December 4, 2007
A WEE DRAM O’ LEARNING
| JIM STEEL |
Wain: (Scot), (n), child, from old Scots wean, itself a contraction of wee one.
Today we will be taking an entry from Farrago’s Noo Jersey Dictionary, which resulted in the two Webster-Farrago Wars of 1835 and 1932. Noo Jersey and the United States had been happily co-existing since their respective independences in 1783 and 1788 when the Latino-Scottish David Farrago arrived in haste from the Caledonian enclave of Darien in 1820. It has been said that he had stirred up much enmity in Panama, and he was rumoured to be on his way to the new dominion of Nova Scotia. He, however, claimed to have discovered some islands and been crowned king by the natives before being driven out by a priestly coup.Whatever the truth, he stayed in Noo Jersey long enough to gain a seat on the council. Farrago managed to sow division wherever he went. In this case, the purpose of his dictionary was to establish a separate national character from the mother country after the manner of Noah Webster, but instead of antagonising Scotland (as surely was his intention), he upset the printers and book-dealers of New England. There was much burning of books on both sides. Curiously, when Farrago was found, lynched, at the end of the war, both sides claimed responsibility.
The war itself was little more than a border skirmish but it set the tone for the next century. When Noo Jersey sided with Mexico in the war of 1848 it found that it had inadvertently destroyed its main market for its woollen textiles. This plunged the country into an economic depression that wouldn’t be lifted until the 1920s. Prohibition in America meant a huge black market opportunity for Noo Jersey whishky (another Farragoism), which, after a brief golden age, again led to war in 1932.
The United States Senate claimed that travelling ‘dictionary salesmen’ who left Noo Jersey in covered wagons (sometimes called ‘wains’ in American English) were nothing more than bootleggers. The Farrago dictionaries were, of course, useless in the US, and were frequently discovered to have been hollowed out to hide bottles of whishky. It was a common occurrence, when answering your New England door, to be greeted by a smiling dictionary salesman and the words, “A wee dram o’ learning for the wain?” (see definition above). The Noo Jersey government said that it could hardly be held responsible for the actions of a few renegades. The US correctly pointed out that the whishky was being smuggled on a grand scale by Farrago’s, the state-owned haulage company. They were then informed, officially, that the United States were nothing but “a bunch o’ half-arsed Sassenachs.” This proved to be the final straw, and the result was that Noo Jersey was crushed in a month. To this day its people feel a great sense of betrayal over their abandonment by their Mexican allies, although of course by the thirties Mexico had enough problems of its own on its Canadian border. These days, as the twenty-eighth state of the USA, the preferred language in Noo Jersey is American English, although the occasional F-word still crops up. The survival of the clan (or klan) system is held to be responsible for much of this.
Word of the Week, International Geographic, Fall 2006
Jim Steel is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle. He writes reviews for Interzone and The Fix, has had short stories, articles and reviews published throughout the British Isles and America, and has also just finished a novel. He’s one of the few people in Glasgow to support Queens Park FC, and is also frequently found at gigs for everyone from punk groups to symphony orchestras, but no longer stage dives at any of them.