Totemic : you read about it here first

It was on “Peston” on Wednesday evening, I think, among all the tortured arguments about Brexit, that I heard someone use the word “totemic”. For an instant I thought it might have been “titanic”, but no, I heard correctly, though from the context I wasn’t sure whether it meant “very important” or something to do with placing a symbolic marker. A day or two later, on another TV programme, I heard someone use the word again, but its intended meaning failed to register with me. It might have been about Brexit again and I might just have nodded off.

Well then. Is “totemic” about to become the new all purpose hyperbole, for anything in any respect remotely humungous or ginormous? For something particularly “cool”, perhaps? Even for something - like the choice of colour (blue) for my wife’s new car, as described by the sales assistant – “awesome”. I’ve heard “awesome” being used to describe everything from a soggy slice of ham and pineapple pizza, to a mobile phone, to the Grand Canyon, to the vista of the heavens on a clear night, so evidently its definition is in need of tightening. Or replacing. “Totemic” could be just what we need. “Wow, I’m like, OMG, so I’m like, that paint job is so totemic”.

Will “totemic” replace “iconic” as the descriptor of anything that’s the paradigm specimen of its kind, unique, or modestly notable? Will the Shard become “totemic”, or will it still be just an ugly gesture of contempt for the common man  – one of a large and growing number of such gestures - intrusively visible across our capital city? Will the Big Mac no longer be merely iconic, but a totemically invaluable component of a healthy diet? Will Mrs May’s premiership go down in history as the most totemic since that of Neville Chamberlain?

My Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, published in 1977, defines “totem” as “any species of living or inanimate thing regarded by a class or kin within a local tribe with superstitious respect as an outward symbol of an existing intimate unseen relation”. Adjective, “totemic”. So that’s crystal clear then, isn’t it. It also mentions totem poles, so – given that Poland is a member of the EU – perhaps newer meanings lurk unsuspected within. Dictionaries just can’t keep up, and online definitions need to be treated with caution. My Collins English Dictionary (2004) refers to totem as (1) “(in some societies, esp among North American Indians [sic]) an object, animal, plant, etc, symbolizing a clan, family, etc, often having ritual associations; (2) a representation of such an object – adjective totemic. It offers further elaboration about totem poles but doesn’t say anything as to whether they could be used for stringing up our spineless Brexit-bungling MPs. Or whether tall spikes upon which said invertebrates could be impaled would be more suitable.

 
So we’ll keep our ears open for this word and, if it takes off, we’ll discover in due course what people want it to mean, and how long it takes before becoming appropriated for the name of an upmarket chiropodist.

A sudden injection of wordplay

Bad mimics, attempting generic Welsh or Indian voices, sometimes confuse the two, aware of their similar sing-songiness but failing to get it quite right. It so happens that we have Welsh neighbours, and also Sikh ones, none of whom conform to these crude stereotypes but who all speak English with very slight accents indicative of their backgrounds.

What astonished me the other day was when one of the Sikh children, proud to tell me she was learning the Punjabi (Gurmukhi) alphabet, counted out for me the numbers from one to ten. “I’ve heard that before” was my surprised response – my grandad, who was born near Port Talbot, taught the sequence to me when I was little. Welsh !

Well, something like it, anyway. I decided to put together a chart for comparison:

	Welsh	Punjabi
1	un	ikk
2	dau	do
3	tri	tinn
4	pedwar	char
5	pump	panj
6	chwech	chhe
7	saith	satt
8	wyth	athth
9	naw	naum
10	deg	das

You will notice some words that don’t map across very well, but there are other close similarities between some of them and their equivalents in ancient Latin, Greek or Sanskrit (as well as in many modern Romance and Indian languages, not to mention German or Russian). For instance, the Punjabi for 4, char, shows similarities to the Latin quattuor and the Sanskrit catur; most revealingly, for 5, Greek has pente and Sanskrit pancha. For 10, Greek has deca, Latin decem, and Sanskrit dasha.

 
Naturally I’ve been aware of the common roots of many Indo-European languages for a long time, but it was a surprise to find, just across the road from each other, one set of numbers known to a family with origins in South Wales, and a very similar set spoken by a family with origins in the Punjab (“five rivers”) region of northern India. Perhaps it’s another take on “small world syndrome”. Because it is a very small world, it’s the only one we’ve got, and it needs looking after.

The Algorithm of Self Destruction

If you catch a mainline train out of St Pancras, after 10 minutes or so, and shortly before you cross the M25, you may notice an industrial looking building on the left hand side. Travelling north just before Christmas I spotted it and, infused no doubt with seasonal spirit, read its name as “Turkey Lighting Solutions”. Which got me thinking. Do turkeys do much reading? Why do they need lighting? Are they afraid of the dark? Does enhanced lighting make it easier to cull them ready for a festive lunch? Or (alternative train of thought), why should a company on the fringes of north London be catering to the illuminative requirements of the good citizens of Istanbul or Ankara?

I remained puzzled until January, when on a subsequent trip I realised I had misread the sign. Actually it said “Turnkey Lighting Solutions”. Ah ha, I love those sort of names. My genre favourites include “Domestic Water Solutions” (wonder what they dissolve it in?) and “Granite Solutions” (gravestones). Mm, a tough one that - perhaps something involving hydrofluoric acid. Anyway, “Turnkey Lighting Solutions”. So, I thought, at last, someone has invented the light switch, or something close to it. They’ve solved that age-old problem. Not so much a light bulb moment as a light switch moment. Ta da !

Just in time, it seems, for last week I was told the cautionary tale of a lady going to visit a relative in another part of the country. At the time she was due to arrive she knew the house would be empty, but she had a key so she could let herself in. The problems – she feared - would start when she came to switch on the lights. No switches, just a beeping gadget sulking in the corner. “Dalek” (or whatever its stupid name was), she would have to address it, abruptly having to overcome a sense of absurdity and self-consciousness borne of a lifetime of being sensible, “switch on the light !” She knew she would feel much happier with “Exterminate ! Exterminate !” but apparently that is now deemed to be a politically incorrect command inflected with an ageist subtext. You aren’t allowed to say it this week. Well then, no switch. No flip of the finger. Just the gadget. No manual override. Here goes …. If she gets the pronunciation right (luckily she’s not Scottish or a Brummie) there will be light. If not, not. Oh, the suspense …

No override. This is where the theme suddenly lurches from farce to deadly serious. Dim hallways are rarely fatal. If it takes you a minute or two to work out how to switch on the lights you’re probably going to survive the inconvenience. If you’re in an aircraft determined to nosedive into the ground with 157 people on board just six minutes after take-off, you’re probably not going to survive at all. I wouldn’t wish to pre-judge the results of the enquiries into the Boeing 737 Max 8, or exploit a tragedy for comic effect, but it rather looks as though an insuppressible piece of software “trying to be clever” was the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash near Addis Ababa last Sunday, and of the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last October.

The Germans have a wonderful word, Verschlimmbesserung, which means an improvement that makes things worse. I don’t know if the Germans have another word meaning “what a ridiculously long word - I wonder how you’re supposed to get your teeth round it?”, but they aren’t stupid, and neither (allegedly) is Donald Trump, who tweeted a remark about planes getting too complicated. Bang on, Donald (allegedly). It isn’t just aircraft, though, it’s potentially most of our lives that are getting stupidly and pointlessly complicated, with “improvements” that in a very short time will make life not just worse, but almost impossibly tedious. What were for most of civilised human existence trivially simple, instantaneous, automatically performed actions will now take hours, genius-level IQs, training courses, feasibility studies, and therapies for PTSD.

A simple flick of the forefinger and the light goes on or off. Easy. No, sorry, not any more, the server has gone down - and anyway, a spotty oik six thousand miles away is having a bit of a laugh on his pizza-encrusted cliché, so you’ll have to sit in the dark. And don’t even think of trying to make a cup of tea. It’s called progress, you see. Anyway, never mind, are you sure you’ve signed up for the introductory sessions on how to switch on the telly? No? Oh dear. You’ll probably be needing a dalek, then, to do it for you. We’ll arrange a course for you so you can find out how to order one. Er, not quite sure what we do as regards arranging courses …

We love progress, don’t we. Progress can be extremely helpful. Indeed, there’s quite a strong argument that it should be. SatNav is progress – it’s just that if you rely on it all the time you’ll never learn your way around. Smartphones are progress, so long as you look where you’re going. Google Translate is progress, but it will do little to encourage you to master another language. Calculators are progress, so long as you don’t have to rely on them to work out how much two items from Poundland are going to set you back. Predictive testicle is progress too. So are spell chequers. Google itself is progress, although if you seriously don’t know what you would do without it, it has become self-harming, it has won and, basically, you’re stuffed.

The algorithms are in place, not to mention the innate laziness, to reduce us all to drooling imbeciles within no time at all, if we allow it to happen. Or hurl us to the ground. A once noble species destroyed by algorithms. What a shame, Homo sapiens had so much going for it.

 
Currently I’m reading Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind” (Vintage, 2018;  £9.99 from Waterstone’s).

Dream geography

For many years I had a recurring dream about being in an immensely high and narrow building, little more than a lift shaft really, with small rooms off it. Apparently it was where I worked, and I was very anxious about being able to operate the lift successfully. Being trapped was an ever present fear. Since September 2001 I have never had this dream, but then during this time I haven’t worked in the building that I thought the dream imagery represented. It never occurred to me at the time that the location might have been New York; that realisation only came retrospectively.

I have other New York dreams, though, one of which starts by the Hudson, at an elevated station near where the twin towers used to stand, and proceeds round the waterfront, Battery Park I suppose, but then mysteriously seems to transform into the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon. Another dream takes me on the Subway to Smith and Carroll, high above Brooklyn, and close to a junk-filled Gowanus Canal. A dream of upper Manhattan is full of brown warehouses; on Central Park West I sob bottomlessly for my favourite Beatle. None of this is very satisfactory. Presented thus it sounds daft and mildly pretentious.

Why, I wonder, do I dream like this? My knowledge of New York isn’t bad; my waking state mental maps of the city likewise. Why does my dreaming brain need to distort geography in this way, and consistently so? Does it tell us anything about the hidden similarities or patterns between places, about suppressed analogies or repressed desires? What is the point of it? Why do I dream that I’ve been to Brazil, on a journey home from the US, when I know full well that I haven’t? Why, in my repetitive dream of Sydney, is the Bridge to the south-east of the city centre rather than the north-west, as in real life? Rearranged thus it doesn’t make for a better city. Could it be that my sleeping cerebral hemispheres fail to compensate for the southern terrestrial hemisphere?

Perhaps a psychologist could help. Would Freud have anything to say, for instance, were he still in business? I’ve nothing against him, although I’m not a huge fan - not that I would, as it were, want to indulge in a Viennetta with (or against) him. Wouldn’t want to slip up or anything. However, I rather fear he might have suspicions about an occasional Liverpool dream of mine which features a building labelled Herman’s Laundry. To make matters worse, it stands right next to the Overhead – which isn’t there any more. Or about my dreamtime obsession with underground stations – suitably matching my daytime obsession with underground stations. Birmingham New Street as a two platformed affair, rather like Baker Street Circle Line station, murky and steam powered. Oh, how I wish it was. Or Holborn as an ecstatic subterranean maze with escalators oozing counter-intuitively out of small holes in the sides of cavernous passages, rather like on the Jubilee Line extension. Then the old escalator thing of being sucked into the mechanism, too amusingly clichéd to be a nightmare. Bliss.

My dream London is very strange, it has to be said, and surprisingly disappointing. Perhaps I spend too many waking hours contemplating the city and thus use up all the best material for things to be otherwise. Mostly the dream version consists of a wide strip of paving slabs in front of the National Gallery. Off to the left (not the right, as it should be) goes Charing Cross Road, beyond which, to the left, is Soho, coloured Prussian Blue (it’s always dawn), and consisting of an enormous hole centred on Berwick Street. (Sometimes, Sigmund, even in Soho, a hole is just an excavation for Crossrail). Long and vague and hugely uninteresting grey roads head northwards – think Goswell Road or City Road in the wrong place – towards mainline stations, just as likely to be Nord, Est or St Lazare as the terrible terminal triplets of Euston Road. Dream Paris, by the way, consists mostly of an open air market with a large slightly sloping empty space in front of it with a really good bookshop in the south-east corner, while the Channel Tunnel reaches all the way from Calais back to London. Which, in a sense, I suppose, it does.

 
In the waking state it’s hard to recall much of the detail, or of further dream-geographic instances, of which I suspect there are many, but once asleep it’s all able to reappear and to connect together. By which time, of course, I’m in no immediate fit state to report back in order to blog. How splendid, though, that this systematic parallel world exists within me, within my mind, a mostly unsuspected but wonderfully wonky information space that tugs at my creative urges and inflames my wanderlust whilst I snore. Well done Chief Designer !