dave:
> Yup, basically that's it. A few Scots writers of recent years have
> retained a range of register that isn't limited by class, only a few
> mind you.
Um ...
Ages ago in the Scotsman, Anne Stevenson wrote that (among other things) of
the six young Glasgow writers she knew fairly well who had survived the
Scottish Higher Educational System, of the four who weren't working class,
one went to Art College and the other was the son of a Presbyterian
minister.
{I still resent that.}
Anne missed some, but still, four out of six is a bit more than "a few".
But if you're talking about deployment of linguistic register, we're already
into a different ball game. Tom Leonard is easily capable of making me
sound like an uneducated Glasgow keelie, and I can when put to it deploy a
limited linguistic register.
[As to Edwin Morgan's "Glasgow Sonnets", well ...]
And as you know, I'm about as middle class as it's possible to get, while
Tom is Glasgow bog-Irish Catholic.
A valid point on your part, but different.
Robin
(And hey, don't forget when it comes to working class speech, The Broons and
Oor Wullie from Dundee and Lobey Doser from the Glasgow Herald.
Even before the rise of the Graphic Novel, the Scots had a lock on this.
IHF's _Glasgow Beasts an' a Burd_ was merely the first respectable face of
the interface between the orthographic and the ideographic.
Let's hear it for M'Gonigal. ***
R.
[Actually, say what you like, and heavy-handed as it is, Tony Harrison
succeeds in _Continuous_ and _The Cost of Seriousness_., so it's not *just
the Scots, but.]
*** The reference to McGonigal isn't gratuitous -- whether or not he was
The Worst Poet Ever, there's something prophetic about the interplay between
his prose introductions to (More) Poetic Gems and the poems themselves --
the guy was anything but stupid, and played the persona game before the term
was invented. And who remembers the English Laureate William Watson today?
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