Years ago, at a party among theatrical types, I got chatting to a girl who said her job was - in her exact words - "working with hair".
It turned out she was a hairdresser on a film set, which must be how she started talking like that, because on every other subject she used standard English. But the experience was an educational one. I wasn't long up from the country then and I now realised that, until recently, I had been "working with cows"; whereas I was still saying, in the outdated way, that I'd grown up on a farm.
Of course, you can work with cows on different levels. The International Herald Tribune had an item recently about an Englishman called Douglas Clay, who in 1950 was jailed for a year and fined £301 "for fitting cows with false teeth and selling them to the Ministry of Food as heifers". Sadly, most cow work - and indeed most dentistry - is not as advanced as that.
Anyway, I don't mean to offend workers with hair, who are a fine body of people. And a sometimes sensitive body of people, as they reminded me last year, when I wrote about the embarrassment of having my car broken into during a visit to the hairdressers, and finding that the thief had stolen a pair of old football shorts; which, as usual, had been airing in the boot between games.
A few days later - this is the truth - an anonymous postcard arrived with the message: "Any more cracks about hairdressers and the shorts get it". (The postcard didn't specify what they'd get; but what they needed was a wash.)
So I want to say that, much as we may scoff at politically correct language, that girl had every right to redefine her job, if she thought the old description was inadequate, or didn't demand respect.
New forms of words can help to change the underlying reality of things, as the Government and Sinn Fein know from their endless attempts to find verbal formulations that might "move the situation forward" (exactly what I was trying to do at that party, by the way).
This week saw a completely new word coined, when Tom Parlon of the Irish Farmers Association (which comprises mainly cow-workers) celebrated the success of last month's picket/blockade of meat factories, by calling the action a "pickade". And considering that their forerunners gave boycott to the English language, the farmers' new word may well stick.
This might not be true of another term you may have first heard in recent years - not from the IFA, although again there are livestock involved.
I refer to "pashmina," a type of wool sold, to people with more discretionary income than discretion, as a fabric superior to even cash- mere (which, I don't need to tell you, derives from the "underfur" combed from the throat and belly of a Himalayan mountain goat; the rights to which once belonged exclusively to the Maharajah of Kashmir, hence the name).
Pashmina was a buzz fashion term for a while, but in this case it didn't change the underlying reality (which underlay the goat, in fact). The "new" fabric derived from the very same animal as cashmere, and the word is nothing more than a feminine version of the Persian name for the wool; something I learned from the New York Times language columnist, William Safire, when he was trying (and failing) to explain the origins of the expression "to pull the wool over one's eyes".
Indeed, the use of the term pashmina by advertisers appears gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "working with hair". And I thought of another one this week while covering the Late Late Show chair case in the High Court.
Barristers, also a group of people who don't always get the respect their vocation deserves, are synonymous with their wigs; and could, in a very real sense, be said to "work with horsehair". As indeed could upholsterers; because, in a coincidence I learned of personally from the man who brought the case, the chair is stuffed with the same material.
There's probably a neat conclusion to all this somewhere but, for legal reasons, it escapes me.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie
