RHYS BOWEN:
Most of you will know that I came back from Europe with Covid. I was the one who wore my mask on buses and trains and indoor settings and yet I caught it in Paris (where there wasn’t a mask in sight and everyone was coughing). So I spent a miserable few days confined to my hotel room. I arrived home, still quarantined.
Well, at last I tested negative!
I texted my kids saying “I’m negative at last. Hooray.”
And then I stopped to think about this. I’ve always considered myself a positive person—glass half full, unicorns and rainbows etc. So how can I rejoice at being negative? This made me think about the power of words and how the concept of a word can get so twisted. From now on I suspect that nobody will want to say they are positive. It carries the dread connotation of seeing that red line appear and knowing that there is nothing one can do about it. Of being infectious, dangerous.
I can think of other words that have become twisted from their original meaning. When I was young it was okay to say I’m feeling gay. We used it a lot. It meant happy with overtones of joie de vivre and lightheartedness. A lovely word. Now it’s come to mean only one thing and can’t be used in its original context any more.
The same goes for queer. When I young if I felt out of sorts I was feeling queer. Not any more. I can think of lots more like that. It’s interesting how words suddenly get twisted in popular use, isn’t it? Smashing meaning good. Bad meaning good. Wicked meaning good. IN UK everything is cracking these days. Let’s get cracking. Crack on. This is cracking (meaning great). Where did that come from? And pear-shaped. Things go pear-shaped in the UK, meaning start to go wrong.
And one I’ve always mused over is the use of black and white for skin color. I’ve never met a person who was black or one who was white. We are all shades of pink and brown. But by choosing those words in the beginning we have intentionally attached concepts of good and bad, right and wrong to them. The good guys wear white hats. Blackness equals night, darkness, fear. I wonder how our world would have evolved differently if we’d said “He’s a brown person, I am a pinkish ivory sort of person.” Neither inherently better than the other.
A story about my daughter in pre-school. She came home one day and asked me what the N word meant. I was shocked and asked her where she had heard it. She said a boy had told her it was a bad word. I explained that it was something you said to black people to make them feel really upset and sad, sort of like if I’d said to her “You are so ugly and stupid and nobody likes you.”
She frowned, thinking about this for a moment then she said, “I don’t know any black people.”
This surprised me because her teacher was African American. “What about Miss Kathleen?” I asked.
She gave me a look of utter scorn. “She’s brown,” she said.
And there you have it.
So what are your thoughts? Which words have changed meaning during your lifetimes?
AND on a lighter note: The lovely folk at Britbox always alert us to new series that our Jungle Red Family would love. The newest addition, that I got to review last week, is based on Val McDermid's Karen Pirie novels. Gritty Scottish crime with an appealing main character, a policewoman who has to fight for respect as well as justice. My one caveat is that the Scottish dialect may be a challenge for some people! if you'd like to see the trailer, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AtbQL0Muhg
