Misused Words

The fashion for misusing particular words comes and goes, but there are always at least a few with us. EFFICIENCY is a long-standing favourite, but the current one is SPRING, as in ARAB SPRING. The Prague Spring of 1968 really meant something, even though in the event it proved to be no more than a temporary thaw in a long winter. But can journalists compare rifles being fired into the air (at best) and the exchange of one dictatorship for another at a cost of hundreds or thousands of lives with this?

TWO MEETINGS WITH JORGE LUIS BORGES

The fact of living in the same city as a writer we admire does not mean a huge advantage in relation to the possibility of meeting him beyond what his pages offer.

In the event, Icould only see him a couple of times, both very briefly. The first occasion,was  in 1975, when he unexpectedly showed up at an art gallery I attended. He was extremely polite and even shy in his social behaviour. I do not remember who introduced us but he told me something about his latest book La rosa profunda (The Deep Rose), just published. He was very reticent in talking about himself or his work unless directly asked. By that time. I had not read him thoroughly nor was I particularly interested in his poetical or narrative work. Six years later I had devoured his complete works and had the chance of meeting him again at the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentinian Society of Writers).

As I had published my first book — in which Dylan Thomas had left a deep trace — I wanted to give Borges a copy with an inscription. I remember he took my book very politely. Listening to the reading of my inscription  —Borges had been blind since 1955 — he told me he did not deserve those words of sincere admiration; nobody did. When I told him I also admired Dylan Thomas and that the Welsh poet had had a powerful influence on my first book, he said that if I liked Dylan Thomas so much, I would also like Walt Whitman, "an author of other epiphanies", as he then defined it. I answered that I had read Whitman — with that certainty only allowed by the age of 20 and a first book published — and was not too enthusiastic about him.

Borges retorted that something similar had happened to Ezra Pound, who only came to appreciate Whitman's great work at an older age and that, if Pound had had that perception, it was probable the same would be happening to me: that I might be needing some more time to enter Whitman's poetics.

 I never saw Borges again but I kept on reading and re-reading his poems and narrations. Later these became a major influence in my writing. By then I already believed that a new author should try to premeditatively seek the influence of other writers, to counterbalance the influence received from one author with the reading of another.  LUIS BENITEZ

Vorderman doesn't add up

That deeply unpleasant woman, Carol Vorderman, has seen fit to publicise her views on mathematics teaching. Apparently she believes, or says she believes, that everybody in school should study maths until the age of eighteen. On behalf of my sixteen-year-old self (I was one once, though admittedly this was a long time ago) I shuddered at this suggestion. Strangely enough, I have retained the greater part of the mathematics I struggled with so long ago.

But why should we take the opinions of a TV presenter seriously? And why, in particular, should we pay heed to Vorderman? Her doubtful claim to fame is based on her time as front woman of Countdown, a daytime TV show, but I remember her better as the front woman for a loan company's advertisements. Her job was to give this usurer some kind of credence, and to pretend that the extortionate repayment rates added up.

In the magazine-based predecessor to Stray Blogs, Stray Thoughts, I identified Vorderman as one of the three most ill-matched people to jobs. The others were Tony Blair as 'peace ambassador' in the Middle East and Jeffrey Archer as a 'TV jurist'. Would we take anything they said seriously? I hope not.

The Silent Majority

One of the most dishonest things any journalist or 'commentator' can do is to call upon 'the silent majority' for support. You know the sort of thing:

'the silent majority recognises the need to address our budget defecit'

or

'the silent majority resents the savage cuts to public spending'.

No it doesn't, in either case. We don't know what the silent majority is thinking. The thing about 'the silent majority' is that it's silent. As some of those who seek to enlist it to their cause should be.

Words

I may not do this, for I feel it would surely characterize me as something of an Anorak, but I should love to sit through next year's final of the BBC's 'Strictly Come Dancing' and actually count the number of times judges and commentators use the word "fantastic". I suspect that this year's count would have run into several dozen.

Words

Acknowledging that he was on dangerous ground, Bill Oddie said on the radio that ‘only civilised people care for wildlife’. This raises complex questions, but in a very narrow sense what he says is worth considering: ‘civilised’ originally meant ‘city-dwelling’ (from ‘civitas’, Latin for ‘city’). It’s often interesting to know the roots of words: ‘entrepreneur’ literally means ‘between-taker; ‘egregious’ comes from ‘grex gregious’ - ‘standing out from the flock’; and so on.