Although Tony Blair in A Journey calls Alastair Campbell ‘crazy’; David Miliband ‘smart’; Gordon Brown a ‘strange guy’; and a barbecue given by the Queen ‘freaky’, I do not think this is part of his ‘love letter’ to America.
Although Tony Blair in A Journey calls Alastair Campbell ‘crazy’; David Miliband ‘smart’; Gordon Brown a ‘strange guy’; and a barbecue given by the Queen ‘freaky’, I do not think this is part of his ‘love letter’ to America. Certainly these words are American in flavour, but their use hardly removes barriers of comprehension for his transatlantic audience. What interest are they supposed to have in Patricia Hewitt or John Prescott? It must all be baffling.
In any case, Mr Blair slips between dialects and registers of speech with the readiness of an actor with no firmly determined linguistic character of his own. ‘Americans can be smart,’ he tells them, ‘really, really clever’. Not that smart isn’t well established in English use in Britain. The Anglo-Saxons used it of a smarting pain. By 1656 Archbishop Ussher, the man who worked out that the world was created in 4004 bc, was able to write of ‘a smart fellow’ in the clever sense. Its application to smart society was revived in the last two decades of the 19th century.
Guy, originating from Guy Fawkes, is in the sense ‘fellow’ a much more recent Americanism, from the second half of the 19th century. ‘I am a pretty straight sort of guy,’ Mr Blair announced in 1997. But then, in A Journey, he calls Petar Stoyanov, the President of Bulgaria, ‘a lovely guy’, as no doubt he is.
Freaky a word even younger than Mr Blair, becoming current in 1960s America. ‘I think it would do everybody good to take LSD,’ an informant told Warren Young and Joseph Hixson for their study into use of the drug on campus. ‘But soon it’s gonna get pretty freaky.’ That does not sound like a barbecue given by the Queen.
As for crazy, Mr Campbell has already complained about Mr Blair’s crass categorisation of mad people. ‘In my experience there are two types of crazy people,’ he had said in A Journey. ‘Those who are just crazy, and who are therefore dangerous; and those whose craziness lends them creativity, strength, ingenuity and verve. Alastair was of the latter sort.’ Perhaps Mr Campbell would have preferred the good old English word maggoty. Anthony Wood called John Aubrey, a better man than he (Mr Campbell), ‘a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed’. John Wesley’s father published a book of poems called Maggots, and it would have done extremely well as a title for Mr Blair’s volume — a step beyond John Fowles.
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