Over here we grow kale (one syllable) but never feed it to the cattle, and
it has no symbolic meaning at all, unlike collard greens and spinach.
At 04:17 AM 1/5/2001 -0000, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>Mark:
>
>Ooops!! Sorry (and to Matthew too) -- it was actually Matthew Francis in a
>post immediately after yours, and I managed to conflate the two of you
>(shades of Dan McGee).
>
>> Robin: the second quote wasn't me, and I could use your help with aword:
>> kailyard means what?
>
>"Kailyard" is literally the cabbage (well, strictly, kail, a species of
>vegetable fed to animals and sometimes humans) patch. The Kailyard School
>is used to refer to poets and novelists of the late nineteenth / early
>twentieth century who presented a sentimentalised and idealised image of
>the Scottish countryside, in a rather thin and mawkish version of "Scots".
>S.R.Crockett's _The Stickit Minister_ is one which comes to mind (though I
>prefer his _The Red Axe_ which +isn't+ set in Scotland). There's also Ian
>MacLaren's _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_.
>
>The obscurities come together (unless you know the background!) in the last
>paragraph of the first chapter of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's _Sunset Song_:
>
>So that was Kinraddie that bleak winter of nineteen eleven and the new
>minister, him they chose early next year, he was to say it was the Scots
>countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny brier bush in
>the lee of a house with green shutters. And what he meant by that you
>could guess at yourself if you'd a mind for puzzles and dirt, there wasn't
>a house with green shutters in the whole of Kinraddie.
>
>_The House With The Green Shutters_ is the title of a novel by Geoge
>Douglas Brown which was distinctly _not_ kailyard -- premature
>anti-kailyard, in fact.
>
>I can't for the life of me think of the names of any poets in the movement
>off-hand. Anyway, it all became ancient history when MacDiarmid published
>_Sangshaw_ in 1925, and Gibbon restarted the novel in _A Scots Quair_.
>
>Apologies and profound grovels once more to both Mark and Matthew form my
>misatributed quote ...
>
>Robin
>
>
>
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