Mind your language

Wednesday, 18th February 2009

Dot Wordsworth looks over the rainbow

A bright rainbow on a wall caught my eye, and the building behind it turned out to belong to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. On its website, the department has a cheerful image of helicopters and cranes constructing a rainbow. When I add that the home page is headed by a picture of a black boy in a wheelchair, you can see the lie of the land.

What do they think they mean by their rainbow emblem? In recent years it has been the contested property of campaigners for peace and for homosexual activity. There is something called Broken Rainbow LGBT Domestic Violence Service. ‘LGBT’ stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’. The service does not provide domestic violence, but intends to help people suffering from it. A choir in Brighton for lesbians and gay people is called Rainbow Chorus. A fundraising event for Stonewall is called Rainbow Rampage, ‘the world’s first gay-centric motorsports event’. One gets the drift. Indeed the rainbow is used as a useful flag for pubs and even taxi companies catering for the homosexual market.

But when the government’s TeacherNet online resource suggests a rainbow-focused school assembly for primary-school children, the theme is not homosexuality (as it might well be), but world peace day (21 September). Five pots of different coloured paint will be useful in this assembly, it says. The DCSF manages six colours on its own rainbow (Richard of York gave battle in ...’), so I’m not sure which would be left out at the assembly — blue for battle, presumably. But the teacher is expected to point to the rainbow and say: ‘This logo is the symbol for this day of peace, to show that all of us need peace in our lives.’ I can’t see how it shows anything of the sort, but what really annoys me is the ‘recommended resource’ of John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’, a wicked piece of work beginning, ‘Imagine there’s no Heaven’, and going on to suggest imagining ‘no religion too’. A fine song for school religious assembly.

‘Welcome to the new corporate branding,’ says the department’s explanation of its own designer rainbow, which somehow expresses the department’s purpose: ‘to make England [not Scotland or Northern Ireland and certainly not Wales] the best place in the world for children’. This purpose can apparently ‘be summed up as “building the rainbow”. This brand helps us communicate the message that everything we do is part of delivering that vision; building the brighter future we want for children.’ God help them.

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Christopher Moseley

February 20th, 2009 2:09pm Report this comment

This is not a comment on the above article but a request to Dot Wordsworth that she bend her mind to the curious metamorphosis of the word "ancestor". My understanding (I'm writing this from Riyadh and don't have a dictionary handy) is that it means a long dead great great great.... grandparent. However, over the last year or so I have seen it used in at least three instances in the sense of descendent. In (I think) the second Harry Potter book Tom Riddle is referred to as Slytherin's "only living ancestor"; in a review in the Sunday Times Simon Jenkins refers to "Nobel's ancestors, the modern day terrorists", and more recently an article in the Times on Spain comments that "although expelled 500 years ago, the Moors and Jews have many ancestors still living in modern day Spain" - very curious

John Lloyd

February 20th, 2009 4:59pm Report this comment

@Christopher Moseley

"ancestor
1297, from O.Fr. ancestre, from L.L. antecessor "predecessor," lit. "foregoer," agent noun from L. antecess-, stem of antecedere "precede," agent noun from ante- "before" (see ante) + cedere "to go" (see cede)."

From the Online Etymology Dictionary (www.etymonline.com)- a free treasure for us languge fetishists.

We need the neologism 'postcestors' - or perhaps we can just carry on with the boring old, 'descendants.

This is like thread-jacking.ouch.

John Lloyd

February 20th, 2009 5:13pm Report this comment

Now the point I wanted to make. Isn't this 'rainbow' guff a case of getting one's polysexual knickers in a twist?

A rainbow is only created when an entirety of white light is fractured (not sure if it is refraction or diffraction) by a turbulent co-existence of weather factors. Calm is restored when the rainbow disappears surely?

Buckets of paint are totally different because colour is additive. Mix blue and yellow and you get green. That's why the primary colours for paint and light are different.

Rainbows are divisive but, proabably by ignorant accident, the pint sloshing is a better symbolic gesture of inclusion. th

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