The Urban Voltaire

Jack McLean
Name

You readers out there will doubtless by now know that I like words. There's a lot of people who do. Some like words for the sheer sound of them though I've always thought that, well, unsound. I mean, what seems a lovely word in another language often ends up, when you discover its meaning, not a very nice thing at all. French is fraught with them. Prunelle sounds nice: it is a prune, a nasty word. Or is that simply word association? How about that very pretty word macabre. Well its meaning is macabre at that. German has some truly magnificent words. Gemetzel for instance. It means slaughter or carnage, both of them nice words despite their meaning. Then there is a very expressive word, now entered into the English language: schadenfreude. It means a delight in the misfortunes of others and is possibly the nastiest concept of all.
     But even in the English language there is often an ambiguity betwixt the sound and the meaning. Max Beerbohm once noted that while 'ermine' was regarded as both a lovely word and a lovely thing, 'vermin' was not, though it had the same sound. He then caustically noted that an ermine is in fact a stoat in its winter coat and is regarded by country people who have such an animal in their farmlands as – what else – vermin. Myself, I would rather prefer a stoat to a farmer but there you are.
     
I like words so much that I gloat like a stoat over them. I once did a pilot for Dave Batchelor then of BBC Radio Scotland when it was a programme once worth listening to and consisted of a little more intellectual rigour than that currently afforded by Tam Cowan relentlessly discursing about football. Anyway the pilot was ill-fated because what Dave wanted to do was a sort of Scottish version of Desert Island Discs but with a difference and it was a very good idea I think. But he asked me what I would do were I actually to be invited on to the national network Desert Island thing. 'What book besides Shakespeare and the Bible would you have?' he asked. I replied as indeed I would now that I would have the whole and entire Oxford English Dictionary. (Incidentally, for my luxury I wanted an open razor so that I could slash my throat what with the bloody boredom of it all).
     Actually I do possess the entire Oxford English Dictionary along with other dictionaries and many other books on words, such as Websters and slang meanings and a lot of other books about a lot of just words. Like a trainspotter really. I often sit in bed at night just reading the dictionary, for pleasure. It is odd, surely but harmless. (I have a brother who does the same but he reads books of the numbers of aeroplanes, the ones which flew in the first and second world wars, of all the nations. He is odd but not, I can assure you, harmless).
     To be honest I often disapprove of new words, especially if they are fashionable and especially so if they actually have no meaning at all such as 'tad' or 'double whammy'. They may have meaning to somebody who uses them but they convey nothing but irritation to me.
     
But a word I but recently encountered, well in the last few years really, and which I did not know of previously, I thought was absolutely splendid. It sounded good and the meaning was too and I am going to defend the word, its meaning, and the use of the very object itself. The word is 'bling'.
     For a start the word sounds smashing – that last word incidentally taken from Gaelic – smahan – and for an end it does sound like its meaning. It means, I understand, something glittery and both expensive, and worthless in moral terms. It could indeed describe myself. Another grand aspect to the word is that it is used to disparage that which belongs to other people.
     Decent folk do not possess bling: aristos may have family silver and jewels (a really, really, fine phrase today is 'the family jewels' by which is meant the male genitalia), but not bling. By bling we mean glittery jewellery, especially gold neck chains, chunky identity bracelets, finger rings in the shape of pianos or whatever Elvis Presley in his Las Vegas could think up: in fact, something rather common and smacking of vulgarity. (Which is gemeinheidt in German, another good word I think).
     But not only do I like the word Bling, I like the very thing itself. Some years ago the writer, publisher, and former broadcaster Kenneth Roy wrote a profile of me for the Sunday Times in which he mentioned that I was sporting an inordinately expensive gold wristwatch. (There was an implied sort of reproach here.) Well it was true and I still often wear the same watch. Note the word 'wear'. As a watch it is rather difficult to read but its dial is surrounded by small paste brilliants. He should see the wristwatch I later bought and still wear. It is an Art Deco bauble made of platinum and gold and I hope one day it will be able to act as a kind of pension, just as long as the buyer doesn't discover that it too is nearly as ersatz as its owner.
     I have not stopped at watches either. On the little finger of my right hand is a heavy gold-engraved signet ring (a pretence I share incidentally with the Prince of Wales). On the little finger of my left hand lies a heavy red gold ring made for me by a young jeweller who was once a student at the design faculty of the Glasgow School of Art. Around my neck is a gold chain with a medallion displaying the Glasgow coat of arms. (It's actually a football medal and was originally designed as a fob for a gold Albert watch chain. Talking of which I have a gold Albert too. And a gold pocket watch.) My cigarette lighter is a gold Dunhill. I have gold and silver cigarette cases too. And cufflinks.
     In short, I am not short of Bling.
     
The poet, songwriter, and former teacher, Adam McNaughton, a man whom I much respect and admire (you should encounter his concise Hamlet in verse song to see one of the reasons why we should all share my sentiment about him), once dreadfully disparaged me in public by describing me as Gollum, ever looking about for 'my precious'. My nephews and nieces take the piss out of me for the sheer amount of bling which I display.
     Yet all of the above would have been perfectly normal for a gentleman of a reasonable income right up till the Second World War. What is more: put together, all this bling would cost less than most people will pay for a family car, let alone a Mercedes or a Jag (or two if you are a former cabinet minister). I have, in fact, never owned a car.
     I haven't been on a holiday since 1979, I only dine in expensive restaurants if somebody else is paying, and many of my suits (impeccably cut as Ken Roy stated in that long-ago newspaper article), are over 20 years old. I do not cherish hi-tech gee-gaws such as mobile phones or I-pods or raspberries or whatever they are called. I am, with the exception of alcohol, inclined to austerity. And the exception of bling. I like bling. I approve of bling. I approve of people who sport bling. Splendour in small things is, I attest, splendour in the small things which can only help to make life a little bigger for ourselves. But a last word. I like words even more than I like bling. Words are bigger than bling can ever hope to be.

Kenneth Roy has never written a profile of Jack McLean for the Sunday Times. He did, however, write a profile of Jack McLean for Scotland on Sunday – Ed