Language and Creativity

The Art of Common Talk

Ronald Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317332657
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language and Creativity has become established as a pivotal text for courses in English Language, Linguistics and Literacy.

Creativity in language has conventionally been regarded as the preserve of institutionalised discourses such as literature and advertising, and individual gifted minds. In this ground-breaking book, bestselling author Ronald Carter explores the idea that creativity, far from being simply a property of exceptional people, is an exceptional property of all people.

Drawing on a range of real examples of everyday conversations and speech, from flatmates in a student house and families on holiday to psychotherapy sessions and chat-lines, the book argues that creativity is an all-pervasive feature of everyday language. Using close analysis of naturally occurring language, taken from a unique 5 million word corpus, Language and Creativity reveals that speakers commonly make meanings in a variety of creative ways, in a wide range of social contexts and for a diverse set of reasons.

This Routledge Linguistics Classic is here reissued with a new preface from the author, covering a range of key topics from e-language and internet discourse to English language teaching and world Englishes. Language and Creativity continues to build on the previous theories of creativity, offering a radical contribution to linguistic, literary and cultural theory. A must for anyone interested in the creativity of our everyday speech.

Part I Backgrounds and theories

1 Approaches to creativity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315658971-2

Prologue

NOW IS THE DISCOUNT OF OUR WINTER TENTS!!

(sign displayed outside a camping shop in a small town in the English Midlands)

Cut ’n’ Dried; Headlines; Making Waves; Kutz; Shampers; Klippers; Headstart; Hair Comes Linda;Way Ahead

(all names of UK hairdressing salons)

Common language expressing common thought is anything but simple, and its workings are not obvious. Special language expressing special thought is an exploitation of the common and to be analyzed only in respect to it.

(Turner, 1991: 14)

Common words, common values and common talk

This prologue opens up further questions of the kind raised in the Introduction, underlining that the main focus for the book is on ordinary, everyday talk and on the features of creative language use to be found within such contexts. It provides a range of concrete examples while at the same time asking about the values which surround both the examples and the words we use to talk about the examples. Yet more questions are asked about the examples, and the chapter as a whole thus provides a basis from which to introduce, in chapter 2, some key theoretical paradigms from different academic disciplines which are then employed further to return to the data.

Keywords: ordinary, common, art

Ordinary people, ordinary life, ordinary language. Ordinary is one of those common-sense words which appear to refer unproblematically to things. But like many of the words used in the argument in this book it has a cultural history. ‘Ordinary’ originally had a meaning derived from the Latin ordo = order (with the suffix -arius), and referred to the designation or formal appointment of people to positions in society; hence the ‘ordination’ of a priest. It is not until the eighteenth century that, when referring to people, it acquires a more pejorative and dismissive sense of judgement on the grounds of their being socially inferior. More generally, the word ordinary has come to refer to the prosaic, unexceptional, common uses against which more exceptional or extraordinary uses can be measured.

Likewise, the word common is derived from the Latin com (together) and unus (one) and thus has etymological links with ‘communal’ and ‘community’ and ‘commonwealth’, that is, something which is valued on account of its being part of or belonging to a group. In the case of common, Williams (1983: 71) points out that it is in the sixteenth century that a reverse semantics, not dissimilar to the changes to the meaning of ordinary, takes place and one specialised meaning which the word acquires is that of ‘vulgar’ and ‘unrefined’. This pejorative and derogatory sense gets extended in the late nineteenth century to refer to people (e.g.‘her speech was very common’ or ‘he’s just so common’), though it at the same time retained the original source meaning in phrases such as ‘common’ ground or the ‘common’ good. References to language as ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ thus often carry a sense which is both derogatory and dismissive.

The keyword art is used in the subtitle to this book the art of common talk. It is, similarly to the word literature which originally referred to all types of writing (see p. 55 below), also used to refer inclusively to a range of skills and competencies. For example, in the medieval university curriculum the study of the ‘arts’ embraced grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. By the late eighteenth century the word had acquired different specialisations so that the word artisan came to be associated with more scientific, technological and also manual skills, while artist came to be associated with imaginative, intellectual and creative purposes, developing an even more abstract sense in the capitalised Art or its reference to the study of the humanities in a university or college Faculty of Arts. In these senses, then, the ‘art of common talk’ carries different inflections. ‘Common talk’ can refer disparagingly to the ordinary, prosaic, unimaginative talk of uneducated people which involves mechanical and non-creative techniques of communication; or it can refer positively to the universal, creative artistry of all speakers of a language.

Ordinary creativity

As discussed in the introduction, creativity is basic to a wide variety of different language uses, from everyday advertising language and slogans to the most elaborated of literary texts. Even very young children possess the capacity for telling and receiving jokes which depend for their effect on a recognition of creative play with patterns of meaning. For example, children encounter in the school playground creative exchanges such as the following:

Q: What is black and white and read all over?

A: A newspaper.

They can also give varying explanations for a newspaper headline such as the following: Giant Waves Down Tunnel. Both of these instances here depend on recognising dual meanings created by the phonology (read/red) and syntax of English (giant is both a noun and a modifier; waves can be both a verb and a noun). They tell and laugh at ‘doctor doctor’ and ‘knock knock’ jokes such as the following:

Patient: Doctor, Doctor, when I close my eyes I can see spots.

Doctor: Well, keep your eyes open.

A: Knock, knock

B: Who’s there?

A: Ivor

B: Ivor who?

A: Ivor Surprise for you.

And they enjoy reading and themselves making up titles of books such as Keeping Fit by Jim Nastics, Hospitality by Colin Anytime, or Victorian Transport by Orson Cart.

Advertising language also depends crucially on creative play with language and on the cultural discourses of society within which the language is embedded (see, in particular, Cook, 2002; also Moeran, 1984; Myers, 1994). For example, an advertisement for a motor car in 1992, which states that it is A Car for the 90^os, suggests simultaneously the possibility that it is a car in which you can travel at great speeds (90 mph), that it is particularly suited to very hot weather (90^o – the temperature reaches the nineties Fahrenheit), and that it is ultramodern and in tune with expectations for the decade (the 1990s). It might even suggest a car that can be put through its paces in a ninety degree right-angle turn. We might note that such texts are designed to require some engagement and interaction on the part of the reader/interpreter. The reader has been positioned in a creative conversational duetting or dialogue with a text; the text resonates with multiple meanings but they only resonate if they are interpreted as such by an audience.

Humour, creativity and everyday language

Airline Stewardess: The pilot is going to have to make an emergency landing. There’s a problem in the cabin.

Passenger: What is it?

Stewardess: It’s a small room at the front of the plane where the pilot sits but don’t worry about that now.

(adapted from the movie Airplane)

Everyday exchanges between people are replete with wordplay, puns and formulaic jokes. Tabloid newspapers are characterised by verbal ambiguities, often containing sexual innuendo, as in the case of the Daily Mirror newspaper front-page story concerning the gay international pop star George Michael who had been arrested by police in the United States on a charge of indecent behaviour in a public place. The headline made intertextual reference to a previous hit song of Michael (‘Call me up before you go’): ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO, GO!!!

Graffiti are also a not uncommon feature of everyday life, with the term ‘graffiti art’ sometimes reserved for the paint display often surrounding the verbal display. The medium can also be a resource for humour, as in the case of the white van, completely covered in dust and dirt, on which someone had written the words ‘Also available in white’. Or the British Rail train window, similarly to wordplay reported in Chiaro (1992: 12), which had the following finger-written into the dust: British Rail Coffee: Only £1 a slice. The reference here is to both the expense and the consistency of the coffee served on British Rail trains. The coffee is judged to be so undrinkable that it has almost the consistency of a slice of cake or bread.

It is worth noting too that such wordplay does not exist wholly for purposes of entertainment or simply for the intrinsic pleasure obtained from the recreation of new words and meanings from familiar patterns. As in the case of the British Rail graffiti, there can also be a social and critical purpose to the language. For example, recent problems with reliability and punctuality of trains in Britain, especially around London, led to wordplay, often written publicly and directly onto notices on stations, such as the following: NOTwork South East; SNAILtrack; BEYONDTHEPAIL Track. Here the phrases are critically amended from the name of the rail company ‘Network South East’ and the name of the track company ‘Rail Track’, but the humour and wordplay are directed towards the company in an adversarial response to the circumstances.

Of course, such verbal play involves varying degrees of sophistication and knowledge on the part of the consumer and the knowledge may sometimes, as here, be specific to a particular cultural context. Indeed, some even more sophisticated instances of jokes and wordplay cross linguistic boundaries, requiring knowledge of different languages or of words drawn from different languages. For example, jokes such as:

What do the French eat at eight o’clock for breakfast?

Huit-heures-bix [echoes Weetabix – an internationally marketed breakfast cereal]

Or

A: Je t’adore. [echoes ‘shut the door’]

B: Shut it yourself.

Or the name of a recently opened Moroccan restaurant called So.uk, which plays on the Arabic word ‘souk’ and the fact that it is at the same time very British (‘so UK’), and with its spoof email address suggests that it is also very much of its time.

Cultural knowledge is needed for the impact of wordplay and humour to be at its most effective. For example, a petrol company in Ireland goes by the name of Emerald Oil. Interpretation of the effects of this name require a knowledge that green (emerald) is the colour associated with Ireland and that Ireland is often referred to as the ‘Emerald Isle’, but most particularly that an Irish accent renders the word ‘isle’ as ‘oil’, thus securing a multiple layering of effects involving cultural allusion, phonetic play and lexical ambiguity. In a related way, too, the Irish are stereotypically thought to be a group of people of inferior intellect and ‘common’ sense and are thus regularly the butt of jokes in which a person’s lack of intelligence is at the root of the joke. In the case of the following joke, involving a public announcement at an airport, this kind of cultural knowledge is a prerequisite:

British Airways flight 218 departing Gate no. 10 at 13.35.

Aer Lingus Flight 931 departing when the little hand is on number four and the big hand is on two. [Aer Lingus is the national airline of Ireland.]

Creative language and shop fronts: a prototypical example

Examples cited in the introduction and in this prologue illustrate how so-called ordinary, everyday discourse is frequently patterned creatively in ways which make it memorable and striking, displaying a play with the more stable forms of language in ways which make them less stable. In the process, the limits of idioms, fixed expressions and other pre-patterned regularities are stretched and creatively de-formed and re-formed. The names of shop fronts are a good example of this creative design, playing with common collocations and idioms in order to make the language used to describe the products they offer part of the presentation. Continuing the Irish theme for a little longer, here are examples of a range of different health food shops in southern Ireland: Nature’s Way; Mother Nature; Back to Nature; Open Sesame; In a Nutshell; Wholesome Foods; The Whole Story; Fruit and Nut Case; Naturally Yours; Grain of Truth; Simple Simon; Nature’s Store; Just Natural. Most of these words and phrases (many of them fixed expressions or idioms) are connected with nature and a simple way of life and are creatively exploited to promote the sale of food which is either organically grown or which is defined as having particularly health-giving properties. For example, words like ‘grain’,‘nut’,‘nutshell’,‘store’,‘whole’ and ‘wholesome’, ‘sesame (seeds)’ are all words used to describe specific foods or specific qualities associated with such food; and they are then combined into fixed expressions such as ‘In a Nutshell’ or ‘Grain of Truth’, which draw attention to themselves as expressions and are made memorable by their unusual association with the sale of health food products. In other words, creativity and cultural embedding are not the exclusive preserve of canonical texts but are pervasive throughout the most everyday uses of language.

Such uses also imply dialogue and conversation. Some are more obvious, such as ‘Naturally Yours’ (with its echoes of ‘sincerely yours/yours sincerely’; but other idiomatic phrases function at boundaries of a conversation to sum up feelings or to comment or to evaluate, so that ‘In a Nutshell’ or ‘that’s not the whole story’ function in a hybrid way, depending both on our recognition that the texts are written but also on a recognition that they possess a dialogic character. As you read them, it sounds as if you are involved in conversation.

Creative purposes and functions

In a recent paper Toolan (2000a) has taken this discussion further, focusing in particular on the kinds of social attitudes conveyed by creative language play with the names of shops. Toolan points out that such verbal practices normally accompany the provision of a particular type of service or the sales of particular products. The shops are not, for example, operating in a highly serious business of chain store merchandise (they are more likely to be privately owned businesses); and they are not engaged in selling a range of products (they are more likely to be promoting a single product or service such as unblocking a drain or selling videos or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Illustrations
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements for the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements for the First Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Backgrounds and theories
• PART II Forms and functions
• PART III Contexts and variations
• Appendix 1 A note on transcription and corpus analysis
• Appendix 2 New words for old
• Appendix 3 Corpus and Creativity: Publications (1994–2014)
• References
• Index