Episode 05: Words in Design

Using words is a form of design. Writing and reading have a huge role to play in making life better.

Transcript

Kevin A: 0:12

Hello and welcome to another episode of Make Life Better by Design. I'm your host, Kevin Drayton. Long time, sorry. I'll say that again. Uh, long term architect, uh, design feigned, uh, and generally interested. In explaining or hoping to infuse people about how design can make your life, my life, all of our lives better today. Uh, something a little bit different. It's really to talk about words and the way into this is. Really because of questions I get from time to time about the website name, which is not Make Life Better by Design, but is in fact www.best revenge.co.uk. And my email address is kevin@bestrevenge.co.uk. So the question people quite reasonably ask is, what the heck has best revenge got to do with design and making life better? Right. Well, I'd like to explain, I've said before, I think all sorts of things have got the scope and ability to make life better. And a particularly big area for me is words, reading, writing good literature can make a huge difference to our lives. I. The ways in which words can be combined is pretty much infinite, and therefore the subtleties and variations between different writers can give as much pleasure as listening to music. There's a difference between prose poetry. Theater scripts and say song lyrics, but I'm not too bothered about the academic definitions. It's all about using words in particular forms and combinations to communicate something to other people, and they can do this across vast tracks of time. That's why we still read Shora. We still mount and watch Shakespeare Productions, and I reread authors from France Kafka to Mick Herron. See for me, Joni Mitchell is as great a poet as TS Elliot, albeit in a very different way. Words themselves fascinate me and the infinite variety of how they can be combined to produce stories, descriptions, and evocations has always and continues to affect my quality of life. So let's return to the matter of how best revenge relates to making life better. Well, I. When you know that the tag best revenge comes from the poet and clergyman George Herbert, and I'll give you his dates'cause everybody's always interested in that. 1593 to 1633, long time ago, quite short lived, but he had a big effect. And the full quotation is living well. Is the best revenge. Now, a lot of people knowing George Herbert to be a poet, uh, look up living well is the best revenge, and they say, no, it wasn't. George Herbert doesn't appear in any of these poems that I can find, and that's perfectly true. It's the clergyman side of his life that, uh, involves the quotation. He was a clergyman known for the power of his sermons. And somebody dunno, who unfortunately used to collect little phrases and sayings, uh, from his sermons, they were so impressed with them and collected them and published them. And living well is the best. Revenge actually comes from one of those compilations there. That was fascinating, wasn't it? Right. Let's get back to it then. So for me, what that saying suggests is that whatever life throws at you. And it can be all sorts of things and different hardships for different people, different things that you have to come to grips with. The best re response, I'm sorry, that you can make, is to live as best you know how in every respect. Everything matters, and ultimately everything connects. It's what makes up our lives. Of course, the nice thing about the phrase is it's not rigidly prescriptive, so you can adapt it to your own particular way of seeing things, and indeed, the way in which you live. Okay. Writing and literature play. A big part in my life as I see it to write, is to design and writing and reading are very inexpensive and easily accessible ways where design can make life better. Now that still leaves the question of why best revenge came to play such a big part in my life. And for that, I will tell you a story. For many years, um, I lived in a succession, albeit a short succession of houses. Uh, but always had the yen, as a lot of architects do, to design and build a house for myself. But by that stage, it was a, a house for ourselves, myself and my wife. And eventually the opportunity came along. Now there was a, a pause of perhaps three years whilst all sorts of adventures ensued. We, we found a plot. Um, I adapted the design thinking I'd been having about the house to the plot. I mean, you cannot design a building without it being site specific. But then we had all sorts of other problems, which I'll go into perhaps on another occasion. But finally, the house is built and we're getting ourselves ready to move in. So I contact the local building control department in our local authority, because that's the department that gives numbers for, for new houses. I. Puts numbers to developments and they say, came back and said, do you know the numbering on that street, that road that you've built on is all over the place And really, it's just impossible to give you a number. Just give it a name and that'll, that'll do. Now living well is the best revenge, uh, had been spinning around in my head for decades and it was perhaps a bit naive of me, uh, to think that calling a new house. In a small former mill village in West Yorkshire, uh, built by Comers Inn, would you believe it, uh, in a form that it wasn't exactly dead, traditional, local vernacular? I didn't really realize that giving it a name like Best Revenge. Uh, might lead to some non-positive, uh, responses and connotations, but it did. However we get, we get, we get round, we get round it. We, um, we stuck with it. People got used to it. It was memorable after all is said and done. And, uh, I think eventually it's become accepted. But you've gotta be careful about the context, uh, in which you, you use words. And, uh, now and again because they are open to interpretation, deliberate ambiguity can actually be a positive thing. Writers who are capable of achieving both deliberate ambiguity. And crystalline clarity certainly exist and, uh, that sort of ability absolutely fascinates me. Now, some writers I find try too hard and their use of English actually makes reading what they have to say, like, uh, you know, trying to run across a plowed field. I am really restricting myself to English when I speak here. Um, and there are two principle reasons why I'm doing that. It's the language I know best and I've had a lot to do with it over the years. But secondly, and this is I think quite interesting, I've heard it said that if you wish to express something, you can do it in English using fewer words than in pretty much any other modern language. And that's because we can achieve with the vocabulary that we have with our means of expression in English, greater levels of precision and concision than with other languages. It may, it may not be true. I've seen a few examples written out, uh, but I don't know the other languages well enough to know if they're cheating or. If it's the real deal. So anyway, that's the background to my appropriation of the term best revenge language as design tool improver of lives. I hope very soon that I shall be introducing some guests on make life better by design. But in the meantime, thanks very much for listening and I hope I shall meet you again in future episodes. Till then, have a great week and goodbye.