Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  CR: Dr Johnson believed that there were talents and you employed them in any way that struck you. It’s as if you were at the North Pole and you could walk south in many different directions. But what you do is essentially exactly the same, you walk south. On the other hand some people are amazingly numerate. They can look at a spreadsheet and see that the figures have been rigged and fixed. They can see that the books are being cooked. I could look at equations and symbols and numbers for ever and be blank. What about you?

  SF: I’m exactly the same. I don’t understand. And as you say some people are like a spider on the web – every twitch of the filament means something to them. And they can chase it down. So yes there is the gift of language.

  CR: Well, I think poets are really intelligent, and resourceful poets are much less vulnerable than you might think because their self criticism is alive to what might be the criticism of others. Pretty well all great writing has a warning about over-valuing writing in it. At some point or other Shakespeare will tell you not that plays or dramatic representations tell no truths but that you must remember they also tell lies. And so words half reveal and half conceal the truth within. And every great writer has intimated some such things at some point.

  SF: I think that’s absolutely right. Language is a bit like a dress. A dress can reveal the form, can flatter the form, can exaggerate the form, can give a real sense of the beauty and elegance of a particular form but it also hides deformities. It also masks and covers nudity; covers the passionate side of us, our fleshly side. And words are constantly doing that.

  There’s also this idea that there’s great literature: Leavis and his great tradition and Harold Bloom and his sense of the canon of writers, but can they include in that twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures from what is often called popular culture – like Bob Dylan who you’ve written about?

  CR: I think Dylan uses words with extraordinary effect. The effect is related to a different system of punctuation – the speed and pace at which it goes is determined by him, his music and his voice. He changes those and the beautiful thing he says about the songs is, my songs lead their own lives, and it’s lives in the plural not because each song has a life but because each song has lots of lives. I think again and again Dylan is very good when you can imagine an unimaginative creative writing school telling him he’d got it wrong. I think that he’s simply astonishingly imaginative with words.

  Funeral Blues

  Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

  Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

  Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

  Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

  Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

  Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

  Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

  Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

  He was my North, my South, my East and West,

  My working week and my Sunday rest,

  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

  I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

  The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  That poem was written by W. H. Auden, but you may well know it better from the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, where it was recited during the funeral of the title. It’s extraordinary how something can have such impact, be so succinct and have such emotional truth behind it.

  For anyone who’s had to organize a funeral, the choice of words is one of the most difficult things to get right. In the past, the traditional funeral passages from the King James Bible had little competition. But in our more secular times many prefer not to invoke religion at all. So what do we do when we want to express the grief and love and sadness of the loss of someone? Music is integral, and, if it’s right, the emotional heft will inevitably lead to tears.

  So what led Four Weddings scriptwriter Richard Curtis to choose the Auden poem for the funeral scene, a choice which catapulted sales of Auden’s poetry beyond anything he’d enjoyed while still alive?

  Richard explains with his unfailing modesty that he didn’t feel up to the job.

  ‘Tragically in my life, in every film I’ve ever done, the single best moment in the film has nothing to do with me at all. I was writing a moving funeral scene so I thought I’d better leave it to a better man. I’d always been told I should study Auden and I didn’t understand most of his poems. And I remember being very thrilled when I came across that one. And I think it’s no coincidence that it’s in fact called ‘Funeral Blues’ and it’s a lyric; it was meant to be sung. And that is symptomatic of the fact that I’m passionate about lyrics in a way more than poems.’

  It’s become the thing to choose songs rather hymns or prayers at funerals. ‘I Did It My Way’, ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’ or ‘Angels’ may be a bit clichéd, but people clearly feel their lyrics do the job better than a poem or a reading. They can express a communal emotion that everybody can share.

  Richard has a theory that we don’t have access to poems now in the way we once did. The Romantic poets were celebrities in their day. People were outraged by the work of Byron because they knew about him, he was famous. Nowadays it’s hard for a poem to break through into the popular culture, so what happened with Four Weddings was a rare example of a poem being heard by enough people to get a passionate reaction.

  Poems are often perfect word for word, pop lyrics less so, although, as Richard is keen to point out, there are some wonderful wordsmiths in the world of pop lyrics. He cites Paul Simon as one lyricist who has written some extraordinary, powerful songs.

  ‘Every day I think of that line from “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” And it lodges in your head, and as you go through life you realize people are only hearing a bit of what you say because it’s the bit that suits them. Rufus Wainwright’s song “Dinner At Eight” is about him and his father, and there is no finer expression of the argument between a son and a father who abandoned him. And there are the huge, big popular ones that everybody knows. They become the fabric of your life, and those lyrics are carried around with you and reflect your moods and feelings.’

  Richard is in full flow now. ‘If you pick up a poem for the first time you have to piece it together. It’s much harder. Whereas a song by Coldplay like “Fix You” has the lyrics “I will try to fix you.” It’s very direct, and the fact that the lyrics may not be as well crafted is compensated by the beauty of the tune, and is enough to turn it into something deeper. And on top of that you have the feeling that your whole generation heard that song together, so it has a binding effect. If you stood in a stadium with 45,000 other people who know those words, it’s the Nuremberg Rally of pop.’

  He’s right, of course. Pop songs are a brilliant way of people sharing a culture. But, despite his love of popular lyrics, does Richard still read poetry? He had to read lots of it at Oxford. He laughs.

  ‘I think there was a six-month period in which I understood it. I tried to read something by Yeats the other day which I know used to be my favourite poem. It’s gone completely. It’s as if I’ve forgotten the language.’

  Paul Simon, right, with Art Garfunkel

  Music

  If you’ve ever wondered why you sing in the bath (if you don’t, ignore this bit); or why you spent all those hours and hours as a teenager, shutting out the annoying world of parents and other people, glued to Radio 1 and the charts; or why the hairs on your neck prickle and your heart beats faster whenever Wagner’s music fills the air – well, if you’ve ever wondered, sorry, but nobody really knows. To be precise, scientists can’t agree on what it is about music and singing that touches us so profoundly, and whether it’s something to do with our evolution. Are we hard-wired to b
e musical?

  Music is universal. It’s found in all cultures across the ages, and archaeologists have unearthed musical instruments dating from as far back as 34,000 BC. The mystery is why humans have been singing and making music virtually since prehistoric times. What purpose does it serve?

  Evolutionary psychologists have a few theories. Some think that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females, rather like brightly coloured birds competing with each other to produce the most elaborate and complex songs. In other words, it’s a tool of evolution and natural selection: the male with the biggest lungs and catchiest song gets the girl. Another idea is that women were the original music-makers, and it goes all the way back to the universal instinct of the mother crooning and singing to her child. Experiments show that mothers automatically make their speech more musical when they talk to their babies, more lilting and melodic, and the theory is that music perhaps evolved as a sort of prehistoric baby-pacifying tool. Human babies can’t just cling on to their mothers’ bodies the way other primates do, so perhaps the singing was a way of the mother keeping contact with her children when she had to put them down to work.

  And then there’s a third theory that identifies music as a sort of social glue, a way of bonding early human communities, much in the same way that football supporters or people in church or families round the piano singing together enhances a sense of tribal identity. The evolutionary psychologists trace this back to the necessity for early tribes to work together for survival: communal singing demands coordination, bringing many voices together, and the theory goes that this is a way of practising for the kind of teamwork crucial in hunting or fighting for survival.

  Interestingly, researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute discovered, when they scanned musicians’ brains, that listening to music stimulated exactly the same part of the brain which food and sex affect. In other words, music lit up the basic, instinctual, pleasure centres of the brain.

  However, others dismiss these ideas. The Harvard linguist Steven Pinker caused an uproar when he addressed a conference of cognitive psychologists in 1997 and told them that their field of music perception was, basically, a waste of time because music is just an evolutionary accident, a redundant by-product of language: ‘Music is auditory cheesecake,’ he said, ‘an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of several of our mental faculties.’

  For many people – whatever the neurological and evolutionary theories – music is another form of language. A way of communicating without words.

  Music is universal and serves as a social glue

  Much research has been done on the use of music therapy with people suffering from dementia. They find verbal communication very difficult because the disease causes aphasia and amnesia. If you can’t find the words, if you can’t remember who you are, how do you express yourself and connect yourself to the people and the frightening world around you? Music therapists use singing and music in place of words. Singing a song with someone with Alzheimer’s doesn’t put demands on them; it doesn’t require the answer to a question; it doesn’t make the world even more confusing than it is. Singing is a way of being together, of inviting the person to take part, of somehow bypassing the damaged part of the brain that can no longer form the words. It releases tension and calms anxiety because it opens a door to expression when all the other doors are barred and shut tight. Music is part of who we are. It travels further, down and down into that part of ourselves which is older, deeper, mysterious.

  Auditory cheesecake indeed.

  Advertising

  If you were to chant ‘Helps you work, rest and play’, the chances are most people will respond with ‘A Mars a day’. Or if you sing, ‘Now hands that do dishes …’, a surprising number of you will feel the urge to sing ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid’. Someone younger will have the same automatic response to ‘Just do it’, immediately associating it with Nike. For just as succinct language can have a powerful effect on us through poetry and song, so the perfectly turned phrase can enter our subconscious, influencing our actions and decision-making. Nowhere is the use of the clever slogan seen more explicitly than in the language of advertising.

  From an ancient Egyptian town crier hired to shout out news of the arrival of a goods ship to a computer pop-up ad offering the secrets to a flat belly, we have always found ways of attracting the public’s attention to a product or business. Advertising may have become much more sophisticated, but wherever communities and commerce exist, so too does the advert in some shape or another.

  We’re been shouting our wares and promoting our products for thousands of years. Historians reckon that outdoor shop signs were civilization’s first adverts. Five thousand years ago the Babylonians hung the symbols of their trades over their shop doors, a practice still used today in areas of poor literacy or in some of the traditional shops like barbers – the red-and-white pole – or the three golden balls of the pawnbroker. A poster found in Thebes from 1000 BC offers a gold coin for the capture of a runaway slave. The Romans advertised the latest gladiator fight on papyrus posters and seem to have introduced the world’s first billboards with their practice of whitewashing walls and painting announcements on them.

  The advent of printing and spread of literacy meant advertising could expand into handbills and newspapers. A newspaper ad for toothpaste appeared in the London Gazette in 1660: ‘Most excellent and proved Dentifrice to scour and cleanse the Teeth, making them white as ivory.’

  An early example of a Wedgwood ad in a newspaper, c.1769

  The Industrial Revolution and the greater availability of factory-produced consumer goods brought a growing awareness amongst manufacturers that they could create a need for a product amongst the middle and lower classes able to afford luxury items. Our friend Dr Samuel Johnson wrote one of the first articles on advertising in a 1759 edition of his magazine The Idler: ‘Promise, large Promise, is the soul of an Advertisement … The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection, that it is not easy to propose any improvement.’ He wasn’t very prescient, for at that very moment one Joshua Wedgwood was founding his pottery workshop and he had very big ambitions about improving advertising technique. Wedgwood was one of the first industrialists to recognize the importance of creating a market through advertising and used newspapers ads, posters, publicity stunts, give-away promotions and money-back guarantees to persuade people of the need for a must-have Wedgwood vase or a twenty-piece dinner service.

  Increased competition amongst manufacturers and a growing public sophistication opened the way for agencies in the late nineteenth century who promised to create and run advertising campaigns for the client. Advertising had become a profession. The advent of radio and television extended the mass reach of advertising, revolutionizing its persuasive potential. This is the world of advertising we’re all familiar with – the TV commercials and product placements in films and internet pop-ups.

  On the reception desk of the west London ad agency Leo Burnett is a large bowl of green apples, a reminder of the humble beginnings of the founder, Mr Burnett, who established his agency in Chicago in 1935 with just one account, a staff of eight and a bowl of apples on the front desk. Legend goes that, when word got around Depression-hit Chicago that Leo Burnett was giving apples to visitors, a newspaper columnist wrote, ‘It won’t be long till Leo Burnett is selling apples on the street corner instead of giving them away.’ Leo was a wizard with visual imagery and created the iconic brands for the Jolly Green Giant canned peas and corn, Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger – ‘They’re GR-R-R-E-A-T’ – and most famously the Marlboro Man for Philip Morris, who were persuaded to repackage their woman’s cigarette as a rugged man’s smoke. Today, Leo Burnett is one of the world’s leading advertising organizations.

  Don Bowen is a creative director at the agency’s London office and currently in charge of the Kellogg’s and Daz accounts. He began in the business thirty years ago as a copywriter and manages
to turn on its head the adage of a picture being worth a thousand words.

  ‘Words are tremendously important in advertising because there have been hardly any ads where there have been only images that can make a lot of sense. The Economist has done this, once or twice, but most of the time most ads have words in them, and very often the words can be worth a thousand pictures.’

  Don gives the example of the Volkswagen advertising campaign in the 1960s. The American ad agency DDB faced an apparently impossible task – selling Hitler’s favourite car to the Americans, a decade or so after the Second World War. What they came up with is known simply as ‘The Lemon’ – a black-and-white picture of a Beetle car with the one word, ‘Lemon’, underneath. The story below explained that this car had been rejected by the quality-control inspectors because of a blemish on the glove box. ‘We pluck the lemon; you get the plums,’ ran the end tag. It intrigued readers that a company should be critical of one of its own cars. Then it hooked them with its assurances of rigorous inspection. It was an approach to advertising that the Lemon’s creator, William Bernbach, saw as part of a creative revolution, rethinking how advertising works. (For the car rental company Avis, his agency made an apparent failure a virtue: ‘We’re only Number 2. We try harder.’)

  The 1960s Volkswagon campaign was part of a creative revolution in advertising

  ‘Lemon’ is an example of what copywriters call the endline, like ‘Probably the best lager in the world,’ or ‘Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach,’ or ‘Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.’ Huge amounts of time are spent getting them right, distilling a number of ideas into one three-, four- or five-word end line. ‘English is a particularly good language for being able to play gags, to word play, to sum up an idea pithily,’ says Bowen, ‘like “You’ll never put a better bit of butter on your knife.” ’