Speculation, Fact and Fiction

No, not a typo leading into a post about a search for brioche. I was making chicken and mushroom soup yesterday afternoon and had Radio 4 on, so found myself listening to Material World. I quite like science programmes as I find myself so frequently struck with childlike wonder, along the lines of 'coo, who knew?'.

Only this had two chaps, whose names escape me, talking about how they were using assorted medical imaging techniques, MRI kindathings, to look at people's responses to literature. That got my attention. Turns out folks' brains light up particularly brightly for Shakespeare - and one thing that apparently links into this is his fondness for using functional shift in words. Or, as it turns out, Bill the Bard seemed to believe there's no noun that can't be verbed... As in, 'grace me no graces, uncle me no uncles.' Or 'companion me'. This had the chaps on the radio all very excited about why he might have done this.

A couple of thoughts occured to me as I softened mushrooms, onion and garlic. The first is, just coz Shakespeare did it, this is no reason for others to think it's a nifty way to make readers' brains light up. I vividly recall a dry-as-the-finest-sherry tutor at Oxford commenting thus on an essay of mine; 'the Ciceronian period (a sentence of nested clauses that can run to a whole paragraph or even a page) is very fine when done by Cicero but rather less so when done by you, Miss Mckenna.' She was, it cannot be denied, quite correct.

Also, I promptly recalled a BBC drama some years ago called Looking After JoJo, about heroin dealing etc on Edinburgh housing estates. It was very good, and I recall reading at the time, was broadcast with subtitles in the US on account of the authentic accents. Well, I got my ear around those but was thankful for translations of local idiom from a local pal who used to live in Edinburgh. Such as 'I'll chum ye tae the polis,' meaning, 'I'll accompany you.'

Um, so, maybe Shakespeare wasn't being so radical. Maybe he was just reflecting contemporary usage of his day? I don't know enough about late C16 English-as-it- was-spoken to know but worth finding out if you're doing that kind of research, I'd say.

Anyway, the interviewer wrapped this all up asking if their work was likely to lead to reverse engineering of writing, to create masterpieces to make the brain light up. No, not according to the scientists. Writing techniques like functional shift are tools of the trade but the writers are the craftsmen who use them. Glad to hear that.

And then the programme turned to analysis of complex systems and complicated systems and I was back to my customary 'coo, who knew?' listening. Turns out the Royal Mail is of great interest to folk studying such things. Not least coz of the human factor there. Hmmm. Yes. Well, the human factor hereabouts delivered a Christmas card yesterday addressed to someone with a different name, same number and name of our Close, only in this address it was a Road, and a road what's more, in a clearly written suburb of Birmingham.