23 means skidoo!

I read somewhere that every 10,000 years, a language will have replaced every single sound in it with another sound. I believe it. Language is a human gift that refuses to stop giving. We don't live in a language: we just drift along in its river. It's constantly changing.

Of course, that doesn't stop people who know nothing about it from trying to lay down the law about how it's supposed to work.

Some very bright young Scottish folk artists and linguists have been busy trying to educate people in their country and elsewhere about the history and heritage of Scots. Scots is a living language that appears to be thriving in that country. It's the reason some of the scenes in Trainspotting had subtitles. I'm glad to see they're still speaking it.

Scots confuses people. For one thing, they get it mixed up with Scots Gaelic, which is a completely different language related to Irish. When they're not confusing it with a Celtic language, they think it's just mispronounced English. This isn't true at all: Scots is a West Germanic language that is older than modern English. They have documentation and everything.

This reminds me of a colleague of mine back when I taught English in Germany. My colleague, whose last name started with 'Mc', was from the southern US. One time, he decided to go exploring in the land of his ancestors. Somewhere in the north of Scotland, he heard some guys talking in a pub. He was eager to make contact with these distant cousins. It did not go well.

'Are you speaking Gaelic?' he asked.

They looked at him as if to ascertain what planet he came from. 'No, this is English,' they insisted. In his defence, my colleague was teaching English to Germans, but his background was in history. And he told that on himself.

Yes, Scots is a West Germanic language. Like German. And English, originally. And Dutch and Frisian. I know these things. I spent way too much of my youth studying Germanic languages.

Language doesn't stay still. Not only is it picked up by people not related to the original speakers – have you seen, and more importantly, heard the new Doctor Who actor? – but it 'alters when it alteration finds'. It changes at a whim. Exactly whose whim is often impossible to discover, which leads to insane arguments.

Take the phrase '23 skidoo'. It was a major catchphrase in the early 20th Century. Exactly what it meant, nobody knew – but they loved it. They'd work it into just about any conversation. It was like one of those Twitter n0nce phrases that take on a life of their own. Nobody knew where '23 skidoo' came from, but that didn't stop them from making up origin stories about it. It referred to 23rd Street in New York City, for example: the wind around the Flatiron Building caused an epidemic of girl-watching (you might see a forbidden ankle!). Alas, the phrase predates the Flatiron Building.

It came from Dickens, or it didn't. It was born in vaudeville. It referred to the number of horses in a race. Or the town of Skidoo and the number of miles they had to pipe in water. The list goes on. Nobody knows, which didn't stop the popularity of the phrase, which basically meant 'It's time to go.' It was certainly past time for that phrase to go, long before the last geezer uttered it.

In the movie Love at First Bite, Dracula is being shipped to New York in a coffin in the baggage hold of a jetliner. To pass the time, the count is reading a book on American slang. When he encounters '23 skidoo', he looks at the date of the book – 1920 – and shouts, 'Renfield!' As I said, language changes.

Yesterday, the math guy on Youtube baffled me. That isn't new: the math guy on Youtube baffles me every day. I'm terrible at math. But this puzzle began, 'If you throw a fair dice 420 times. . . '

'Now, wait a minute!' I complained. 'You can't have 'a dice', fair or not. 'Dice' is plural. There's no such thing as 'a dice', just as there is no such thing as 'a books', etc.'

Moved by a sudden, horrible presentiment of evil, I decided to check this out on Google. Sure enough, a grammarian was explaining that although the singular of 'dice' has been 'die' ever since the English language came into being, 'dice' is now being considered a reasonable substitute.

How come? Aha, the board game industry. They put out games with one, two, three or more dice. Yes, I know some of these dice aren't limited to six sides. That's another question. But their instructions always say, 'Throw the dice.' So people have decided that you can have one dice. My head hurts now. But you can't fight it.

Alea jacta est, I suppose. Which we are now told is not what Caesar said. Because he said it in Greek, which all the cool kids did back then. He didn't say 'Et tu, Brute?' either. He said something in Greek that may or may not translate to, 'See you in hell, kid.'

This morning, I opened Twitter, always a dodgy move. And found the photo of a Brutalist theatre building with the comment, 'Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.' What? I agreed that the building was not beautiful.

Scrolling down, I ran across the post of a ferocious-looking Preraphaelite redhead supposedly representing Helen of Troy. And the text, 'Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.'

By the time I saw a piece of ugly computer code with the comment, 'Sorry. Not beautiful,' I realised that a new meme had been born. But whence? Wherefore? And what in the blue blazes was 'authoritarian tolerance' supposed to mean?

Aha. I soon found that the originator of the 'authoritarian tolerance' meme was a right-wing pundit-wannabe, a US professor of something-or-other, who had objected to a cover photo of – wait for it – the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. In case you don't know (I barely do), that sport magazine has a long 'tradition' of putting out an annual issue involving attractive women in swimsuits. I don't know what their ostensible excuse is. I do know the real reason is that it increases sales for their magazine. This year, they've taken a bold step and used a plus-size swimsuit model. The lady is extremely beautiful but not in a conventional way.

I would personally never have expressed an opinion on this subject. I hate sport and do not read this magazine. I also do not spend time looking at photos of other people in swimsuits unless I need to buy a swimsuit. Otherwise, I have no interest in such things. But this professor accused the 'media' of trying to influence his personal fantasies by changing the unspoken criteria for swimsuit models. He didn't like it. He probably thought it was 'woke' in some unspecified manner.

But the professor, who presumably has a degree of some sort, was aware that shouting 'woke' at people tends to undercut one's argument. It's a signal that you haven't done a lot of thinking. In an attempt to counteract that impression, the professor had attempted to couch his criticism in what he fondly believed to be academic discourse. He referred to 'authoritarian tolerance'.

His approach backfired. Within minutes, he was mocked. Within hours, he was memed. Within a few more hours, he had left Twitter in high dudgeon, pursued by the bear of catcalls. I doubt he will be missed. But it shows something about our use of language.

Language shifts. It changes, constantly. As in Alice's Looking-Glass World, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. We do our best to keep up. We adapt and learn, as this Twitter user noted:

I learned a new term 'authoritarian tolerance' which apparently describes a system of government under which private companies can hire professional models they choose, even if those models might inadvertently incline young women toward eating enough food.

– ER_idK

Somehow, language always manages to survive whatever we do to it. It's an indestructible, though malleable, resource.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

20.05.24 Front Page

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