UKLA Discussion Forums

Does it matter ...

The question reminds me of the old WW2 North Africa campaign story about two useless squaddies in the 8th Army sent out into the desert by their commanding officer with a camel, a radio, and a command not to return until they had captured Rommel. After a week, a radio signal was received from them: send help, Rommel captured. Montgomery was informed, and within an hour a whole division with air cover was launched. They found the two men alone, grieving their dying dromedary. When asked to explain themselves, they revealed that the message should have read: send help, camel ruptured.

There are less trivial examples: tradition has it that the 1895 Jameson Raid, which precipitated the re-ignition of the Boer War, was launched after a full stop in a telegram migrated 5 words to the right between author and telegrapher and changed the ‘meaning’ of the message from an appeal for eventual aid to an appeal for immediate aid.

Both episodes refer to errors of encoding rather than comprehension, but they illustrate the point that texts are created in real time by real people with real (but not directly knowable) intentions, even if the ‘real’ people happen to be fictional squaddies. If you mistake those intentions, the consequences can range from nothing to a hiding, as anybody who has mistaken the import of a too-subtly written ‘Dear John/Janet’ letter knows.

So why do I put quotes round the word ‘meaning’? Perhaps to try to contain the sinister oleaginousness of that word’s ‘meaning’. This can’t be equated with the author’s intention, which is inaccessible, only tentatively interpretable, and perishes with the author, leaving the text behind for the reader to labour at. Sometimes the work is relatively simple (‘NO PARKING’), sometimes a bit harder (‘there is some strange misprision in the princes’). But ‘sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine’, and practices like reciprocal teaching seem to make the plod less lonely as well as more productive. (I find Hopkins’ image of a plough-share opening a bright seam through muddy earth very evocative of the slippery work involved in creating-recreating a line of words in reading-writing.)

Speaking of slippery substances and the need for careful reading, about an hour ago I arrived at the UKLA website for the first time in months, admired the sleek new look of the homepage, tried to log-in without success, phoned the contact number, and after receiving no reply, clicked on the email link and sent an appeal for help in resetting my password. It was only then that I noticed the photo of a beaker of oil on the homepage and the link to Lube Magazine, the organ of the United Kingdom Lubricants Association.