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Robin: the second quote wasn't me, and I could use your help with aword:
kailyard means what?

At 02:33 AM 1/5/2001 -0000, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>Mark says:
>
>> Lallans or Glasgow orthography is another matter--a challange to the
>> primacy of the south as much as a representation of dialect.
>
>Indeed, and the big battle of the Lallans transcription debate was whether
>and how far to use the apostrophe.  Using it (it was argued) implied that
>the language of the poems was a deformed version of "standard English", and
>was notated as a transformation of that rather than a mode of speech in its
>own right.  Tom Leonard writing later eschewed the apostrophe entirely, but
>MacDiarmid, equally consistently, does use it in _Sangshaw_, Penny Wheep_,
>and _The Drunk Man ..._
>
>But then this language thing was as much an internal Scottish battle as
>externally against received standard English -- Lallans revolting against
>kailyard, and Glasgow writing in the sixties putting itself forward as the
>urban alternative to the rural of Lallans (at about the same time that the
>School of Scottish Studies were refusing to document urban as opposed to
>rural Scots in their dictionaries).
>
>Mark says in another post:
>
>"I also think Tom Leonard's transliterations of Glaswegian are brilliant,
>though I'm never sure whether I admire them as poetry or just as a
>technical tour de force."
>
>I'd share both the reservations and the admiration -- I have a sense, as
>Tom Leonard's work evolves, of a narrowing of the +content+ of the Glasgow
>language poems to either transcription of life around (a crude way to put
>it) or an almost obsessive concern with the linguistic nature of the poems
>themselves [the obvious exception would be "The Good Thief"].  It's a
>phenomenon there already in "Six Glasgow Poems", which move from "The Good
>Thief" at the beginning to "Good Style" at the end, with teenage girls,
>football supporters, and pub gurus in the middle.
>
>When it comes to tours de force, the best, most extended, and funniest has
>to be the prose piece "Honest".  Much of this is pertinent to the present
>question (showing among other things that linguistic discussion can be
>howlingly funny).  To quote a short bit:
>
>Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that's no thi way a say it.  Nif
>yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wi thi page covered in
>letters stuck thigithir, nwee dots above hof the letters, in fact, yi end
>up wi wanna they thingz yid needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be
>able ti read.  But that's no the way a _think_, as if ad took a course in
>phonetics ...
>
>Robin
>
>