…understood? comprende? capisco? unnerstaun? gorrit?… a word up your nose…

…Master Gallacher has never been, and hopes never ever to be, a Grammar Nazi… I have been blessed with a good literary education (a luxury which is denied to most of the world’s population)… equally, my career has taken me to geographies far and beyond my homeland shores (again, an indulgence beyond the reach of many)… my skills in the English language are many multiples better than any of the smatterings I have picked up in another half a dozen tongues in my sojourns… I have worked and lived amongst countless people whose first language is not English … indeed, it could be argued in some quarters, that my upbringing in Docklands Govan in Glasgow equipped me with a strain of English unintelligible even to other British citizens… it is with great annoyance, therefore that I react when the Grammar Nazis offload their salvoes at others whose diction, linguistics and writing powers are not of Oxford/Cambridge/Eton standards…

…I worked in Hong Kong, where most of the inhabitants can handle basic English… my Cantonese took years to muster even a passing familiarity with it… in the Philippines, a superb level of English is found almost everywhere, but the level, mundane at best, of my Tagalong was gained after a decade in the learning… a slogful of academic tuition brought my French merely within a shoulder-shrug and whiff of garlicised Parisien patois… I detest the sneering put-downs of anyone who tries to speak or write in a language other than their mother tongue… the same with the scoffers when a word or phrase is used that is not perfect… my thoughts are simple… if I can understand the meaning or drift of whatever someone is trying to convey to me, that’s plenty good enuff,.. and I heartily applaud their effort… if I attempted to respond in the native language of the speaker, chances are high that I would have it totally garbled… and frankly, I believe the same thing would apply to the Grammar Nazis if they tried it, too… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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…I wanna thank all my ‘past Me’s’ for Me…

…it occurs to this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler that when the notion of ‘role models’ comes up, it seems to make sense to look no further than the various versions of myself that I have been during my own lifetime… daft?… maybe… but when I consider that the only person in this world who knows me as well as myself … is me!… having demonstrated comparative longevity, all the reference points, and the all the pivotal decision-making junctures of my life had one common factor present… myself, again… so, here’s a wee list of the ‘thank you’s owed to the diverse manifestations of Master Gallacher:

1. To the wee boy who lived and laughed his way through an infancy in the slums of Docklands, Govan in Glasgow, thank you for instilling the native grit that comes with germoline-plastered cuts and scrapes… that comes from the raw welts that plant themselves on a wee boy’s calves from the tops of rain-drenched, wet wellington boots… that comes from the stretching-out of two slices of corned beef on trimmed-down ‘back-ends’ of Miranda bread loaves to share with three siblings for supper…
2. To the growing teenager with seemingly endless energy (where the  hell did that go?) thank you for the stamina to practice endlessly, night after night in the nearby Elder Park with a football at his feet and make it into the ranks of a Scottish First Division football team at the age of barely 15…
3. To the same lad, applying whatever brains his God had blessed him with, thank you for enjoying studying and gaining free scholarships to a posh fee-paying school in Glasgow, which education has proved priceless over the subsequent decades…
4. To the young, emerging adult, making a living away from home after falling out with his father, thank you for staying true to your work ethic and ‘making something of himself that his mother would have been proud of’…5.To the maturing man whose outlook on life changed from a blinkered, limited, perspective on people, thank you for daring to move abroad and learning what joy there is in the diverse company of good folks from other cultures and backgrounds…

 

6.To the aging writer, thank you for discovering what immense pleasures exist in writing, creating poetries and stories, and wondering ‘where did all that good narrative stuff come from?’…

 

…to all those metamorphosed ‘Master Gallachers’, …I wanna thank all my ‘past Me’s for Me…

…see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH – BE MY GUEST