THE CONCEPTION AND EXECUTION OF THE COLLARD
1. My name is Professor Barry Worthington.
2. My office is accessible only by a labyrinth of corridors and hallways at the University where I work, a gothic, stone structure with courtyards and spiral staircases which, if viewed from above, would resemble the inner workings of the human mind. My room has no windows, and no decoration except for a large desk, a book shelf, a radiator, a chair, a coat-stand. The green carpet is held in place by masking tape, while the walls, which long ago were painted cream, have now been reduced to a stale grey.
A colleague and I have, for some months now, argued over the validity of a certain punctuation mark known as the collard. Its use and development began two years ago in the metafiction department downstairs when a simple typing error resulted in a random mark which, when viewed on the page, resembled nothing more than an unvoiced break in the flow of the letters on the page. The collard then, in the manner of all great fashions, was adopted by the most cunning of the students in their essays, and then by one or two trendier professors, until its proliferation was declared an epidemic in the end of year report. We have now reached the point where the collard appears in everything, from the deepest, most academic report into symbolism in the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to the sign in the corridor outside which reads Fire E°xit.
My eminent colleague, Professor Zazzo Thim, celebrates the collard as proof that the English language is evolving before our eyes, and that the necessary acrobatics needed to type this meaningless symbol are suffered willingly by writers and students alike just to see it grace the page. Thim is excited by the collard, and has even published a short paper on how the collard can be represented in different type fonts for maximum effect. Yet I do not share his enthusiasm. The collard has spread throughout our department like a virus, infecting even the most mundane hand-written note, to such an effect that the whole of the east wing has been quarantined until a solution is found to the problem at hand. Yet Thim is hostile towards me, a representative of the pre-collard world who has, so far, managed not to infect my writings with that bizarre, inconsequential symbol.
‘A solution must be found’, I tell him.
He is nonplussed, he waves his arms like the sails of a windmill and he says: Let the collard live! Writing has never felt so vibrant as when it is affected by this mark!’ Excitedly, he pounds his fist upon the dining hall table.
‘Our output will be scorned by the world’, I whisper.
‘Nonsense! We will be adored! The collard will escape the stone boundaries of this institution and take over the world! Our future will be assured!’
So enthusiastic is Zazzo that he twirls his cane around in a circle which disturbs the cobwebs hanging above our heads.
‘The collard’, I whisper, Will be our ruin. The whole department will be ruined. The collard will die within a couple of years and reduce everything we have written to that of an unfashionable age’.
‘It will give our work style and substance! No other work will be confused with ours! The collard will be our call sign, we shall be the envy of the world!’ I have no choice but to challenge him to a duel.
3. The department is a-buzz with our feud and groups of students congregate around our offices to offer their support and opinion on the merits and the dis-merits of the collard and our positions thereon. Yet despite the controversy, the proliferation of the collard continues. It seems th*at there is nothing I can do to stop its advance throughout the building, while the conditions of the quarantine demand that the students sleep in the hallways, or crowded in my office around the radiator. The whole university is a breeding ground of bad punctuation, a crazy fad with Zazzo Thim as the high priest.
And oh, how he loves his position among them! Thrice weekly he holds seminars in his office in which the collard is deba*ted, dissected, put back together again, even copyrighted in case another, unscrupulous university might come along and steal his precious gem. Like a crazed scientist, he spends hours at his desk, inserting collards into the most famous texts: the Bible, the Canterbut°ry Tales, the Koran, until, with a childish glee at seeing the even lines and narratives of these great works spoiled forever by that hateful symbol, he sits back in his desk with a big smile on his face.
How I look forward to our duel! Whatever the outcome, I know I will be acting for the best interests of the English language, and for literature in general!
4. There has been a development. Last night, a group of students managed to evade security, and this afternoon there was the first report of a collard inserted deep in the thesis of a biology student from the west wing. Pandemonium ensued; the whole building has been buzzing with a slow panic, the hushed whispers of those who aim to see the collard take on the world, the frightened scampering of those who, for fear of their grammar, refuse to stay still for too long. And all the time I can hear Zazzo Thim in the room next to mine, laughing, interlacing his fingers and cracking his arthritic knuckles, drumming his fingertips on the desk in front of him as the collard takes another victim.
Zazzo Thim must perish.
5. There have been moments in my I°ife when I would have welcomed any advance in the language which we use, for proof that it would adapt to certain conditions under which we live, yet the last few years have been particular repellent in that grammar and spelling have suffered at the hands of mobile telephone text devices and the common E-mail address. Enraged by the compacted, lower-case stylings of my first E-mail address, in which I was unable to print my name in the manner in which I have long used it myself, I decided would embark upon a programme of protection, in order that the language we use should never be defeated by modern technology or, even worse, vulgar Americanisms. Such thoughts come to me now, as I sharpen my pencil and plot the best method by which I shall slay the devious Zazzo Thim. can hear him now, giving a lecture on the poetry and exoticism now evident in our writings since the collard was adopted. How excited he is that a Japanese student, in an E-mail home to her family, managed to secrete two collards into her dense Japanese script and, thereby, spread its beauty to the far east. I groan as I hear this news, to think of that beautiful, artistic language sullied forever. Zazzo Thim must perish!
6. It is time now.
We are gathered in the quadrangle, surrounded by the grey walls of this once-esteemed centre of learning. Students surround us, youngsters wearing T-shirts, many of which are decorated with that hateful device. The manner by which our duel will take has been decided by a council of impartial observers, students with no strong leanings one way or the other, who may or may not have dabbled with the collard. Professor Zazzo Thim grins as he meets his entourage. The old man, I note, has become more sprightly of late, a spring in his step as he +° traverses the endless corridors of this institution. How I shall ache to put him out of his misery, yet it is a duty, a solemn duty which I must perform.
The rules of our duel are simple: we shall both, on the count of three, sit down on opposite sides of a desk and write a haiku which explains, in simple language and observing all the rules of that genre, whatever position we take on the collard. I know I have the advantage; Zazzo is a man of blasé taste and artless fortune, a man for whom poetry is nothing but a blowing of the nose before the pen commits to proper literature. Yet I am a romantic, a strong believer in the power of words.
We stare at each other across the table. He glowers with a fool’s intent. The leather patches on his elbows glisten in the sun where he has worn them leaning on desks, against the walls of his classroom. His white hair is illuminated by the sun, and, with a desperate claw, he pats it down as if conscious of my gaze. At last the count of three is heard
He writes first, bends down, I hear his pen scratching and the table move as, with energy, he marks the page. I notice the acrobatics of his hand as he adds a collard or two to his lines, the bony flesh, the thumb and forefinger shaped around the shaft of his pencil. At last he finishes, looks up, hands the paper to a nearby student, who coughs once, holds up the paper for all to see:
‘There once was a ma®n from Dumfries
Who one day said to his niece
‘It°f you remt°ain a dullard And fail to use a collard,
It will have to be °a matter for the police.
The quadrangle is alive with the sound of laughter. Oh, sweet victory! That the old fool should have, in his moment of prime, mistaken a haiku for a limerick! Oh, the beauteous euphoria! Yet I must perform my duty, I must actually set to writing my haiku for the contest to remain valid. A calm comes over the crowd. I start to write the first line:
evening glories of
My senses heightened, I felt a rush within me from the power of literature. The second line comes, and I write on the page:
unquestionable faith in
only for the moment to become dizzy, the victory, scented by my fair hand as it grips tighter the pen, that magic tingle which comes from knowing one has been proven. Yet the tingle persists. look up, worried that things may be going astray. On the air, from the grey head of Lazzo Thim, and sparkling in the afternoon sun, curling on the slanted beam shot through the surrounding trees, a dust, a dandruff, a remnant of chalk from the old man’s jacket as a sneeze builds up in my nose and I strive to complete the last line:
divine poetry
only for the sneeze to escape me on the completion of the last letter, causing the pencil to slide, crazily, across the page
divine poetry__________________________________
I am given a round of applause, of course.
7. The Worthington becomes the latest craze. It appears everywhere, from official documents to the dining hall menu. Delighted by this latest turn of events, the paper industry, sensing the amount of paper that might be consumed by the extraordinary length of the Worthington, celebrates our achievement with a healthy grant, while the anti-collard quarantine is lifted.
Professor Zazzo Thim comes to my room. Sheepish, he looks down at the carpet. ‘I am’, he says, ‘A humble man in such matters. But the conception of the Worthington, and its appearance at the duel, was a masterstroke’.
‘Unintended, I can assure you’, I reply
‘Yet the Worthington has put this college on the world map. It has spread around the world, into every place where English is written. And you know, children world-wide have even developed a vocal Worthington? It sounds, I am told, very much like a sneeze, and it peppers conversations everywhere. If you turn on MTV, you’ll hear it all the time’.
‘I’m flattered’, I whisper.
‘Though of course’, the Professor continues, ‘I can’t say that I totally agree..:
We stare at each other for a while. Eventually he leaves the room, and 1 hear him next door in his office, cracking his knuckles once again. He still has an affection for the collard, I believe, though he sees the Worthington as its natural progression. He says he even foresees a time when the whole page will be taken up by Worthingtons, the true meaning of the page lost forever, concealed, heralding a new age in communication only by grunts and hand signals. He says he can hardly wait __________________________________
Robert Garnham 