RIP Iain Banks

A few weeks ago, Iain (Menzies) Banks passed away at the age of 59 after succumbing to gall bladder cancer, having only been diagnosed with it in March of this year. A man of tremendous intelligence and wit, Banks’ ‘mainstream’ fiction writing was an insightful combination of social commentary and dark humour, from the weird and wonderful The Wasp Factory to the grizzly and disturbing Complicity, while his ‘sci-fi’ fiction (written under the moniker ‘Iain M Banks’) ran the gamut from inter-stellar espionage in Consider Phlebas to mind-uploading and virtual hells in Surface Detail.

It’s difficult to put into words exactly what Banks and his work meant to me, but I’ll try. I came across Banks’ writing fairly late on. His first book, The Wasp Factory, was published in 1984 (I was two at the time), so I never read anything until I was in my late-teens. In quick succession, I read Canal Dreams, The Wasp Factory and Espedair Street, all borrowed from a friend of mine. I thought they were funny, interesting and quirky books, but it wasn’t until I was at university when I was ‘forced’ to read The Bridge for my undergraduate class in Scottish Literature. And that was the book that changed it all for me. It’s one of those books that you get a little bit more out of it every time you read it, and it’s probably my favourite of all of Banks’ books.

Written in three ‘arcs’, The Bridge follows 1) an unnamed protagonist who wakes up on a mysterious bridge, 2) an love-struck engineer and 3) a Barbarian who speaks in a broad Glaswegian accent. So as not to waste your experience of reading this book for the first time, I won’t say much more about the plot, but suffice to say, as soon as I finished it, I went straight back to the start and went through it again. It was The Bridge that opened up the canon of Scottish Literature to me as an impressionable undergraduate, and Banks acquired another fan for life. And over the years, I developed a wee routine where I would buy a Banks book every time I flew abroad, and up there in the confines of my cattle-class seat, I would have hours to sit undisturbed, engrossed in the worlds Banks built. Banks’ books will always be linked to the various trips I’ve taken, with the people I met, and the places I visited. They set the scene for a new set of experiences, a primer that I was heading off to explore something different.

I avoided his sci-fi fiction for the longest time, but eventually, I ran out of his mainstream fiction and my hand was forced. So at the airport in Glasgow on the way to Pittsburgh last year, I bought Consider Phlebas. And from then on, I have chewed my way through almost every single Iain M Banks I could get my hands on, too impatient to wait until my next far-flung plane journey.

I had the pleasure of meeting him (and shaking his hand!) a couple of years ago at the Glasgow Aye Write festival, where he signed a few of his books I brought along. I also asked a question during the Q&A session, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was… Maybe something about why games were so important in his work? All I remember is being in awe of the man who had filled my days and nights with unimaginable worlds and whose work had variously made me feel thrilled, annoyed, sick, happy, sad, angry, curious, inspired, and confused.

Of course, I am desperately sad that he has gone, but my main feeling is one of thankfulness. Thankful that someone had his gift, thankful that he decided to write, thankful that he wrote such wonderful books, and thankful that his work moved me so much that not a day goes by where I don’t think of at least something written by him. The world is a far better place for having had Banks on it, and I doubt we will see someone of his ilk again.

So here’s to Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry. You are missed.

– The Social Linguist

Scrabble vs. Spell Tower

Over the past few months, I’ve got quite into both Scrabble and Spell Tower. I got into the first because when Rebecca and I moved to Pittsburgh, we didn’t (and still don’t) have an active television, so in our desperation to fill our evenings with something other than spending money eating at Pittsburgh’s variety of restaurants, we decided that we’d play Scrabble, one of the few boardgames that was in the house we’d moved to. Roll on several months later, we’re still playing it, albeit upgraded slightly to the iPad version.

Now, one of the great things about the iPad version is that it has a built-in dictionary, along with a cheat-sheet of all the legal two word letters as well. It was once we figured that the two letter words were the key to success (there’s a nice story about this here) that we saw our scores ratchet up into the 300+ range (on the iPad, we usually play together against the computer). 300+ isn’t amazing, but still, it’s better than the ~200 we were getting playing on the regular hardcopy of the game (although it’s nowhere near the almost unbelievable 830 points scored in this game...). Normally the computer will play words that have us scratching our heads asking ‘is that really a word?’, but there are a couple of the two letter words which also make us go ‘huh?’. Words like AA, ZA, UT, PE and so on, but they’re all legitimate words and if you can get something like XU or XI on a triple letter word square, you can quite easily rack up around about 50 points. Weirdly, though, you can’t play DA (colloquial for ‘father’, but also a heavy Burmese knife, apparently) in the US edition of Scrabble, but it’s acceptable in the UK version.

A few months after playing hardcopy Scrabble, it started to get a bit stale, so I downloaded the game Spell Tower for the iPad. Spell Tower is slightly different to Scrabble in that instead of placing tiles on the board, you trace a line across letters on the board, and once you make a word, the letters around it are deleted. A minimum of three letters is required to make a word, and the longer the word, the more points scored (my personal best is INSULATORS for 940 points, but it’s not at all transparent how the words are scored).

Spell tower gameplay

So in the screenshot above, the word created is SERPENTINE, and that then deletes all the letters in pink around the line. In Spell Tower, there’s a few different modes, with the two main ones being 1) to score the highest number of points from a full board and 2) to stop the board from filling up (kind of like a tetris for words). Both are good fun, but the more I played it, the more I realised that the underlying dictionary is very different to that of Scrabble. For example, the following words are all acceptable words in Spell Tower, but not for Scrabble: SLOOMED, FIEST, TINTY, and TILERY. Conversely, almost none of the plural two letter Scrabble words are accepted in Spell Tower, so you can’t have AAS, ZAS, QIS, or KIS. I’m not sure why it’s been designed in this way, since words like BET, ADD, SIT and so on are all fine, but at least with Scrabble you have an official dictionary, which isn’t the case with Spell Tower. This kind of put me off Spell Tower a bit, because it eventually became a game of trial and error to see what words worked and which didn’t, and in a game where you can actually lose, that got quite annoying. And in Scrabble, you can play things like the following (EVICTION for 194) and feel quite smart and smug for having spotted it (credit to Rebecca for playing this word, not me!).

– The Social Linguist

Ya big feartie!

The following story which just recently came through my inbox (thanks to Dave Sayers for noticing it) made me chuckle, mainly because I didn’t realise that fearties was an especially Scottish term (although I only just found out yesterday that the phrase to clap the dog is also a Scottish term, whereas English English would use pet…). Anyway, feartie derives from the Scottish term feart, an adjective meaning, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘afraid’, and feartie is simply the nominal form of the adjective (I’m not sure whether there are any English English terms which follow a similar pattern?).

I don’t have access to the actual recordings, but I think it’s fair to assume that the speaker here would have have produced a glottal plosive, resulting in something like [ˈfiɹʔˌiz]. I’d then guess that the Hansard transcriber heard [ˈfiɹʔˌiz], thought that the glottal plosive was unnecessary, resulting in [ˈfiɹˌiz]. It’s not a huge gamble to assume that since the transcriber would a) not having any immediate lexical corollary to the word fearties and b) had a different phonological system to the speaker, they would have resolved the confusion by choosing a word with a similar phonological and syllabic structure; hence fairies.

The story also made me think of a situation a few weeks ago when we were out having lunch with some friends, complete with make-your-own Bloody Marys. The conversation turned to the different neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh (there are over fifty!), and one of these neighbourhoods is called ‘Fairywood’. Now, Scottish English has contrastive vowels before /r/, so words like ‘merry’, ‘marry’ and ‘Mary’ are distinct. Other varieties, however, have these some or all of these vowels merged (or neutralised, a nice discussion of which can be found here), so these words sound the same. Since ‘fairy’ and ‘ferry’ were homophonous in my interlocutor’s speech, I struggled for about a minute as I tried to map their pronunciation onto my own phonological system to determine whether it was ‘fairy’ or ‘ferry’ (I had to give up and just ask them to clarify which it was). And no, the Bloody Marys weren’t a factor.

“Haud oan man, nae need tae be feart! I’ll gie ye a lift.”

– The Social Linguist

2012 in review

So 2012 is done and 2013 is shaping up to be a busy but interesting year. Here are some of the stats highlights from the past 12 months. Additionally, this is the 100th post for the blog (although I should have hit this landmark much earlier!).

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 13,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 3 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

– The Social Linguist