Clapping the NHS got me into trouble, of course. It was about 6.30 in the evening of the day of the first big round of applause, and - being me - I'd forgotten whether it was 7 or 8pm when I was meant to stand foursquare on the doorstep and put my hands together. So I googled it.
My big mistake was in googling "NHS clap" because as well as discovering the true time, I also found myself with a number of images of the other meaning of the word clap... and that was more than I bargained for over my omelette. Thanks for that, google.
And so, just like that fine woman in Stairway To Heaven, I was reminded that sometimes words have two meanings... and this is worth considering before you add to your browser history.
Anyway, I clapped. And I'm still trying to get those other images out of my head.
Other words have more than one meaning... and some words have meanings that change over time. In recent times we've often declared that something on the internet has "gone viral..." and that's less funny now. I'll bet that's a phrase that's going to vanish quietly in these weeks.
Other things that might vanish include this:
Corona beer from Mexico is currently out of production because brewing isn't a necessary activity under Mexican law. In days to come, will it return, or change its name? Corona simply means crown, as in:
- coronation
- coronas of the sun
- coroner (that's an officer of the Crown)
- coronary arteries (they encircle the heart like a crown)
and every Friday when I was a boy we would have two bottles of Corona pop delivered by Mick the Co-Op milkman:
Way back, the Corona pop logo was seven old bottles arranged as a crown, thusly:
Anyway. Mick would deliver two random bottles on a Friday alongside the six pint-bottles of milk jangling in the beige crate. Imagine the excitement of rushing down to find which flavours he'd brought us! One of them was usually lemonade: there were lots of home-made shandy drinkers round my way who enjoyed drinking something that tasted like the slops tray in the Red Lion. But lemonade I always found a little bit vanilla... ironically because once Mick brought cream soda by mistake and that was waaaay too vanilla and sugary. Can you imagine me being a bit hyperactive? No, me neither.
Hang on, I may have digressed a bit...
Corona pops (which brilliantly grew out of the temperance movement in Wales in the 1890s) enjoyed huge success for a century and was bought first by Beecham's and then Britvic and disappeared as a brand in the 1990s, although the factory where it was first produced in Porth is now a recording studio and still called the Pop Factory. How brilliant is that?
So, the Corona pop name being defunct, the owners are not presently scratching their heads in an office wondering whether and how to rebrand a drink that shares its name with a nasty virus.
In Mexico, however, they have a challenge on their hands. And I'm sure other Corona products - we saw Corona tomatoes last week - are in a similar cleft stick/gum tree/creek.
Thankfully names and words can change their meanings and overtones. When Dickens chose to call one of his most enduring characters Ebenezer Scrooge, it was a joke: Ebenezer means "stone of help" (It's in 1 Samuel 7 in the Old Testament part of the Bible) but from page 1 of A Christmas Carol this new Ebenezer is nothing of the sort. He's likelier to stone you for taking half a day off and dock your coal allowance than to be anybody's stone of help.
So powerful is Dickens' story that we wouldn't now name a baby Ebenezer (which is Goode). The name has completely changed its meaning and what it conjures up when we hear it.
Elsewhere, Jesus tells the story of a good Samaritan, and where previously the name Samaritan had meant people who sold out God and assimilated with the world, second-class cousins to God's holy people, 2000 years of telling that story have led Samaritan to become a compliment and in 1953 to the Revd Chad Varah founding the Samaritans. The rehabilitation of the word was complete!
We live in a curious age where some people - and some politicians - and some newspapers will use words for ill, and particularly words like refugee and asylum seeker and immigrant have been tarred with a nasty brush. The news that the first (hopefully the last) three doctors to be killed by Covid 19 were all immigrants to this country - two from Sudan and one of Pakistani origin - comes as a stern corrective to people who would demonise and spread hatred. The news that the UK fruit and veg harvest is at a certain risk because of a lack of immigrant workers reminds us that we need the world.
Immigrant simply means that someone has taken the initiative to up sticks and move a good distance, sometimes to help, sometimes to look after family. Refugee simply means that someone has fled an awful place or awful treatment. Asylum seeker simply means that someone has looked to our land and judged it better and fairer than where they were. I'll take that compliment on behalf of the nation.
If anything, in a time when there is more xenophobia and racism about that in much of living memory, we can seize these words of bravery, words of courage - words like immigrant and asylum seeker and refugee - and fly them up the flagpole with a touch of compassion and pride. They should be words that imply effort and courage. Have a go today. Read some stuff about immigrants (not on the Daily Mail website thanks) and find out some famous immigrants from history who came here, saw things differently and gave their all for their adopted home. Start with:
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
George Frederic Handel
Sigmund Freud
Michael Marks (and Spencer)
Alex Issigonis (designer of the Mini)
Rita Ora (from Kosovo as a baby)
Wyclef Jean (refugee from Haiti)
Omid Djalili
Albert Einstein
Jesus
and now - having fought to the end to defeat coronavirus, those three doctors:
Adil El Tayar
Amged El-Harwani
Habib Zaidi
Use this crisis and your time and conversation so that we emerge into a world where demonising immigrants and legitimating racism are both unacceptable, and where meeting someone from somewhere else in the world inspires in us curiosity and admiration at how far they've travelled and how much they've risked to look after family... or what they've endured and escaped.
If Jesus and Dickens can change words, so can we!
No comments:
Post a Comment