The ‘which way round?’ questions are never as harmless or as innocent as they look. And they look strange in a language like English that doesn’t do inflections. The answers are no less strange.
Which end do you peel a banana from?
Which way round do you put toilet rolls in the wall holder?
Which way round do you park you car in relation to the curb?
For example, the question: ‘Which way round do you sit in the office in relation to the window?’ can have for an answer:
I sit side-on to the window.
I sit facing the window.
I sit with my back to the window.
I sit at an angle to the window.
We could force all answers to follow one pattern, as I am sure is the case in many languages, but three of the four would sound – well, ‘forced’. The grammar of say: ‘Put the knives and forks in the drawer sharp end first,’ is challenging on account of its simplicity (when I was little, I was taught to hand a knife to another person with the sharp end towards me, that is, with the sharp end away from the person to whom I was handing it).
Negotiating the bends and corners of such grammar causes as much mental fatigue to speakers of little faith in their linguistic capabilities as rotating a triangle in the coordinate planes through 90 degrees about the origin does to a student of literature. But once the grammatical code has been cracked, the serious business begins.
They are Swiftian questions. When Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, he learns that the empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu had gone to war over which end was the correct end to break a boiled egg at. Inevitably, some of my students say that the big end is the logical way to break an egg at, others, the little end.
From ‘logical’ the debate goes to ‘normal’. Sometimes it is the other way round. There can’t be anything logical about any of this business because bivalent logic admits only ‘true or false’ or ‘valid or invalid’ for an answer, but I accept that the word ‘logical’ is used loosely. ‘Normal’ is a different story. ‘Normal’ promptly leads to ‘the right way’ and ‘the wrong way’ (compare ‘dexterous’ – right-handed but also skillful, adroit, and ‘sinister’ – left-handed but also ominous). By now we are really going places.
As in Swift, we could be talking about whether transubstantiation takes place at an altar or it is just hocus pocus (Swift uses the egg ends to allude to the differences between the Catholics and Protestants). Someone will inevitably chip in with a line that tilting your soup bowl away from you is the posh way of doing it while tilting it towards you is the common way. How about slicing a tomato? Green end nearest you or green end facing down, or holding your tomato green end uppermost and slicing it thus? One way is practical, another positively wasteful. Which is which? Then, there is the trolley in the check-out aisle: narrow end towards you to make loading and unloading easier (naff) or narrow end away from you (to effect an exit in a dignified pose). Put the coat on left arm first or right arm first (is this a gender difference?).
These are silly divisions with strong underlying convictions, and Swift was a sharp observer to notice that answers to questions of the ‘which way round’ or ‘which end first’ type polarize us on many levels. Small cracks conceal big schisms. What we call a force of habit may only be a fig leaf. Speaking of relations and stretching the analogy a little, the mathematical relation congruence modulo 2 partitions the set of integers into two non-overlapping sets: ‘even’ and ‘odd’.
Which end do you peel a banana from?
Which way round do you put toilet rolls in the wall holder?
Which way round do you park you car in relation to the curb?
For example, the question: ‘Which way round do you sit in the office in relation to the window?’ can have for an answer:
I sit side-on to the window.
I sit facing the window.
I sit with my back to the window.
I sit at an angle to the window.
We could force all answers to follow one pattern, as I am sure is the case in many languages, but three of the four would sound – well, ‘forced’. The grammar of say: ‘Put the knives and forks in the drawer sharp end first,’ is challenging on account of its simplicity (when I was little, I was taught to hand a knife to another person with the sharp end towards me, that is, with the sharp end away from the person to whom I was handing it).
Negotiating the bends and corners of such grammar causes as much mental fatigue to speakers of little faith in their linguistic capabilities as rotating a triangle in the coordinate planes through 90 degrees about the origin does to a student of literature. But once the grammatical code has been cracked, the serious business begins.
They are Swiftian questions. When Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, he learns that the empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu had gone to war over which end was the correct end to break a boiled egg at. Inevitably, some of my students say that the big end is the logical way to break an egg at, others, the little end.
From ‘logical’ the debate goes to ‘normal’. Sometimes it is the other way round. There can’t be anything logical about any of this business because bivalent logic admits only ‘true or false’ or ‘valid or invalid’ for an answer, but I accept that the word ‘logical’ is used loosely. ‘Normal’ is a different story. ‘Normal’ promptly leads to ‘the right way’ and ‘the wrong way’ (compare ‘dexterous’ – right-handed but also skillful, adroit, and ‘sinister’ – left-handed but also ominous). By now we are really going places.
As in Swift, we could be talking about whether transubstantiation takes place at an altar or it is just hocus pocus (Swift uses the egg ends to allude to the differences between the Catholics and Protestants). Someone will inevitably chip in with a line that tilting your soup bowl away from you is the posh way of doing it while tilting it towards you is the common way. How about slicing a tomato? Green end nearest you or green end facing down, or holding your tomato green end uppermost and slicing it thus? One way is practical, another positively wasteful. Which is which? Then, there is the trolley in the check-out aisle: narrow end towards you to make loading and unloading easier (naff) or narrow end away from you (to effect an exit in a dignified pose). Put the coat on left arm first or right arm first (is this a gender difference?).
These are silly divisions with strong underlying convictions, and Swift was a sharp observer to notice that answers to questions of the ‘which way round’ or ‘which end first’ type polarize us on many levels. Small cracks conceal big schisms. What we call a force of habit may only be a fig leaf. Speaking of relations and stretching the analogy a little, the mathematical relation congruence modulo 2 partitions the set of integers into two non-overlapping sets: ‘even’ and ‘odd’.
One difference that seems to have prevailed is that relating to buttons on male and female garments. A hang over from the days when female clothes were buttoned from the back perhaps? Who can say for sure? :)
ReplyDeleteApparently, women as a rule stir their tea, coffee etc counterclockwise as this movement of the wrist is conducive to holding up the little finger, by which observation an extra terrestial alien could distinguish between the sexes on Planet Earth, for example. Men as a rule stir clockwise - I am told:)
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