By Hugo Pooley, AIB
How
often does one find that an individual, a class, nay a whole society… holds
that there is only one right way to do a certain thing? TINA, There Is No
Alternative, as Maggie Thatcher used to say. The tea must be poured into the
cup before the milk (or perhaps conversely). Men cannot wear skirts; their
shoes must be black; socks must be worn with sandals. No se debe nunca cortar
la tortilla con cuchillo. My country, right or wrong. Financial institutions
shall certify details of transactions for submission to the taxman…
And the
funny thing – one learns as one travels – is that each place´s only right way
is different to the others! Tax rules are a particularly rich area of
illustrations.
In
Swift´s “Gulliver´s Travels”, the Big-Endian/Little-Endian controversy - between
those in favour of breaking boiled eggs at one end or the other - reflects
British quarrels over religion.
When you
grow up - for example – as a little Brit on that “small island” permeated with
the spirit of good old subject-verb-object - the missionary position of word
orders - and a healthy distrust of all things continental. And then start to
learn French at school and are introduced to the concept of noun genders. To
such a candid soul there is nothing intrinsically feminine about a door or a
shoe: imagine the turmoil these continental revelations unleash in the fervid
imagination of a 12-year-old! Mind already slightly broadened.
Then
comes, say, the study of German: masculine, feminine and neutral; verb at the
end of the sentence… WTF! Later Spanish, with two alternative words for – concepts
of – the verb ´to be´, and a sentence can be arranged in almost any order… more
like a grammatical Kama Sutra. Then perhaps Portuguese: hey, we´ll just swallow
half the sounds and are telling you it´s perfectly reasonable to insert a
particle, such as an object, in the middle of a verb, between its stem and
ending: dar-to-ia.
Not to
mention the weird and wonderful phenomena at play in more exotic languages… The
end result has to be considerable mind expansion. In such a way that one begins
to perceive that The Other may have a point, there may after all be more than
one way to skin a cat: there´s no intrinsic reason why the salt cellar should
be the one with a single hole in the cap, maybe gay marriage could be
acceptable, perhaps it´s good to eat with one´s hands, why not mark the
conservative-voting constituencies in red not blue, indeed perhaps a different
electoral system would be fairer?
Mind
thus blown… I don´t know if there are many intolerant left-wing bigots in our
beloved profession, but submit that pursuant to the considerations above, there
are not many closed-minded right-wing ones.
