Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

NICKNAMES AND THE ANTIQUITY OF NAMES

            If there is one subject I am loath to discuss publicly, it is personal names.

            Like you, I find some names intolerable. I wonder why parents would ever call their daughter @#$*$%, because the name sounds like something befitting a hooker or striptease artist. Why lumber a boy with %$@*$@ when it immediately conjures up the image of a thick-eared oaf? And as for @!~(&^ and &*^%@#, surely the parents had the brains to see that everyone would immediately make negative assumptions about their children.

But I always restrain myself from expressing these views outside private conversation because I am fully aware that @#$*$% and %$@*$@ and @!~(&^ and

&*^%@# did not choose their own names, are probably perfectly decent people who don’t deserve to be pilloried for their names and were named by their parents with the best of intentions.

On the other hand, there are three issues about personal names about which I am quite willing to sound off.

I think a nickname (Middle English = “eke-name” = “also name”) is a very fine thing to have, as well as a given name. I’m happy to be called “Nick” by friends – though I do think it’s slightly rude when complete strangers begin a written communication with “Hi Nick” rather than “Dear Nicholas”. It’s one of the habits of our instant-communication, e-mail and Facebook age. You should move to the nickname stage only when you are really familiar with somebody. Still, it’s good to have a nickname, which can be used in unbuttoned situations as opposed to formal ones.

But I am not impressed by parents who make a nickname their child’s given name. My father was called John but was happy to be addressed as “Jack” by his friends. In giving him the option to have both a formal name and a nickname, his parents were doing him a service. A nickname is something you accept (or reject) by choice. If you want to, you can even adopt it as your formal name, as many authors have done. But for parents to give a child the name Maggie rather than Margaret, Bill rather than William or Jack rather than John is to impose informality on the child and leave no other options.

Of course, some people may not be aware of what is or is not the informal form of a given name. My wife and I remember once living next door to a couple who had two daughters called Sarah and Sally. They were apparently unaware that one name was the diminutive of the other. They also left us wondering how hard they’d thought over naming their daughters, what with all the names there are to choose from.

So (in a perfectly polite and non-dogmatic way, of course), I am opposed to parents registering their children with nicknames rather than formal names.

As a second point – I think it’s odd when parents give their children, as first names, names that are really surnames or family names. I’m not being prescriptive about this, but should I encounter somebody called McGregor Jones, my first assumption will be that McGregor must have been the family name of a loved relative of the child. Yet I once met a woman with a son so named [I am making up this particular name to protect the innocent etc.] When I asked her if McGregor was the family name of a relative, she said “No – I just wanted our boy to have a strong first name.” I’m blowed if I can see how a family name, unrelated to your own family, is in any way “stronger” than a good given name. My suspicion is that the habit of making family surnames – unrelated to your own family – your children’s first names is in imitation of the number of American media stars who have such names.

My final matter concerning names is more a matter of amusement than of rebuke.

It’s the difficulty some people have in accepting that their personal names are quite recent coinings and “made up”, rather than being ancient in culture and story.

Of course in some sense ALL names are “made up”. Hundreds (or thousands) of years ago, there had to be somebody who first used any given name that we now regard as both formal and ancient. I’m also aware that many names now seen as formal began as nicknames.

Even so, there is a category of names which are much more recent in origin than some people realise.

To give some obvious examples. Cedric in NOT an ancient Saxon name. It came into being just over 200 years ago when Walter Scott, in writing Ivanhoe (1812), misspelt the ancient Wessex name Cerdic (or Ceretic) and decided he preferred the misspelling. Ironically it is now a most respectable name, often bestowed by parents who think it is very ancient.

Vanessa and Wendy were both names made up by authors within the last 300 years. There were no Vanessa-s until Jonathan Swift, in the early 18^th century, concocted the name as a pet name for Esther Vanhomrigh. Slightly more contentious is Wendy. It is sometimes claimed that Wendy is a diminutive form of Gwendolyn, but really the name has been used on its own only since J.M.Barrie created Wendy Darling for his play Peter Pan in 1904, and he probably thought of the name when he heard the daughter of a friend talking about having a “friendy-wendy”.

I don’t think any Cedric, Vanessa or Wendy will be upset to know this, but I have heard of people getting quite put out to hear the origins of Fiona. I think it is because the name is assumed to be an ancient Celtic one, and people call their daughters Fiona to connect them to a legendary past. In fact the name Fiona was invented by the Scottish writer William Sharp (1855-1902) in the late nineteenth century. It was intended as a playful feminine equivalent of the ancient male Celtic name Fionn (or Finn, if you’re Irish). There were genuine Celtic feminine equivalents of this name, such as Finnguala, Finnabair and Finnmaith. But Fiona was not one of them. It is strictly a modern coining, and was formed in a non-Celtic way anyway (only in Latin languages do you make a name feminine by adding “a” to it). Do not be fooled by some of those (typically semi-literate) “names-for-baby” manuals, which try to pretend that the name Fiona was used before Sharp made it up. It wasn’t.

Not that it really matters when a name was made up, or whether it was invented by some author. We like the name Imogen enough to have bestowed it on one of our daughters. The name was probably (but not definitely) made up either by Shakespeare or by his printers. Imogen first appeared in print as a character in Cymbeline. The theory is that this was a misprint for the genuinely ancient and pre-existing name Innogen.

I do have only one problem with this lovely name. It is sometimes mangled and mispronounced (especially by Americans) as “Im-oh-GENE”. But if I got onto the matter of the pronunciation of names, I would take up far more pages than I have already done.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“IN A SLANT LIGHT – A Poet’s Memoir” by Cilla McQueen (Otago University Press, $NZ35)

Recently a poet, who had written at some length about her early life with her parents, mildly rebuked me for drawing what she thought were wrong inferences about her relationship with her mother. Duly chastened, I replied that I was only going on what her long poem had itself said or implied. If a poet chooses to be confessional about very personal matters, it is very hard for readers not to draw conclusions about the poet, the poet’s friends and family and the poet’s life in general. This is the danger (or, if you prefer, the courage) of confessional poetry. Write about yourself in such detail, and risk having the world chattering about you rather than about your work.

I am saying all this at the top of this notice, because what was true of that other poet is doubly true of Cilla McQueen’s In a Slant Light. Let me say at once, before I pass any other judgments, that I found In a Slant Light accessible, thoroughly enjoyable, and revealing a strong and sane personality. But it is highly confessional, so you will certainly end up having some opinions on Cilla McQueen and friends.

This handsomely produced hardback (with ribbon bookmark) is exactly what its subtitle says – a poet’s memoir. Divided into what amount to chapters, its free verse takes us from 1949, when Priscilla McQueen was born (to an English mother and an Aussie father) in a hospital in Birmingham in England; to 1984, when she was trying to free herself from other influences and striking out on her own as a poet.

In between is all her childhood, remembered vividly – some time in Australia; travelling to New Zealand in a Sunderland Flying Boat; her family settling in Dunedin; childhood naughtinesses; getting addicted to reading at an early age; a couple of return journeys (by ship, of course) to England with her mum and siblings, to live with relatives; and girlhood dreams of being a ballerina, compromised by a back injury and a dodgy spine thereafter. McQueen’s family appear to have been supportive in the young girl’s and teenager’s crises, even when she was going wild and slightly rebellious. Maybe it helped that she liked high school, was a bit of a whiz in the humanities subjects, and ended up as college dux.

But ‘varsity years were rather more fraught at first. Losing her virginity at about 17 (I assume that’s what “surrender at dawn” on p.57 means) resulted in a pregnancy and what she calls a “shotgun wedding” and a youthful marriage. This didn’t last but it did produce the daughter of whom she is very proud. Then there was her fascination with drama, in Dunedin centring on Patric and Rosalie Carey’s Globe theatre and involving a large cast of bohemian thespians. McQueen records with relish her undergraduate enthusiasms, but she is not so self-regarding as not to notice how privileged her life was in some respects in those days. As she remarks self-deprecatingly, she lived “in a happy, ignorant, opinionated / undergraduate bubble.” (p.66) Nor is she naively impressed with all of the arts-and-culture crowd, for as she later remarks: “Sometimes it seems to me the art world contains / but few true thinkers  / and many hangers-on.” (p.127) There were the pains and struggles of balancing being a single mum with studying and having to earn a living. And there were the protest causes she became involved in  - especially the conservation one of opposing the building of an aluminium smelter at the Bluff. And there was her ache to produce something distinctive of her own. The literary and acting world of Dunedin was a great solace, but a real turning point was meeting (and eventually marrying) the artist Ralph Hotere, in whose work she became absorbed. In fact, she implies, she may have become too absorbed in it, as it took her some time to find her voice as the prolific poet she has been since those days. In a Slant Light fades out in 1984, when the poet is 35, still married to Hotere, and with her first volumes published. While In a Slant Light is mainly a memoir written from the perspective of old age, McQueen interpolates the texts of six or seven poems written nearer the times her memoir records.

All of the above simply gives you the “bibliographical” view of the book by telling you what it contains. It does not really tell you how In a Slant Light achieves its effects or what notes and themes it strikes.

As a personal response, I admit that I was often absorbed – especially in the book’s earlier sections – with what I would call the purely nostalgic aspect. Cilla McQueen and I are of the same generation – both baby-boomers – she being a few years older than me. Therefore I often nodded my head at specific indicators of the times (the 1950s and early 1960s), which I recognised from my own childhood. I mean things such as the names of radio serials, and the type of foods consumed and playground games (stacks-on-the-mill etc.) and shop-visits like this:

“Bronze penny fills my hand,

silver threepence as thin as a moon.

Farthings are remembered by the shopkeeper….

I come in the widening space, approach

the glass counter, the sweets in bottles and trays

all shapes and colours, pink cachous, sherbet,

licorice, acid drops, pineapple chunks,

aniseed balls, a paper twist for a halfpenny.” (p.17)

Like McQueen, when I was a kid I travelled with my family, by ship, to England and back. I remember, as she does, such things as the King Neptune ceremony for kids as we crossed the equator, and the strange like-but-unlike-home sensation that England produced. Like McQueen, I also remember my first shocked childhood reaction to the following public event:

“One morning in the kitchen

making toast for breakfast

we hear on the Bell radio which sits

on the shelf beside the yellow venetian blind

above the sink, a news flash:

the assassination of President Kennedy.

There’s anguish in the reporter’s voice.” (p.47)

As an Aucklander, I can even key into some of the experiences McQueen had in Dunedin as a student. Like her – dammit, like all arty students at the time – I had the iconic meeting with James K.Baxter, though in my case it was in the last year of Baxter’s life, in a student cellar, and I was miffed when he refused to answer my earnest student question about how he set about writing his poems. (McQueen records him telling her young self not to bother reading the poetry of Allen Curnow. Interesting.) Retrospectively, and when I consider the student loans in which my own children have to be entangled, I can also endorse her student memory:

“Nobody pays university fees.

We are given a fantastic education

by Aotearoa New Zealand.

We develop an independent manner of speaking.” (p.60)

Like her, I have had some career as a high-school teacher, and like her I remember from the 1970s:

“Chalk-skreeek paroxysms….chalk dust….

carbon paper, cranky copiers, Banda, Gestetner,

inky machinery, paper, time divided by buzzers and bells.” (pp.85-86)

But while such nostalgic recognition is great fun, it isn’t what McQueen is essentially on about.

She is fully aware that memory itself is a faulty thing, although, paradoxically, she finds that keeping diaries – as she used to do – is no help, because diaries too often flatten experience into mere series of external events and miss the inwardness of experience. Only the memory one still has can turn the past into poetry. As she remarks early in In a Slant Light:

“Snaps, tableaux – can’t be sure about the authenticity of memory,

but by my lights it’s all I have to go on.” (p.7)

Of course memory is related to how we see things – both literally and metaphorically – and a good part of this book refers to the sense of sight. McQueen did the self-portrait on the book’s cover and it emphasises, most appropriately, the poet’s eye-glasses. (Again, I share an experience with her – we both had the childhood awkwardness of having defective sight diagnosed a little late). Vision is related to the book’s title In a Slant Light, and is referenced a couple of times in the text.

There is a childhood memory:

 “In Brisbane

my fingertips

touch dancing motes

in a slant sunbeam.” (p.8)

And there is an adult reaction to a group of Ralph Hotere’s paintings:

“In the shadowy hallway hang three paintings that seem completely black.

When the light slants in from the front door I see that the matt canvas is textured with words in thicker paint, black on black….” (p.80)

The “slant” light could be the light of sunset (the poet getting old…). But it could also be suggesting that we all see things from a particular angle – just as the light falls from a particular angle, which heightens and emphasises the contours and flaws of things, as well as exposing significant reality.

This connects with the essential subjectivity that is part of being a poet. More than nostalgic recall, more than thoughts on memory and vision, In a Slant Light is Cilla McQueen’s account of becoming a poet. An early childhood memory indicates this path. She is told off for reaching over the fence and destroying part of a neighbour’s seedling nursery and she admits:

“I did lean over the fence, I did

plick all those little seedlings out

of their yielding soil one by one,

because I liked the sound.” (p.12)

This is the poet in embryo.

Later there is the proto-poet’s sheer fun in playing with words:

“Behind this curtain, on a table, is a typewriter –

not supposed to be touched

but I can hardly tear myself away

for fascination with the letters

appearing on the blank sheet

representing language, meaning – mistakes –

            the incongruity of this serious machine

in my inexpert hands creating nonsense

as it casts up inky letters one by one.” (p.31)

The power of language is underlined in McQueen’s time acting on stage, and in such things as her account of Rosalie Carey, conducting drama classes with “agile enunciation… [which] renders the voice an instrument of music…” (p.83)

There is the realisation that sometimes poetry can be simply an escape from the quotidian:

“I write for company and to sort out my emotions, dismayed at the turn my life has taken. With the help of my family and my studies I contain

the shock; reading Villon,

hoist myself out of the difficult present through the long-ago

consciousness of a poet.” (p.77)

There is also, and perhaps most painfully, the realisation that the poet can be distracted from her own creative path by absorption in the art of somebody else, even if that is somebody she loves:

 “Layer on layer of Ralph’s works

cloak me.

Were I to lift them gently away with tweezers

in all their dark seductive textures,

might I find myself in my spare time

doing what, apart from appreciating, facilitating?

Sewing, cooking, knitting, spinning, reading,

acting, visiting, making jam, bottling fruit, baking bread…

My focus was on him – his work intrigued me –

I was fortunate to take part.” (pp.91-92)

This theme is developed later, rather more assertively. Talent, life and experience make her a poet, but so does choosing her own path and getting out of somebody else’s shadow.

This is the essence of In a Slant Light.

Of course much that is very personal is aired here, such as the early stages of her relationship with Ralph Hotere:

“He calls me wet behind the ears.

I feel like a licked-by-its-mother-tongue wobbly-balancing-four-square newborn foal. I hope we might have a baby, but he says quietly, it’s unlikely.” (p.82)

Hard, then, not to feel sometimes that you’re eavesdropping on what isn’t really yours to know. But then Cilla McQueen puts this aspect of a poet’s being very well in a passage where she speaks of poets who affected her in student years:

            “Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins

speak to my inner ear with lyric and sprung lines,

linguistic energy like Shakespeare’s

and something else – their own dear selves as poets

who have sat down to write with pen and paper.” (p.55)

In the end, this is what we get in In a Slant Light. Communion with a poet who has sat down and written and consciously decided to leave us with her own dear self.

I’ll probably get hammered by the usual suspects for ending my notice on this upbeat note – but I’ll leave it at that.

Querulous footnote: In the 1964 section of her memoir, Cilla McQueen speaks of being with her teenage boyfriend at the time and listening to, and enjoying, the music of many jazz greats, including Wynton Marsalis. As Wynton Marsalis was born in 1961, and would have been three years old at the time McQueen recalls, this is hardly likely. Marsalis made his first recordings in the 1980s. Truly memory is a fallible thing.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“A JOURNEY FROM THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT” by Henry Fielding (1743)

I’m sure you are aware of the publishing phenomenon whereby certain books are reprinted, not because they have much intrinsic merit, but because they were written by people who are known for better things. This is particularly true of what are known loosely as the “classics”. Matching editions of all the works of some illustrious author are produced, even if some of the volumes are quite forgettable or mere apprentice stuff.   

My case for the prosecution this week is Henry Fielding’s A Journey From This World to the Next, which sits on my shelf in the form of an Everyman’s paperback - although I note that Everyman’s did not get around to including it in its “classics” series until 1973, which suggests that they knew it was really just one of the scrapings of Fielding. A Journey From This World to the Next was first published in 1743 when Fielding (1707-54) was just beginning the most illustrious part of his career. True, this was years after his burlesque farce The Tragedy of Tragedies (or Tom Thumb the Great) and a year after the publication of the delightful Joseph Andrews, which I still insist on finding Fielding’s most enjoyable novel. But all the evidence suggests that A Journey From This World to the Next was tossed off in haste well before Joseph Andrews was written; and it was certainly before Tom Jones or Amelia or the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon were thought of.

Originally this short book appeared in Fielding’s “Miscellanies”, a hodge-podge of journalism, satire and occasional pieces published periodically. It is a loose satire based on the style of the Greek Lucian, purporting to tell the adventures of a man after his death, trying to find his way into Elysium. The 140-odd pages of A Journey From This World to the Next are divided into two parts, “Book One” and “Book Nineteen” because (in a gag that was also later used in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling in 1771), the book is supposed to consist of surviving fragments from an authentic manuscript.

The first nine chapters of Book One are a very robust and lively read – the narrator journeys through the land of the dead, meets the diseased and the pretentious in the City of Diseases and the surprisingly jolly Palace of Death. The pagan Minos acts the part of Saint Peter, judging whether people can go through the gates to Elysium. In every respect these first nine chapters are the best of it. The satire is not as sharp in the following chapters (Chaps. 10 to 25) of “Book One”, which are about the various transmigrations of the soul of Julian the Apostate – he goes from life to life and is continually rejected at the gate by Minos and sent back to Earth to live again. Why was Julian the Apostate chosen to play this role? Perhaps because, as the Roman Emperor who turned his back on Christianity once it had been established as Rome’s official religion, he was for Fielding an image of fickleness and changeability. The irony of this section is that Minos is actually encouraging Julian to improve. After all, Minos could send him to Hades for his sins, but he always chooses to give him another chance to reach Elysium.

Basically, through Julian’s avatars, Fielding gives himself the excuse to satirise various “types” – the standard objects of traditional satire – boastful and destructive warriors, social climbers, religious fanatics, pretentious people, foolish society women, rakes, vain scholars, devious statesmen, violent soldiers etc. He also takes Julian through various ages and countries from the ancient world almost to the present. This allows Fielding to make typically English swipes at Roman paganism, foreigners and especially Catholics. In Chapter 17, superstitious Spanish Catholics are fooled by a faked apparition of St. James; in Chapter 19, corrupt Roman clergy parade in finery and have no money for beggars; in Chapter 20 the saintliness of Edward the Confessor is seen in a ridiculous light; and in Chapter 23, King John is forced to submit to the devious slavery of the Roman church. However, the way “Book One” breaks off abruptly suggests that the narrator is winding up to say satirical things about present-day England (and the way Anglican bishops vote), but is not allowed to do so.

The twenty pages of “Book Nineteen”, labelled “Chapter Seven”, are the self-contained story of Anne Boleyn, told by herself. They are clearly an added-on section – and in fact they were probably written by Henry’s sister Sarah Fielding (as is hinted at the end of “Book One” with the joke that what remains was written “in a woman’s hand”). Anne Boleyn’s story is of artlessness corrupted by ambition; but Minos lets her into Elysium because she has suffered much as Henry VIII’s queen.

The whole of this little book has the air of being thrown together hastily and of course one wonders if it would ever have been reprinted if the author(-s) hadn’t later gone on to greater things. Not that this stops Claude Rawson, in the 1973 reprint, from giving an erudite 24-page introduction relating the book to the whole tradition of classical and Augustan satire – to Lucian and Juvenal and Pope and Swift and company.

As for me, I amused myself as I read it by taking down passages that seemed to strike the right tone of silliness or satire.

There is, for example, the deliberately camp description of the god Mercury as encountered the other world:

“I had not hopped far before I perceived a tall young gentleman in a silk waistcoat, with a wing on his left heel, a garland on his head, and a caduceus in his right hand.” (Book One, Chapter One).

There is an example of how monstrous personification can become:

            “We had not been long arrived in our inn, where it seems we were to spend the remainder of the day, before our host acquainted us that it was customary for all spirits, in their passage through that city, to pay their respects to the lady Disease, to whose assistance they owed their delivery from the lower world.” (Book One, Chapter Three).

This is even more evident when “Maladie Alamode” – sexually-transmitted disease – speaks: “She spoke likewise greatly in approbation of the method, so generally used by parents, of marrying children very young, and without the least affection between the parties; and concluded by saying that, if these fashions continued to spread, she doubted not but she would shortly be the only disease that would ever receive a visit from any person of considerable rank.” (Book One, Chapter Three)

            The difference between the straight-and-narrow path of virtue, and the broad highway that leads to the everlasting bonfire is referenced ironically thus:

            “On enquiry, we were acquainted that the bad road was the way to greatness, and the other to goodness. When we expressed our surprize at the preference given to the former, we were acquainted that it was chosen for the sake of the music of drums and trumpets, and the perpetual acclamations of the mob, with which those who travelled this way were constantly saluted” (Book One, Chapter Five)

Being asked about the way obscure lines in his plays have been interpreted by editors, the ghost of Shakespeare says what is even more relevant in the age of Harold Bloom and too-clever academic editors:

“I marvel nothing so much as that men should gird themselves at discovering obscure beauties in an author. Certes the greatest and most pregnant beauties are ever the plainest and most evidently striking; and when two meanings of a passage are in the least balance our judgments which to prefer, I hold it a matter of unquestionable certainty that neither of them is worth a farthing.” (Book One, Chapter Eight).

When Julian the Apostate is in his avatar as a wise man, he utters words which have a universal truth in the way they show that gravity and solemnity are often mistaken for wisdom:

 “I had ever in my infancy a grave disposition, nor was I ever seen to smile, which infused an opinion into all about me that I was a child of great solidity; some foreseeing that I should be a judge, and others a bishop. At two years old my father presented me with a rattle, which I broke to pieces with great indignation. This the good parent, being extremely wise, regarded as an eminent symptom of my wisdom, and cried out in a kind of extasy ‘Well said, boy! I warrant thou makest a great man’…. I had now obtained universally the character of a very wise young man, which I did not altogether purchase without pains; for the restraint I laid on myself in abstaining from the several diversions adapted to my years cost me many a yearning; but the pride which I inwardly enjoyed in the fancied dignity of my character made me some amends.” (Book One, Chapter Sixteen)

Of course Fielding can’t forego some fairly commonplace moralising when he has Julian, in his avatar as a tailor, speak thus:

 “ For, in reality, who constitutes the different degrees between men but the tailor? The prince indeed gives the title, but it is the tailor who makes the man. To his labours are owing the respect of crowds, and the awe which great men inspire into their beholders, though these are too often unjustly attributed to other motives. Lastly, the admiration of the fair is most commonly to be placed to his account.” (Book One, Chapter Twenty-Two)

So I did find some things to amuse me as commonplace-book fillers in A Journey From This World to the Next. But they were not such as to make me think this was wonderful satire, nor such as would lead me to believe that this was the acme of Henry Fielding’s achievement. Read it as an oddity if you will. Or read it if you are a “complete-ist” seeking to cover all the works of Henry Fielding.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.    

 

IF YOU CANNOT SAY “SHIBBOLETH” YOU WILL BE DAMNED

            In Stephanie Johnson’s 2015 novel The Writers’ Festival [reviewed on this blog], there’s a scene where a rumpled, likeable old leftie character considers the way that Maori placenames were once pronounced by many Pakeha New Zealanders “Tauwpo. Ruapeyhoo. Owneehunga. Wangaray. Koikoiee. Taowrunga. Mangeree. Wakkawat. Paikok. Pram.”(p.170).

The old leftie is of course momentarily abashed by what we would now call the cultural insensitivity of this. But he later reflects (p.177) that such mangled Kiwi-isms were in effect the voice of a more egalitarian New Zealand which has passed away in an age of New Zealand’s worship of the market, the widening gap between rich and poor, the unaffordability of housing for young people and all the others things to which our country is now subjected.

And yet – forsooth – we are ever so sensitive about what we say. Let not an age-ist, racist, sexist, homophobic, able-ist or even species-ist phrase or word pass your lips, even in the most light-hearted, inconsequential or flippant way, or you will be damned, pilloried on social media or otherwise held up as a pariah. Not that we care about what is happening to wealth or poverty. What we say is extremely important, but as for what we do about the main issue facing our country – well, that doesn’t matter, does it?

We can also feel immensely superior to our parents and grandparents, who mispronounced Maori and told politically-incorrect jokes. And as we feel superior, we can ignore the fact that from approximately the 1920s to the 1980s, the driving ideology in New Zealand was a real egalitarianism, which supported the welfare state and would have been appalled at the chasm that now divides our richest from our poorest. In other words, by many objective indicators, that verbally retrograde society was more humane than the one we have now.

I won’t be long with this week’s sermon, but I cannot think of our current cultural situation without remembering the story from the Book of Judges. Enemy spies are trying to penetrate Israelite territory, but they are stopped by Israelites who ask them to say the word “Shibboleth”, knowing that it is a word which foreigners are prone to mispronounce. The Israelites slay anyone who mispronounces it, and of course end up with a pile of corpses. The wrong use of language kills.

No wonder the term “shibboleth” has now come to mean any cultural marker that shows whether someone is or is not an acceptable member of a social group.

On one level we have advanced. On another, we have become more callous. And the mispronunciation of Maori placenames also gives us, as educated middle-class people, a neat opportunity to look down on those uneducated working-class slobs.

Not that we’re classist or anything.

A fine sensitivity over the pronunciation of Maori placenames is a modern shibboleth.