ok, I'll give you up to 333). Either there is no man, woman, slave, Jew, or Greek, or there is. It seems to me that a lot of American history is spent saying that, regardless of how Jesus may have thought, we think differently -- or at least we act as if we think differently, with our absurd, Escherian upstairs/downstairs distribution of who is qualified to rule. Worse (for Americans) we can't even act as if we understand the sense of our own founding revelation (the Declaration of Independence) which essentially repeats the belief in universal human equality even if it puts it on a more agnostic plane better suited to the one that will finally reach germ theory.

The problem, then, is not lack of availability. It is, rather, that Thomas Jefferson cannot actually take a piss without lifting the lid, even though he knows it's the right thing to do. Thomas Jefferson cannot do as Thomas Jefferson reasons. And this is the case even when there are people hollering that, in fact, up can be up!

In fact, of course, the problem is much worse, since so many people of influence and power don't even rise to the level of hypocrisy. They use might to defy right and manufacture patriotic bunting, theological apologesis, and pseudo-science to disguise demonic actions that some explainers fob off as "the law of the jungle," but which would horrify a baboon.

All this is by way of saying that Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol Dubois should be on every American's bookstand in this month of the centennial of the 19th amendment. It is thrilling to read, particularly if, like me, you come into it with only the sketchiest knowledge of the history of the subject. Of particular interest to me were the ways in which the movement for woman suffrage interacted with the movement for Black (male) suffrage: the early unity between the two fractured and spun out into separate orbits as if by some peculiar physical law of American politics. Oh, and racism.

The overall impression, however, is that the women who dedicated their lives to this cause themselves caused the USA to bring itself into at least 51% better focus than it had been before. Moreover, they were forthright from the very outset in such a way that no one can say there was no sentiment available for changing the way things were.

This book's appendix includes the text of the movement's founding document, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments written by a group of women including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and promulgated to the world after a 2-day meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. Says author Dubois, "News of a public protest meeting in favor of women's economic, civil, educational, and political rights went viral throughout New York state and into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Cady Stanton and her sister organizers knew that what they were doing was unprecedented, but they did not anticipate the mean-spirited, demeaning ridicule that came down on them, drawing on every possible negative stereotype of manly women and effeminate men. The women were called 'Amazons,' their dignified proceedings 'A Petticoat Revolution.'"

But the genius of the Declaration of Sentiments is that its style, organization, and even verbiage all derive from the Declaration of Independence. It both stakes out the high ground and takes it. The old standard thus becomes the new standard, easily available to everyone who subscribed to the old one.

From there -- in a dramatic story well told by this book -- followed a cloud of dedicated witnesses to see its suffrage aspect, at least, to fruition some 72 years later. For such Amazons we should be ever grateful, especially given that so many American males still cannot be brought to lift the damn lid before they piss, not to mention wear a mask for the safety of others.