Packing heat

Quiet people, language and the right tool for the job

Recreation of a Neanderthal settlement, Neanderthal Museum, Dusseldorf, Germany

Amongst other books that I am reading at the moment - and yes, the stacks are once again getting idiotically high - is Cro-Magnon by Brian Fagan. It makes for a fascinating read, although there are times when, it has to be said, leaps of imagination tend to take the place of hard data. But even given that, the narrative is gripping. I can’t help but feel sympathy for the Neanderthals, the so-called Quiet People because they had little to no language, no art, and only rudimentary tools. There they were, chugging along peacefully for hundreds of thousands of years, living in rhythm with the plants and animals on which they fed, and responding, as we do now, to slow or sudden changes in climate and terrain. Then came Early Modern humans - or Cro-Magnon to you and me - with their shiny new technologies, deploying clever-clogs language and magical art to enhance cooperation and pass on knowledge. And the Quiet People died out - though some amongst us still carry snippets of their DNA to this day.

Language is responsible for a lot, it seems, both good and ill. There was a playground doggerel which did the rounds when I was a child, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Apart from the fact that this is clearly not the case, as I’ll touch on in a moment, it always struck me as a rather rash taunt, as if you’re inviting your interlocutor to move on from mere verbal insults to actual bodily harm. (Just by the by, I love the fact that the two ancient criminal definitions of ‘actual bodily harm’ and ‘grievous bodily harm’ are still on the English statute books - they’re so clear, and, at the same time, so evocative.)

Words can hurt, there’s no doubt about that, as shown by the fact that, in England and Wales (the legislation is slightly different in Scotland), hate speech is a crime. It’s fiendishly difficult to define, as even a glance at the wording of the various Acts makes plain, but it is one of those instances of ‘you know it when you see it’, or, indeed, when you hear it. So words, just like sticks and stones and flint-tipped spears, can be weapons. They can also be tools, useful for an almost infinite variety of purposes, and, it can be argued, you can’t have thinking as we Modern Humans know it, without having language. Language and conceptual thought seem indissolubly welded together.

As writers, we have the inestimable pleasure and privilege of playing in the language sandpit, and picking out the words and sentences and similes that we find appropriate to the task we have in hand - with the task, in my view, always determining which of those words and sentences should be deployed. There’s a lovely remark which C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to his friend Alastair Fowler:

“Academic work and imaginative writing are incompatible in the same sense as playing the piano and having hot baths: i.e. they can’t be done at the same time.”

In another letter a few years later, Lewis wrote,

“ I hope this doesn’t all sound too pedantic. But the matter is important. So many people, when they begin ‘research,’ lose all desire, and presently all power, of writing clear, sharp and unambiguous English. Hold on to your transitive verbs, your concrete nouns, and the muscles of language (but, though, for, because etc.). The more abstract the subject, the more our language should avoid all unnecessary abstraction.”

Absolutely, and of course. But I confess, as I’m sure you’ve found out by now, I love the play and flexibility and ambiguity of language. ‘Packing heat’ is a superb example of the way in which just a couple of words can be press-ganged into saying so much more than their individual meanings could convey. To pack - to carry something stowed more or less methodically, according to one dictionary definition - and then heat, which denotes not the gun itself, but what the action of the gun creates, and what propels the bullet forward. Carrying a gun is a statement, packing heat is a threat. Which brings me, because my mind’s like that, to the schoolboy delight in smutty ambiguity of John Lennon’s Happiness is a Warm Gun - and that’s probably a good place to stop. For now, at least.