Favourite Words
When I was a child and living in Marrakech, my sister Esther and I entertained ourselves with obsessions about certain words. We settled on Hideous and Kinky as the favourites. We would chant them, starting slowly and building up to a frenzied crescendo, hoping to attract the attention of the adults who were fairly oblivious, sitting around in cafes, smoking, and drinking mint tea. The fixation with words remained, and as I grew up they became my arsenal for attack and self protection. I remember a low moment with my much hated step father when he caught me hitchhiking and threatened consequences. ‘You are the essence of hypocrisy’ I sneered at him with all my might. It was the only time he hit me but I was exhilarated as felt I had affected him enough for him to fall from his moral high horse. My father had a hatred of certain words and it made me vigilant about how I expressed myself. It was a bit of a tyranny but it was fun too. He was brilliant at describing people, nicknames which stuck, some affectionate: we were all Kidlet or Kiddo. My brother Ali was Albert. I was Bloni. And then there were more reductive ones like our rather dull friend who became Sniffo because of her endless honking and blowing her nose. He despised it when people used the royal we when recounting what they had been up to. I saw him freeze slightly when someone made this unwitting faux pas. I became adept at avoiding we, and I still do. Esther reminded me that our mother hated the word pardon. Once when we had been staying with our grandparents in Ireland, Esther thought she would try it out. Mum went mad. ‘Don’t say pardon, say what. Pardon is awful!’ When I started to use graphics on my jumpers I looked for words to distil a feeling. I don’t want a directive, or a slogan. I want them to evoke – and for the wearer to be able to claim them in some way. I like the words on record covers, and protest march words are often very good. ‘Ginsberg is God’ was my first word jumper. I was vaguely thinking about Allen Ginsberg but also about the atmosphere of how free the Beat poets were - how they threw language around. Then there was a famous t-shirt in the 70’s that said Clapton is God. Someone once asked me if Ginsberg meant Ginsberg’s the haberdashers in Petticoat Lane. It didn’t, but it could.
