I Despair...

I've just come across this newspaper article in The Herald newspaper which was published a few days ago stating that a Scot had won a national poetry contest. Now, surely it would only have been newsworthy if the winner of this national poetry contest hadn’t been Scottish, given that it was, after all, being reported in a Scottish newspaper? Of course, upon reading, it soon became apparent that the “national poetry contest” in question actually referred to a UK-wide poetry contest. Yet it really brought home just how far Scotland is from seeing itself as a real nation.

Now The Herald has, since 2003, been an English-owned newspaper (owned by Newsquest, from Weybridge, England), yet I really do not think this had any bearing on the article. It is the Scots themselves, through careless use of semantics, who have talked themselves out of nationhood. I recently watched a Kevin Bridges DVD and grimaced every time he talked about “down south” and his ambiguous use of the term “country”. On Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, Bridges even joked about the difficulties he faced with having a “regional accent on National TV”. Given that the “regional” accent he was referring to meant Scottish and by “national” TV, he meant British television, it became very hard to watch. Another comedian from Canada, called Craig Campbell, appeared on the same show. He talked about having Scottish ancestry (the show was being filmed in Glasgow), yet thereafter referred to everything Scottish as being British and talked almost exclusively about the differences between Canada and the UK (rather than acknowledging the fact that he was actually  in Scotland). I imagine it would be somewhat annoying to Canadians if someone from this side of the Atlantic, speaking to a Canadian audience, was too lazy to differentiate between Canada and the US and simply referred to North America.

Of course, I’ve blogged before about the issue of semantics in Scottish life (http://thisscotland.blogspot.com/2009/07/semantics-of-being-british.html), yet it seems clear that unless people start to become acutely aware of just how important the use of language plays in undermining Scotland’s sense of national identity, then we might as well give up on the whole notion of actually being Scottish in the first place. After all, I’m not interested in a Scotland whose only raison d'être is to participate in the Six Nations Rugby Championship. Especially given the fact that I don’t even watch rugby...