Category Archives: Lawrence

Celebrating Notts Language

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Map of Nottingham with language tags. When I first returned to Nottingham, I kept popping into the cob shop at the Theatre Royal tram stop because the staff there had such thick Nottingham accents. One of them had a form of Notts turrets, interjecting duck at every opportunity: ‘Egg mayo, duck, with lettuce, duck, on white or brown, duck…’ It was music to my ears, a lovely warm feeling, like sinking slowly into a bubble bath and turning the hot tap with my toes. God, how much I’d missed those flat vowels.

Dialect is a form of intangible culture and an integral part of identity. It carries the knowledge, values, attitudes, and experiences of people. The Notts dialect is something I’ve celebrated and promoted in various forms during my 13 years as LeftLion Literature editor, through comics such as Dawn of the Unread and Whatever People Say I Am, through documentaries on the wireless, and more recently through the writing of that mardy bloke from Eastwood – dialect was the second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. Natalie Braber, a Professor in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, provided the contextual essays for this.

I mention this as Natalie has recently finished a project where she interviewed a broad range of people, including schoolchildren, ex-miners, locals – those who were born here, and those who have moved here – to try and map out the Notts accent. Each participant was asked ‘to share what language means to them: their favourite words and expressions – whether dialect, familect (words used within families), ethnolect (language associated with an ethnic group), work-related vocabulary or words from another language; and poems, stories and songs which invoke place’.

I submitted shin-tin’ as my favourite word (‘she isn’t in’) and read an extract from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). I find the dialect in Lawrence’s work, such as the poem ‘The Collier’s Wife’, too complex to read. Only those who straddle the Derbyshire/Notts border, like mining historian David Amos, have the tongue for it. This is why ‘Celebrating Notts Language’ is important, because it captures the richness and variety of spoken dialect.

Although the East Midlands dialect of Middle English was an influence on the development of Standard English, there’s been little research into the spoken English of the area. Dialect tends be thought of in terms of north (bath) and south (baath) when perhaps there needs to be a tripartite distinction. Nottingham, as always, is hard to categorise, borrowing from the north (‘bus’) and south (‘aaas’/house) – exactly as you would expect from a city bang in the middle of the country.

There are many arguments suggesting language is becoming homogenous, mainly due to the globalisation of work and media, would it be too radical to suggest that a bigger threat to dialect is we are talking less to each other? The mining and industry communities that Lawrence and Sillitoe wrote about are gone – as is the pub where ‘everybody knows your name’. More people work remotely or interact with a screen rather than a human. Millennials no longer need to call each other when a status update or WhatsApp message serves the same function. Surely this must impact on language, accent, and dialect.

Natalie’s website: Celebrating Notts Language 

This article is a variation on one published on the Digital Pilgrimage, 14 August 2023. Further Reading

  • James Walker/Made in Manchester Productions. Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets of the Pits (2021) BBC Radio 4
  • James Walker. Thar’t a Mard Arse. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. Mardy ducks: Nottingham Dialect Words. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. What is the Nottingham dialect and where does it come from? Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber. Lawrencian Dialect. Memory Theatre.
  • Natalie Braber and Jonnie Robinson (2018) East Midlands English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Natalie Braber and Sandra Jansen (Eds.) (2018) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Natalie Braber (2018) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. In: N. Braber and S. Jansen (eds.) Sociolinguistics in England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 243-274.
  • Natalie Braber (2018) Performing identity on screen: Language, identity, and humour in Scottish television comedy. In: R. Bassiouney (ed.) Dialect and identity performance. London: Routledge, 265-285.
  • Natalie Braber, Suzy Harrison and Claire Ashmore (2017) Pit Talk in the East Midlands. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
  • Natalie Braber and David Amos (2017) Images of the Coalfields. Sheffield: Bradwell Books.
  • Natalie Braber and Diane Davies (2016) Using and creating oral history in dialect research. Oral History 44(1), 98-107.

 

Penis Mightier than the Sword

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If somebody had a look at my search history, they may conclude I’m a cock-obsessed fetishist. This is because for the past month I’ve been googling every iteration imaginable for penis: ‘Penis shaped bridge,’ ‘penis rainbow,’ ‘building that looks like a cock,’ ‘plants that look like a willy.’ It’s amazing what lurks deep inside the digital void. There’s something for everyone.

As it happens, my intentions are honourable. I’ve been researching for the third artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre: Phallic Tenderness. This was submitted by Stephen Alexander, author of Torpedo the Ark. Stephen is a writer who I greatly admire. He is provocative and playful. He is also a writer whose opinions I often disagree with.

Lawrence was a tad obsessed with his todger – but not in a puerile way (although in his younger days he did write a gushing poem about the magnificence of his erection). The phallus had symbolic meaning for him and represented a broad range of ideas that tapped into his life philosophy and belief in blood consciousness. If you want to know how, you’ll have to read Stephen’s pithy and provocative fragments.

There’s 12 of them in total – one for each hour – because I originally wanted to have a ‘Speaking Cock’. The clock would have a penis as an hour handle and visitors would press a button and it would spin round and land on an hour and one of Stephen’s essays would be read out. I even went as far as contacting one of my friends – a woman of Flemish descent – to see if she would like to read out some essays about willies. She never responded.

D.H. Lawrence as Christ by Dorothy Brett

D.H. Lawrence as Christ by Dorothy Brett with an added flower border.

I decided against the Speaking Cock because it may lead our project to be perceived as a ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ – a series of oddities to be gawped at and amused by – rather than a thoughtfully curated moveseum that explores key themes in Lawrence’s writing via artefacts. It may also have made light of what is a key philosophical strand to Lawrence’s writing, thereby defeating the purpose of its inclusion.

So how do you represent something as abstract as ‘Phallic Tenderness’ without turning it into a Carry On movie? My solution was to create a hybrid of the phallus and the phoenix to emphasise the transformative potential of this symbol rather than reduce it to an innuendo. I then added a flower border (for nature and tenderness) – and added a fringe filter in Pixlr to distort the colours and reinforce the transformative element. I think it works well, but I would. If you disagree, please get in contact.

Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron and Marcel Proust

I was thinking Mount Rushmore when I put these stencils of Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron and Marcel Proust together. This was the holding image for an essay on falsifying phallic consciousness.

Likewise, I needed holding images for the 12 fragments. These had to be strong pictures that captured the essence of each article while luring readers in. Given Stephen explores the phallus in terms of consciousness, power, union, Christ and gynaecological deconstruction, it is little wonder my Google search history was so weird.

The two previous artefacts in the memory theatre comprised of four essays. As this one included twelve (because they were originally intended to form a clock) it would have looked like we’d gone willy mad if I’d populated it with twelve phallic images. Thus it took a long time to design appropriate images.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that I visited Stephen in Hackney in 2018 when I had the original idea for a speaking cock. His essays have sat patiently in my inbox for five years. Part of the reason for the delay has been Paul, my co-producer on the project, has been too busy to upload content to the website as he is involved in various projects while also running his business, Think Amigo. We have found a compromise and he has redesigned the website so that it has a WordPress interface. This means that I can now upload essays and help with the design. I can only compare this with being given control of the S.S. Enterprise and feel as if I have the entire galaxy at my fingertips.

Over the past five years I have learned so many new skills from video production (the above video took two days to research, write, edit, publish) to graphic design to HTML. This means I have less people to rely on while saving a fortune in costs as well as having more editorial control. Don’t get me wrong, I – and Paul – would love to have a bigger team supporting us but the reality is we don’t have the money at the moment, and don’t have the time to put in for a funding bid. Upskilling is not only a means of ensuring this project maintains momentum but it also provides the kind of stimulation and variety that a creative needs to get up early in the morning and head to bed late.

The 12 fragments will be published on the memory theatre in September to coincide with Lawrence and Millett’s birthdays.