Drays of doubt

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29 April

When there is a shortage of water in (parts of) the UK, let's spare a thought for those counties that, in past centuries, were so unshakable in their beliefs that they got stuck in a rut, and, not unlike the Wednesbury lot who (at my hands, too) get such stick for coming to that famously unreasonable decision that no one could reasonably have made*, were worryingly in danger of binding themselves in hide.

The drastic solution was to seed this rigid application of rules and principles (and to hell with the consequences), a bit as one might a patch of ice with salt. So government-sponsored orators would go around, on the back of waggons, proclaiming alternative viewpoints, and arguing for a Grey between the Black and White. (Dr, later Dean, Jonathan Swift - although not one of these orators himself - wrote scripts for them to memorize and employ.)

Of course, some counties were so entrenched in their views, that all this achieved nothing, and the orators were hanged or stoned, and thus - as no one has dared since to send anyone into the vineyard (oops! different topic, as that's a parable) - we have modern Britain, where angels fear to tread in such homelands of dogma, discrimination and dis-ease***.


QED


End-notes

* Yes, how that decision is described** is a bit like divorce, and the behaviour that is so unreasonable that the other party could not reasonably be expected to tolerate it, except that almost any marriage will have given rise to events that are sufficient to flesh out the required particulars for a judge to certify that a divorce can proceed - broadly speaking, first, last and worst, plus a few others.

It must be said, a soul-destroying task, both for the person drawing up those particulars, and for the one reading them, even if both may be (as, respectively, solicitor / legal executive and judge) paid to do it... Pay does not make pleasant the unpalatable, as Seneca declaimed - but it does help!

** If memory serves aright, it was something to do with licensing a cinema, of all things.

*** As Stephen Potter would have called it.


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The weather's been quite reasonable recently, hasn't it?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 November

Yes, a quite usual British piece of padding for - or for avoiding - God knows what, but the weather can only be reasonable (just like a run of luck), and it makes no sense to call it 'unreasonable' weather in this idiom of British English.

Oh, fair enough, we have the verb 'to bury' now, but the pair, 'to disbury', has been lost, and we have to resort to 'to dig up' (or 'to disinter', for specific purposes), but this is not one of those: it never was possible to say the opposite of 'he has reasonable skill as a tennis player'.

This bloody word 'reasonable', being so reasonable that it has no pair, no man on the Clapham omnibus (why Clapham? why should he ever have been going to - or coming from - Clapham) who isn't reasonable. No, we have to go to unpronounceable Wednesbury for unreasonableness, for decisions so unreasonable that no reasonable panel could have made them.

And there's nothing in-between - it's either the officious (a much misused word, outside the courts) man on the omnibus, saying to two people about to make a contract 'I say, what if Z happens?', or this hopeless lot in Wednesbury, making their artless unreasonableness itself a form of art by being so damn'd unreasonable.

Well, I'm not convinced that we should say 'It has been unseasonably / unseasonally warm of late' - I'm going to go right out and accuse the weather of being like that lot in Wednesbury, so unreasonable in attaching terms to the licensing of something like a cinema that they made a name for themselves.

Damn'd unreasonable the weather we've been having, you'll hear me say (avoiding God knows what)!


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