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We Want Information

PORTMEIRION

The road south from Caernarfon into mid-Wales runs along the Lleyn peninsula then cuts across through Porthmadog and past the Italianate village created by Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1920s in loving memory of his visits to Portofino, on the coast of north-west Italy. Portmeirion. I had to go and worship there, for a little while, because it was chosen as the location for The Prisoner, the 1960s cult television series starring Patrick McGoohan. I am of the generation that watched it assiduously, week by week, and puzzled over what on earth it was all about.

Portmeirion was ‘the Village’ where (it seemed) kidnapped spies and agents of all descriptions were kept for interrogation, so that whatever data they had in their heads might be extracted for use by those (whoever they were) who were in charge. McGoohan’s character has suddenly resigned from his job in British intelligence. He is followed home, put to sleep with a gas spray, and taken to the Village. Each episode begins with his character, now a prisoner, waking up in his new bedroom and having an exchange with the Village’s current second-in-command (‘Number 2’).

PRISONER: Where am I?

NUMBER 2: In the Village.

PRISONER: What do you want?

NUMBER 2: Information.

PRISONER: Whose side are you on?

NUMBER 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information. Information.

PRISONER: You won’t get it.

NUMBER 2: By hook or by crook, we will.

PRISONER: Who are you?

NUMBER 2: The new Number 2.

PRISONER: Who is Number 1?

NUMBER 2: You are Number 6.

PRISONER: I am not a number. I am a free man!

Despite their hook and crook, the Village guardians don’t get their information. And at the end of the series, McGoohan triumphs (possibly).

The surreal location, and the ingenious, ambiguous ‘Big Brother is watching you’ plots, a combination of thriller, fantasy, and science fiction, reinforced by quirky music, clever camerawork, crisp editing and colourful design, resulted in a series now acknowledged to have been well ahead of its time. I especially admired the quickfire dialogue, with its contagious catch-phrases, and forty years on still find myself saying ‘Be seeing you’ as a farewell – the au revoir that all brainwashed inmates of the Village had been programmed to say.

Catch-phrases are notoriously difficult things to pin down, as they rarely get into dictionaries. Often, by the time lexicographers come to be aware of them, they are already on their way out, so they are never recorded at all. In any case, they don’t easily fit into a dictionary format. A dictionary is not the obvious place to put ‘Be seeing you,’ for instance. Or Victor Meldrew’s ‘I don’t beLIEVE it!’ from One Foot in the Grave.

Many catch-phrases are generated by particular radio or television series, or by TV advertising slogans, and last only as long as the transmissions take place. ‘Can I do you now sir?’ from the radio show ITMA in the 1940s. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ from Listen with Mother in the 1950s. ‘There’s no answer to that,’ from The Morecambe and Wise Show in the 1960s. ‘And now for something completely different,’ from Monty Python in the 1970s.

There can be huge generational gaps in communication – teenagers not understanding adult catch-phrases and, even more so, adults not understanding the latest teenage linguistic fashions. Nor are catchphrases much recognized outside the country in which they originate. Most British catch-phrases are not known in America, and vice versa. PC Dixon’s ‘Evenin’ all,’ from the 1950s and ’60s television series Dixon of Dock Green, never travelled across the Atlantic. Nor did ‘Gissa job’ (= ‘Give us a job’ in Liverpool dialect), from Alan Bleasdale’s 1980 television play Boys from the Blackstuff, and the series it inspired.

A favoured few phrases catch the public linguistic imagination, and live on. Some of them eventually become part of the mainstream of English usage, and their origin is lost to memory. Who now knows which film Western originally inspired ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’? And how many of us are aware that it was Al Jolson, in the first talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927), who gave us ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’? Such phrases have refreshed parts of our linguistic intuition that other phrases have not reached.

For some (especially younger) readers, that last sentence will seem to be an original piece of literary expression, perhaps admired for its metaphorical ingenuity, more likely condemned as a piece of intellectual self-indulgence. Others (slightly less young) will nod wisely, and remember the original lager slogan which ran from the 1970s for some twenty years: ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’.

A significant amount of our daily language is a matter of recalling our individual past linguistic experiences, reflecting old interests and habits. Catch-phrases tell others what we have watched or listened to. If you have experienced the same happenings, you recognize the allusions and respond with pleasure. If you haven’t, you would probably think the behaviour puerile. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more. Know what I mean?

When phrases are consciously taken from literature or high oratory, they are usually called ‘quotations’. Some people sprinkle them throughout their speech and writing. They may not know their origins, of course. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ ‘O, what a tangled web we weave…’ ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’ If they escape your memory, a book of quotations will tell you that these are from John Keats, Walter Scott, and Rudyard Kipling, respectively.

Some quotations have become so familiar that they have entered the standard everyday language. ‘The plot thickens’, from George Villiers’ play The Rehearsal. ‘Ships that pass in the night’, from Longfellow’s poem-saga Tales of a Wayside Inn. ‘Having your pound of flesh’ and ‘to the manner born’ from Shakespeare. ‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other’ from Frederick Marryat’s novel The Pirate – or, of course, from The Prisoner.

Misquotations enter the standard language too. Sherlock Holmes never said ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ Ingrid Bergman never said, ‘Play it again, Sam’ (in the film Casablanca). Tarzan never said ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ In each case, something similar was uttered, but it is the misremembered versions which have come down to us.

Catch-phrases help people to bond. Conversely, a difference of taste in catch-phrases, as George Eliot nearly said, ‘is a great strain on the affections’. Only the most successful advertising campaigns, or the most reported public statements, manage to reach out to everyone, and transcend individual tastes. ‘A diamond is forever,’ from a campaign of 1939. ‘Clunk, click, every trip,’ from a 1971 road safety campaign. The slogan ‘Drinka pinta milka day,’ from 1958. That brought the word pinta into English.

You can, of course, keep linguistic memories alive artificially. This is what fanclubs and anniversary gatherings and appreciation societies do.

There is a Prisoner Appreciation Society. The society has a shop in Portmeirion, in a building called the Round House, where they sell Prisoner books, recordings, and memorabilia. Each year they have a get-together in the village, and there is a tradition of re-enacting one of the scenes – the chess-match on the lawn from the episode called Checkmate in which the pieces are represented by Village inmates. Proper Prisoner dress is the order of the day. Everyone says ‘Be seeing you,’ when they leave. The appropriate response is ‘And you.’

To reach the village you follow the A487 out of Porthmadog, past the station where the Ffestiniog steam railway begins, and across the mile- long embankment built by local landowner William Madocks in 1811, known as ‘the cob’, to reclaim land from the Traeth Mawr (‘great beach’) estuary. Madocks had hoped that the embankment, along with the new model village of Tremadog, which he was building nearby, would provide an attractive road route between London and Dublin. Unfortunately for him – though fortunately for Holyhead and Llanfairpwll – the commissioners decided on a northern route, across the Menai Straits, and, as we have seen, eventually got Thomas Telford to build it.

High tides in the winter of 1812 breached the cob. Hundreds of local men turned out to carry material to fill the gap, and the embankment was saved. But the disaster closed the cob for two years, and placed Madocks in serious financial trouble. He received welcome and unexpected support from the poet Shelley, who was passing through Wales at the time and looking for a place to escape the attentions of the authorities, who were concerned about his radical political views. Shelley was hugely enthusiastic about the Tremadog project, which he saw as a bold experiment in forming a new social community, so he decided to stay in the area and fund-raise on Madocks’ behalf. He lived in a cottage in the grounds of Madocks’ house. Much of his long philosophical poem ‘Queen Mab’ was written there.

The collaboration didn’t last long. One night in February 1813, Shelley claimed that an attempt had been made on his life, and he immediately left the area. The event – if it was not simply hallucination – has attracted endless speculation. Was it a government-inspired assassination attempt? Had his radical views upset local businessmen? Some think it was a clever scheme by local shepherds to drive him away. They had become upset at Shelley’s practice of shooting any injured sheep which he encountered on his mountain walks. So one story goes.

Madocks’ house, Plas Tan-yr-Allt, is now a hotel. The rooms are named after Madocks’ guests. One is called Shelley’s Theatre.

Madocks was saved by the development of the new slate quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog, which used his embankment to export the slate via a nearby harbour, which was called Port Madoc – modern Porthmadog. A railway line was later built along the cob, alongside the road. It’sa splendid tourist attraction today.

Cobs turn up in all kinds of places. There’s another one on Anglesey, linking Holy Island to the Anglesey mainland. I suppose the most famous one in Britain is at Lyme Regis in Dorset, because it figured in Jane Austen’s novels and also starred in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Cob – or cobb, as it is sometimes spelled – is a curious word. It has a remarkable range of senses, some dating back to the fifteenth century. At one time or another it has referred to a well-built man, a type of gull, a herring, a male swan, a stout horse, and a spider (think of cobweb). Small haystacks, loaves of bread, certain types of nut, the tops of maize shoots, and even testicles have also been called cobs, as have Spanish dollars (the famous ‘pieces of eight’), lumps of building material for walls, and small rounded stones for roadways, more commonly called cobble stones.

Which is where Lyme Regis comes in, for the cob there was originally made out of cobble stones.

The OED editors must have spent some time puzzling over this set of senses, but without coming to any definite conclusion. Are the meanings all related to each other, or do they have different points of origin? There seem to be three semantic themes involved. The notion of ‘large in size’ is there in such cases as the large men, swans, and horses – and probably also the pieces of eight, which were bigger than the average coin. The notion of ‘head’ or ‘top’ (compare German Kopf) is there in gulls and spiders and maize shoots. The notion of ‘something rounded or forming a roundish lump’ is there in most of the others.

It’s hard to disentangle these notions in many instances. Was it the male swan’s size relative to the female, or the rounded shape of its head, which caused it to be called a cob? And then there are the more abstract or figurative uses of the word, many of which are still found in dialects. To give someone a cob can mean to hit them. To have a cob on is to be in a bad mood. To get a cob on is to become sulky. I remember using those last two in Liverpool, where I lived as a teenager. But are these related to the other senses? Nobody knows.

At the end of the Porthmadog cob, on the left if you’re driving towards Portmeirion, is a small house where until recently you had to pay a 5p toll per car – an unusual practice, to say the least, on a British A-class road. It’s a legacy of William Madocks’ original toll, which helped rescue him from financial difficulty. But it is no more. The road was nationalized by the Welsh Assembly in 2005.

The opening paragraph of the old toll-board is a Roget’s Thesaurus of early-nineteenth-century vehicle names:

TOLLS TO BE TAKEN AT THIS GATE

For every Horse or other Beast of Draught drawing any Coach, Sociable, Berlin, Landau, Chariot, Vis-a-Vis, Chaise, Calash, Chaise-marine, Curricle, Chair, Gig, Whisky, Caravan, Hearse, Litter, Waggon, Wain, Cart, Dray, or other Carriage, any Sum not exceeding One Shilling:

For every Horse, Mare, Gelding, or Ass, laden or unladen, and not drawing, the Sum of Sixpence: but if there shall be more than one such Horse, Mare, Gelding, Mule, or Ass, belonging to the same Person, then the Sum of Sixpence shall be paid for one of them only, and the Sum of Threepence only for every other of them:

For every Drove of Oxen, Cows, or Neat Cattle, any Sum not exceeding Five Shillings per Score, and so in proportion for any greater or less Number:

For every Drove of Calves, Pigs, Sheep or Lambs, any Sum not exceeding Three Shillings and Sixpence per Score, and so in proportion for any greater or less Number:

And for every Person crossing or passing on Foot, without any beast or Carriage, any Sum not exceeding Two-pence.

The sign shows the eighteenth-century liking for capital letters on nouns considered to be important – Coach, Mare, Pigs, Horse, Berlin, Person, Chaise…, of course, as these are the critical factors; but also Number, Sum, and Foot, which the sign-writer felt needed extra prominence. The fashion for noun capitalization died out by the end of the century.

After you’ve crossed the cob, quite suddenly you turn right for Portmeirion. You have to be on your toes not to miss the turning. If you encounter a sign saying Penrhyndeudraeth, you’ve gone too far. That name means ‘headland with two beaches’. In 1998 it became the first broadband-networked village in the UK.

Actually, you don’t have to go as far as Penrhyndeudraeth. Another sign just after the turning tells you that you’ve missed it.

The road down to the village winds for a mile through woodland and into the car park by the arched gatehouse which is the entrance to Portmeirion. You pay to get in, unless you’re staying there, or dining in the hotel. But it’s worth every penny. You’d have to travel to Portofino to have a comparable experience.

In his account of the development of Portmeirion, Clough Williams- Ellis describes his creation as full of ‘wilful pleasantries, calculated naivetes, eye-traps, forced and faked perspectives, heretical constructions, unorthodox colour mixtures, [and] general architectural levity’. That’s exactly what it’s like. There is cheeky joy everywhere.

Noël Coward was one of many literary visitors. He stayed for a week in the Watch House, arriving one Saturday and leaving the next. In between he wrote Blithe Spirit.

I called in to the Prisoner shop, and bought yet another book on the subject. As I left, I said ‘Be seeing you,’ to the man behind the counter. He said, ‘And you,’ through a thin smile. The rest of his face held an expression of extreme pity.

A sunny day, and Portmeirion was full of tourists. It’s a small place, really, with one steep windy road leading down to the sea, and innumerable recesses and side turnings beckoning you towards intricately landscaped gardens and visually teasing ornate façades. On a tall pedestal, at the head of the long flight of steps leading to the harbour, is a bronze statue of Hercules, standing in for Atlas, in a heroic kneeling pose, carrying a huge stone globe on his shoulders. Prisoner aficionados would of course see this as an allusion to the huge bouncing balloon-entities, controlled by the Village guardians, that prevented people escaping.

Thomas Telford turns up in Portmeirion. A tall building overlooking the piazza was erected in honour of the bicentenary of his birth, in 1957. They call it Telford’s Tower. Today it is a self-catering cottage for three.

The compact layout of Portmeirion tends to push people towards each other. That day in June it seemed there were more English accents per square metre here than anywhere else in the world. And foreign languages too. I heard five in as many footsteps.

I walked down to the water’s edge, by the hotel. A group in front of me were speaking Welsh. Having been listening to so many English accents, it took me a bit by surprise. And yet this is a corner of the traditional heartland of Welsh. Once upon a time it would have been English that caused the surprise on the banks of Cardigan Bay. And indeed, in some Gwynedd villages English is still the exception rather than the rule.

Welsh has been the success story of the twentieth century when it comes to plotting the future of the world’s endangered languages. And endangered they certainly are. It is thought that half the languages of the planet, some three thousand in all, are unlikely to survive to the end of the present century.

That’s one language dying out somewhere in the world, on average, every two weeks.

About two thousand of those languages have never been written down. That’s the savage part. For when a language dies that has never been written down, it is as if it has never been. And that means the irretrievable loss of another unique vision of what it means to be human.

Many of those endangered languages have only a few dozen or a few hundred speakers. Welsh, by contrast, has over half a million. About a fifth of the people of Wales speak Welsh, and the numbers are steadily increasing. It is the only Celtic language to have done so well. The activism of the 1970s and the subsequent Language Acts, giving measures of protection to the language, helped enormously. Plus radio and TV channels in the medium of Welsh.

I sat in the stone boat next to the hotel and looked across the Dwyryd estuary. It was early afternoon, and the tide was coming in. Some people were walking on the estuary sands in the distance. They would have to watch out. The sea comes in very quickly here, and it’s easy to get cut off.

When was English first spoken along the banks of this estuary, I wondered. And when Welsh? And what was the language that was here before Welsh? Nobody knows how many languages have been spoken on earth since the human race developed the ability to speak. Some people think as many as 150,000. Maybe more. The six thousand or so we have left today are only a fraction of what may have been.

Sometimes you can see a trace of an earlier period of language inhabitation. In the territory between Spain and France you will find Basque, unrelated to any modern language, and in structure quite unlike the Indo-European languages surrounding it. People think it is the last example of the languages which were spoken in Europe before the invaders from Asia arrived.

The tide had almost reached the group walking on the sands, but they seemed oblivious. Some Portmeirion regulars were sitting nearby, bemoaning the way some people ‘don’t take any notice of the warnings’. The hotel staff were used to it. A man with a megaphone came out and bellowed. The walkers scuttled. I asked him whether this happened often. ‘Not so much these days,’ he said. ‘The time of the high tide is printed on the ticket.’

His accent wasn’t local, and I couldn’t immediately place it. ‘You don’t sound as if you’re from these parts, then?’ I asked. I can never resist an unfamiliar accent.

Nor an unfamiliar name. Once I was looking for a particular old edition of Hamlet, and called an antiquarian book company that I thought might have it. The person who answered the phone said she would look, and asked me to call her back. ‘Ask for Lassarina,’ she said.

I couldn’t stop myself. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ I said. And as I said it, I thought, she’ll think this is a come-on, so I hastily added, ‘You see I’m a linguist and I’m interested in the history of names and I’ve not come across that one before and do you know what it means and how do you spell it?’ Then I thought, that sounds totally implausible, even more of a come-on! But she reacted equably, and said she’d no idea, but thought it was Irish. She spelled it out, and told me her friends called her Lassie for short.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, and I rushed over to my bookcase, where I had some ‘origins of names’ books. There she was, Lassarina, an anglicized form of Gaelic Lasairiona, a combination of lasair and fion, ‘flame’ and ‘wine’. I picked up the phone and told her. She was delighted. People usually are when you do a bit of etymological digging on their behalf.

I thought that piece of mini-research might get me a discount on my Hamlet, but no such luck. Maybe if I’d called her Lassie… But I couldn’t do that to a non-canine.

Then, in one of those coincidences that make linguistic life worthwhile, I came across the name again a few weeks later. In Irish writer Padraic Colum’s collection of stories called The King of Ireland’s Son, published in 1916, there is a character called Lassarina.

‘I’m from near Norwich,’ the hotel man replied to my question about his origins. He pronounced it as a single syllable – ‘norrch’. He added: ‘Little place called Caistor.’

Caistor-by-Norwich. I knew it, Horatio. It’s famous – at least to people interested in English historical linguistics. It’s the place where they found the earliest runic inscription known in England. Caistor was originally a Roman base – the name comes from Latin castra, ‘fort’ – and in a cremation cemetery there they found the anklebone of a roe deer. It was probably used as a plaything – perhaps as part of a dice game – but what made it special was the inscription on the side: raihan, written in Germanic runes. Raihan means ‘roe deer’.

The shape of the H rune attracted especial attention. It has a single cross-bar. This is typical of the kind of runic writing found in northern parts of Europe. Further south they wrote H with two cross-bars, . This suggests that the person who wrote the inscription came from Scandinavia.

The significance of the find to linguists is that it dates from around the year ad 400. The Anglo-Saxons did not arrive in Britain until 449. This person was using a Germanic language in East Anglia well before the well-known Germanic invasions began.

East Anglia is the place to be if you are looking for early evidence of the English language. In 1981 a farmer found a gold bracteate – a kind of medallion, fashioned with eyelets so that it could be worn around the neck – at Undley Common, near Lakenheath in Suffolk. It dates from around ad 475, within a generation of the Anglo- Saxons arriving. It seems to be modelled after an old Roman coin from the time of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century. It shows a helmeted head of the emperor next to a she-wolf suckling two children – presumably a representation of the story of Romulus and Remus.

And there is an inscription: a sequence of runes, written around the edge from right to left. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet, the runes say gægogæ mægæ medu. It would have been pronounced roughly ‘ga-gog-a ma-ga may-doo’. Inscriptions are often sentences. If so, this is the oldest known sentence in the language which would one day be called English. But what does it mean?

The second and third words aren’t a problem. Mægæ probably comes from mæg, ‘kinsman, companion’. Depending on how the ending is interpreted, the sense is either ‘of a/the kinsman’ or ‘to a/the kinsman’. Medu is likely to be an early form of the word med or meord – meaning ‘reward’. The closest modern equivalent is the archaism meed. An alternative suggestion is that it is something to do with the drink, ‘mead’.

Scholars have puzzled over the first word. It has an unusual phonetic shape, with its three gs, suggesting it might be a nonsense word – a magical formula, perhaps, or a tribal shout of some kind. The form gagaga has been found on a sixth-century spear-shaft from Kragehul in Denmark, suggesting a battle-cry. And lots of magic words use a reduplicated sequence of sounds: abracadabra, alakazam, hocus pocus… Wizzo the wizard (aka American magician Marshall Brodien) says ‘Doodee, doodee, doodee’ to get a trick to work.

On the other hand, it could be a real word. There are words in Old English with three gs in them, such as gegongan (‘conquer’), gegogud (‘relying on’), gegegnian (‘meet’). And there are words with similarities in form to which gægogæ could relate. The first syllable might be a prefix, an early form of ge–, which is common in Old English (as it is in modern German). The root of the word, –go–, might be related to a word such as geomrian, ‘lament’. The ending might be a marker of femaleness. Thinking along these lines, the Swedish linguist Bengt Odenstedt suggested the reading ‘howling female wolf’, referring to the picture on the bracteate. There have been other interpretations.

If Odenstedt is right, then the inscription could mean ‘this howling she-wolf to a kinsman [is] a reward’. It’s certainly a plausible interpretation. But it’s no more than a well-informed guess.

The Undley Bracteate, as it is called, is now in the British Museum, in the study collection of the Department of Medieval and Modern Europe. Other coins in the museum collection show runic inscriptions too, but they are usually even less decodable. The hope is that, as more finds are made, the semantic clues will increase, and things will become clearer. But often the finds just add even more puzzles.