The Trouble With Nouns

The Trouble With Nouns

´Can you tell me where I can buy stationery?’

There were ten minutes before school assembly. He was determined to make use of them: his own headmaster had taught him that.

‘Where I can buy my pens and my paper…’

Their teacher had called in sick. They weren’t expecting this.

‘ … or our printer cartridges?’

Hands shot up into the air with an audible thrust.

‘Yes, Sancerre?’

‘Rylans, Mr. Thompson.’

He discouraged them from calling him ‘sir’; he was Mr. Thompson, Mr. T. but he stopped short of ‘Keith’ although he knew they privately referred to him as Thommo or The Thompster.

‘Yes, Rylans, Sancerre which is a … someone? Yes, Bono?’

‘A shop.’

‘A shop, Mr. Thompson, yes, but what kind of a shop? someone tell me?’

‘A chain store, Mr. Thompson.’

‘A franchise, Mr. Thompson.’

He briefly tasted defeat.

‘Alright, then; who can tell me where we would go shopping for our Sunday…’

He checked himself. Not all of us take traditional Sunday lunch. Tradition was one of those unhelpful nouns. A bit like lunch. Don’t name the event, the meal; name the food. The key to political correctness was in avoiding what he called generic terms and try to avoid rules: if you made one rule you would need to come up with at least another five, all with possible sub-clauses.

‘…Where we go to buy a joint of meat? Yes, Kylie?’

‘Bargainfreeze!’

‘Yes, or... Fleurisse?’

‘Ukansave, Mr. Thompson.’

‘Ukansave is pootch-nang, Mr. T.’

‘Pooch-nang, Walid?’

‘Ukansave employ illegal immigrant labour and pay them well below national minimum wage, sir.’

He bristled inwardly at ‘immigrant’ although when linked with ‘illegal’ it seemed, somehow qualified. When you said immigrant without ‘illegal’ the latter seemed vaguely implicit. Certain nouns had the ability to both blur and discriminate. Collective nouns, especially, imposed definition in a world of uneasily shifting parameters. Black was a grey area, white buff. The children, anyway, knew what a racist was; a racist was someone who split them all up, divided them unreasonably and took their friends away.

´Be sure of your own facts, Walid, before accusation.’

He took pride in the fact that he remembered each pupils name. He didn’t see them as pupils, though, he liked to think he saw them as people. The simple answer is the Christian name. Joy gave freedom, Hope individuality and the two Gayes didn’t share a name, they had one each.

‘Come along, where can we buy a joint of meat? yes, Ronaldo?’

‘Kerrissons!’

‘Yeah, Kerrissons is good because you get points.’

‘You get points in Ukansave.’

‘Yeh, but with Kerrissons you can get points on the same storecard in HouseCraft’

‘Very good, Seal, and what sort of things do Housecraft sell?’

‘Home Improvement, sir.’

He had been hoping for ‘hardware’ but hardware was now something into which you put your software.

‘Alright, settle down, settle down. So where can we go to buy a joint of meat? Where we can actually see a man… or woman, cutting up a joint of meat.. with a …?’

‘Knife!’

‘Axe!’

‘Cleaver, Sadé. But the shop would be called…?’

‘Springfresh! They have a meat-counter!’

‘A meat-counter, yes, which is run by a… what? A..?’

‘Manager!’

‘No, Mister Thompson because he wouldn’t be a manager, he’d be just a meat manager ‘cos they sell other stuff.’

‘He’d be a sales assistant.’

‘Springfresh is posh, anyway, Mr. Thompson. You pay through the nose in Springfresh.’

‘How do you know that, Gasgoine?’

‘Springfresh has class pretention, Mr. Thompson, and favours the Middle England vote, nimbyism and encourages delusions of social betterment.’

‘Goodness, Gascoine!’

‘No it doesn’t, actually.’

‘Really, Fleurisse?’

‘No, Mr. Thompson.’ Fleurisse was pouting.

He thought to himself; the chattering classes. Except they didn’t chatter anymore, they ranted the chunky page-bulk of their bourgeois tabloids.

‘Well, Fleurisse?’

‘My Godmother works in Springfresh, Mr. Thompson, and they have a policy where the staff are given the option to become shareholders. And my godmother is one, actually.’

‘That’s so they can get out of paying her a pension.’

‘ERRR! ... No...’ Fleurisse’s eyes were flashing.

‘Mr. Thompson, a pension is merely a manipulative pseudo-meritocratic device to encourage worker loyalty. The unattainable in the guise of the tangible based on the principle of the carrot put before the donkey.’

‘Stop showing-off, Gascoine.’

‘No, actually, Gascoine, she is a company pension policyholder…’

‘She won’t get it though, will she? The fat cats’ll have spent it by then if they haven’t already…’

‘… yeah, or it’ll go bust.’

Fleurisse was in fighting mood.

‘Well at least she’s prepared to work, not like your parents!’

‘That’s enough, now, that’s not helpful, Fleurisse, is it?’

There were two minutes until assembly. This could have been accomplished in minutes when he’d been a boy. Answer one Stationers, answer two butchers. There were new ways to ask questions now, a way to elicit self-expression rather than answers. But the exchange of views and ideas had been useful. Opinions had been formed and, perhaps, a mastery of quotidian consumerist inexactitudes: meat manager, sales assistant. It would be nice to think that in future you could buy your meat from Gascoine, your paper and pens from Fleurisse: people with their own identities. When you took away the nouns, though, it occurred to him that you could deprive a man of his skill, rob him of his professional status. His raison d’etre. He wondered whether, since becoming a headmaster, he’d forgotten how to be a teacher.

A new tack.

‘So who can tell me what a butcher is?’

‘Sadam Hussein, sir! The butcher of Baghdad.’

‘Radovan Karadicz. Butcher of Srebrenitza.’

‘No, but you mean like in Hal-Al meat butcher, don’t you Mister Thompson, like Welsh lamb, Scotch beef.’

‘Or chicken.’

‘Chicken isn’t meat, it’s poultry.’

‘Comes under meat on menus.’

‘So does turkey. ‘

‘But that’s game.’

‘No it ain’t. Birds are game.’

‘So’s turkey.’

‘No, it’s got to fly, innit.’

‘It’s meat, like fish.’

‘Yeah, like tuna steak. Steak is meat.’

‘Like on the McSizzler’s menu; even the vegetarian burger comes under meat.’

‘No, it don’t.’

‘Doesn’t.’ (He couldn’t help himself.)

‘Yeah, it does in its own little box but it’s under meat.’

‘In McSizzler’s, Mr. Thompson, not even the meat should come under meat.’
He saw his chance.

‘So I buy my meat at a … yes?’
No response.

‘A butcher.’

Silence. A tentative hand.

‘Yes, Ashraf?’

‘But that’s not what asked us, Mr. T; it’s like who sells meat? Like a butcher? Durr. You asked us where you could buy some meat. Like you wanted it, like, now, yeah? We buy it at the meat counter. So do you, don’t you, sir? Anyway, Butcher’s used to have their own shops, didn’t they?’.

‘I never seen a butcher’s shop. Have you?’

The bell for assembly sounded. A scraping of chairs. Some things never changed.

‘So who can tell me about stationers … Fleurisse?

‘It’s where the trains go from, Mr. Thompson. To London.’

And off they went in the direction of the assembly hall, routinely and quite happily dividing themselves into separate groups for different services according to their religion just as their parents had steadfastly arranged for them to do.


*


©David Shaw-Parker 28.11.2015 All rights Reserved by the author