Will Self

Millions of people in this country get up every morning and put something with a funny name in their mouths – in 2009 (the last year figures were available), some 39.1 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in the UK; and while I believe this indicates a mass hysteria (among doctors and pharmacists as much as their patients and customers), I’m minded to investigate the queered semantics of proprietary drugs.

Seroxat is the name paroxetine – a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (or SSRI), and the most popular antidepressant pushed globally – is marketed under in the UK but in the US it’s called Paxil and in Australia either Aropax or Lumin. I love to imagine the blue-sky sessions at which drug marketers dream up these monikers. I picture them sitting around featureless lozenges of beige MDF flinging these mangled bits of verbiage back and forth: “Grandax!” one snaps, “No, Pildernox . . .” a second pitches in. I wonder what rationale decides them on one repellent  bit of gobbledegook over another – but not for long because it’s all rather obvious.

Take “Seroxat”; well, the prefix “Ser” it shares with such suitable mental ascriptions as “serene”, “serious” and “servile”; while the stem “ox” is de rigueur for all sorts of drug names (along with “ix”, “ax”, “ex” and even “ux”). The prolific use of Xs in drug names is probably representative of no fewer than three buried intentions on the part of the marketers. One is to evoke “Rx” – the abbreviation of the Latin “recipe” (“take”) used in the US for a prescription – in the mind of the miserable. The second is to introduce a note of futurism – such syllables rarely occurring in English, they tend to imply a shiny, happy realm of neologism. And the third is to subtly imply the near-alliterative and highly desirable state – to be relaxed.

As for the suffix “at” (and please note, I know full well that “Ser” and “at” aren’t really these parts of speech, but I ask you: what the hell else can you call them?), this seems to me to indicate a return to the solid virtues of the Anglo-Saxon, being cognate with such words as “fat”, “pat” and “mat”, unexceptionable terms that anchor this creepy brain-chemistry-bender to the homely and quotidian. I could be wrong about all this and the wonks at GlaxoSmithKline (itself a name to conjure with), have no rationale for naming Seroxat at all but came up with it after making free with their products and lying in a blissed-out heap on the expansive carpet tiling of their conference room.

But somehow I doubt this – there’s Paxil to contend with after all, which says to me: “Take peace and you won’t be ill”. When we get to “Lumin”, it’s crystal-meth-clear that someone gave one of the more lowly marketers her head that day and she decided to call a dull pill a luminous spade.

This lunacy surrounding the naming of proprietary drugs is nothing new – since the dawn of quackery (sorry, “medicine”), the snake-oilers have been coming up with appellations they believe we’ll find tasty – and as if to pay obeisance to Big Pharma’s shareholders, we’ve swallowed them. Back in the day there was at least a certain honesty about Bayer’s naming of diacetylmorphine as “Heroin”, although its marketing of the drug as a cure for morphine addiction ranks as one of the world’s most infamous blunders. By the time the swinging sixties rolled around the mutually reinforcing reliance on mood-altering drugs between the legal and illegal sectors of society resulted in a semantic shift towards such cod-Latinisms as “Valium” and “Librium”, the aim of which was to make mass sedation appear positively classical.

In my time I’ve been prescribed a fair number of these drugs and I can say with some bitterness that the pills never worked for me. Ascendis – it keeps you up; Concordin – irenic once more; Lustral – shining through the long dark night of the soul; and Dutonin – sounds like a car tyre, makes you feel trodden down. Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I’m free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do? I suspect that if Seroxat were renamed “chemically equable but non-orgasmic” – or Chemeqnonorg – then instead of 39.1 million prescriptions for it being filled, people might be more prepared to put up with their aptly-named lows and highs.

The joint is called “Mariners” – which is fair enough: somewhere has to be – but there’s nothing oppressively nautical about the place. I ask my 14-year-old bullock of a son (he grazes all the time, you can watch him grow, castration may be on the cards), how he would describe the curtains and he says: “Greenish, pinkish, greyish mush”. The boy’s a natural – he could also have hymned the nauseating carpet, a chequerboard of red and yellow tweedy striations, or descanted on the low and beige-steely ceiling. We plonk ourselves down at a Melamine-topped chair-and-table combo – also in beige steel.

The menu offers Chef’s Curry of the Day, Scotch Beef and Mull Ale Pie, which comes with that delusory thing “a choice of potatoes”; delusory, because, giving one potato preferment over another is no kind of a choice at all, when what you want is to get away from the whole compulsory potato scene. I’m urging my son to consider the Traditional Scottish Breakfast when the translucent concertina doors to the serving area are ratcheted open and the three or four other customers dotted about rise up as one and head for the anti-bacterial hand-lotion dispenser, only to swerve around it and fetch up in front of the heated cabinet full of black-pudding discs, bacon rashers, Lorne sausage, link sausages, potato scones, hash browns, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes.

Standing up, observing the wall-mounted placard that displays the timeless pictogram for muster stations (four arrows, each sustaining a running man in silhouette, all pointing towards a nuclear family group); clocking the framed photograph of Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra who wielded the shampoo bottle against the stern back in 1987; and seeing from this position the mirror-calm waters slipping past the portholes, I can no longer evade the reality: I’m on a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry once more and yet again I’m about to eat some black pudding simply because it’s there.

What is it about the ferry experience that makes us go belly-up to fried food? We cannot in this exhaust-stinking roll-on, roll-off age make allowance for it because of the sea air – nor can we blame the imminent threat of a watery extinction. No, the compulsion we have to chip-and-bean our way from Dover to Calais, from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, and in my case from Craignure on the Isle of Mull to Oban on the Scots mainland (a voyage lasting a scant 45 minutes), is a function of the most primitive, lab-rat levels of cognitive functioning: the foghorn sounds, we salivate and so we pick up the tray and slide it along the aluminium bars of our floating cage.

On more occasions than I care to recall, I’ve found myself on rough crossings (back in the day, on the old P&O St Ola out of Scrabster and bound for Orkney), battling with nausea and considering whether it’ll be worth the effort of cramming the full Scottish into me, only in all likelihood to see it again, minutes later, pluming down into the maddened waters of the Pentland Firth. I used to treasure the Orkney crossing, not only for the views of the red sandstone cliffs of Hoy – and looking very much as one imagines Avalon would, were it to exist – but also for the raised rims around the saloon tables, and the graticules of rubber mesh that sat upon them, which taken together adverted the fact that you were going to be at a tipping point for some time to come.

On the MV Isle of Mull there’s none of this drama: a man with a skid-mark goatee divvies up a bacon-and-egg roll to bullock-boy, while I have the blood sausage, some mushrooms, a half tomato and a round of toast. The waters slide on past the portholes, spun-sugar-white cloud flows over the hills, sunlight lances sharp and low: we’re on the 6.45am sailing and have been privileged by one of those dawns that turns the Highlands from driech to divine; on such a morning even the blackest of puddings can be toyed with, as BB inhales his roll in a yolky spume.

Princess Alexandra. Pretty insignificant HRH really – but then this is a pretty wee ship. There must be more minor royals and smaller ships out there – on a boating lake near Stirling the last Stuart Pretender is probably launching a pedalo with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine as I anoint my toast with a pat of butter and then a second. Because if there’s one thing still more inevitable than the ferry breakfast, it’s that one portion of anything is never enough for man, woman, or bullock.

I am distressed to see that the hateful expression “builder’s tea” doesn’t have an entry in Jonathon Green’s monumental, three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang. “Builder’s bum” does, with its allied coinage – previously unknown to me – “Dagenham smile”; and, Green’s being a dictionary on historical principles, the first recorded entry in print, from 1994, is quoted in full: “His monstrous pink buttocks were being forced upwards and were protruding above his waistline like tumescent pillows (‘the Dagenham smile’, this phenomenon is called on London building sites).” This is from Joseph O’Connor’s The Secret World of the Irish Male and, if you think about it, while both neologisms must derive from a time when low-cut jeans coincided with a boom in the construction industry, “Dagenham smile” is more likely a self-attribution – said of builders by builders – while “builder’s bum” has the hallmarks of a slur.

Not least because “bum” is neither an especially cockney nor an Irish working-class ascription, both moieties being more inclined to “arse”. No, “builder’s bum”, like “builder’s tea”, is one of those modifiers of social class that can be smuggled into English via the capacious portmanteau of slang. Back in the day, from upper-middle on up, the term “chippy” was deployed with the same intent. Once again Green’s nails it: “in middle-class use and often as a means of dismissing genuine complaints, the implication is that such ‘chippiness’ has no real justification other than class-based resentment”.

Naturally, the covert assumption that to be “chippy” is on a par with living off the income obtained from the surplus value of others’ labour remains uncontested, and the moral equivalence of so-called “inverted snobbery” with snobbery itself becomes established. To accuse middle-class people who offer their guests (though probably not those employed in refurbishing their properties) “builder’s tea” of snobbery would almost certainly call forth the rejoinder: “Oh, but I was being ironic.”

If they’re smart, that is. Stupid bourgeois who define certain commonplace Indian tea blends as befitting artisans (rather than as “artisanal”) tend to fluff at this point and say things like: “Oh, I don’t know what you mean – I drink builder’s tea,” as if this in some way constituted a levelling of the social pyramid. Irony does pertain to slang terms inasmuch as some examples have their foundation in the semantic shift occasioned between defined and intended meaning; irony can also have a dramatic or situational aspect – the disjunction between what the parties involved know – and this can be information of any kind, including linguistic.

Irony thrives on class distinctions for this very reason: by creating scenes in which diverse social groupings are thrown together, there are endless opportunities for some people to be “in the know”, while others are ignorant or disempowered. It is often said of the English – by themselves! – that their great capacity for deploying ironic tropes is what makes them such sophisticated folk. But might it behove the English (the rest of the archipelago is a case apart) to concede that irony is itself a measure of the steepness of the hierarchical acclivity?

The madness of the crowd thus consists in the assertion that “builder’s tea” is a value-neutral term, when it owes its existence to systemic inequalities that have increased over the past quarter-century. The great success of the British upper classes (and this does apply to the Scots, Welsh and Irish, as they have all long since taken their accent and slang from London) is in simultaneously mutating to accommodate the social mores of North American egalitarianism and teaching the newly rich to speak their own immemorial, subtly arrogant argot.

If you look at it this way, the sign that you have truly arrived is not that you can employ a chippie, but that you can damn him for being chippy; not that you can get in the builders, but that you can give your pals a choice between builder’s and Assam. In the fullness of time, the arriviste will find herself no longer cosseted by this new social position – and its linguistic perks – but trapped by them. Fretting in the claustrophobic ambience of dull dinner parties, she will look for a way out . . . a divertissement . . . As she takes the tray of builder’s to the builders, her eye will alight on a cheery Dagenham smile giving her the come-on …