| Father: | I say... |
| Daughter: | Yes, Daddy? |
| Father: | Croquet hoops look damn pretty this afternoon. |
| Daughter: | Frightfully damn pretty. |
| Mother: | They're coming along awfully well this year. |
| Father: | Yes, better than your Aunt Lavinia's croquet hoops. |
| Daughter: | Ugh! - dreadful tin things. |
| Mother: | I did tell her to stick to wood. |
| Father: | Yes, you can't beat wood...Gorn! |
| Mother: | What's gorn dear? |
| Father: | Nothing, nothing, I just like the word, it gives me confidence. Gorn...gorn.It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than 'newspaper' or 'litterbin'.
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One of the pleasures of this boatbuilding enterprise is the immersion in a language that calls from the depths of our ancestry. Old Norse (is there a new Norse?) and Old English give us a vocabulary of solid, worthy words, all of them deeply woody. Away from the nastiness of txting and the mangling illiteracy of the spellchecker, we can bask in the warmth of terms such as thole, thwart, sterns, stems and hogs. We can talk about buttock lines and rowlocks with barely a smirk and one day soon, I am sure, Joe and I will manage ‘gusset’ into our conversation and keep a straight face…
Already, we are beginning to have conversations that an outsider would struggle with and we haven't even unpacked the kit. We're currently discussing the location and structure of the strongback (which will be made out of four-be-two) as well as the possible approach to constructing the transom and stem. Lovely.
There are some naysayer's who suggest that we will continue to talk about it.. and talk about it.. and talk about it.
ReplyDeleteI will look at my back Catalogue of Guinness book's of World records for the category - "People Talking about things that they are going to get round to doing". That might be easier than actually rowing down the Waikato.
I suspect Toxteth O'Grady already holds this record.