Vol. 22 No. 18 · 21 September 2000
pages 30-31 | 3329 words
Willesden Fast-Forward
Daniel Soar
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 462 pp, £12.99, January 2000, ISBN 0 241 13997 X
A woman at the counter of the newsagent I was in was charged £25. I looked over to see what she could have been buying. Twenty Benson and Hedges, a packet of crisps – and a clutch of lottery tickets. Not cheap. I picture her going into the same shop Saturday after Saturday, buying more and more tickets each time. At first it was just one: then it was two, four the week after, six the next – until it was twenty, and her chances of winning were multiplied twenty times. The trick with gambling is this: each time you lose, you raise the stake you put in so that when you win you cover all your losses. There’s a catch: to be sure of winning you need to have a limitless supply of money. And you need to have enough time. If you buy twenty lottery tickets a week from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 19 · 5 October 2000
From Jamie Wetherall
Zadie Smith is certainly guilty of pressing the fast forward button, as Daniel Soar says (LRB, 21 September), and anachronism is the result. At one point early on in White Teeth, she has the handsome waiter Shiva say to Samad Iqbal, 'You are such a sad little man' – 'sad' here used in its modern sense of being a real loser. 'Sad' surely wasn't used in this way in the 1970s, when the relevant part of the novel takes place, though it's about the most withering thing you can say to someone these days. The definitions of 'sad' listed in my dictionary include 'sorrowful' and 'mournful' (these you would expect), and the far more complimentary 'steadfast', 'dignified', 'strong', even 'profoundly learned'. 'Deplorable' and 'unfortunate' are mentioned, but nothing worse than that. Perhaps 'sad' is now such a popular put-down because of the pressure under the great McDisney dispensation to be cheery and carefree – 'good value', as they say. I prefer the old-fashioned use, but then I'm just an old saddie.
Jamie Wetherall
Leeds
Vol. 22 No. 20 · 19 October 2000
From Adrian Bowyer
Jamie Wetherall wonders if 'sad' has become a putdown because of the have-a-good-dayness of McDisney (Letters, 5 October). My recollection of what happened is this: in the 1980s some sad reactionary not a million miles from Private Eye decided to counter the widening use of 'gay' for 'homosexual' by calling homosexuals 'sad'. This was picked up in teenage slang, the great and glorious engine of linguistic innovation. The fact that the word was now an insult was registered by teens who were not especially homophobic, and who thus collectively decided that it should become synonymous with 'pathetic'. The latest example of this process is the replacement of 'cool' (for 'good') by 'rude', which, incidentally, echoes prenominal usage such as 'in rude health'.
Adrian Bowyer
University of Bath
Vol. 22 No. 21 · 2 November 2000
From John Black
'Sad' meaning 'loser' is much older than Jamie Wetherall thinks (Letters, 5 October). If he had looked in Merriam Webster he would have found that 'sad sack: an inept person' was recorded in 1943. The original Sad Sack was the hopelessly inadequate comic strip character who made his debut in a May 1942 issue of the US Army's magazine, Yank. Publication in civilian comic books began in 1949 and the phrase has been part of the (American) language ever since. Whether or not the editors of Private Eye in the 1980s knew this (Letters, 19 October), Zadie Smith's character Shiva clearly did.
John Black
Leominster
Vol. 22 No. 23 · 30 November 2000
From David Koblick
Any American veteran of World War Two could have told John Black (Letters, 2 November) that 'sad sack' is a curtailment of 'sad sack of shit' – describing an inadequate enlistee or the victim of an unfortunate incident.
David Koblick
Steyr, Austria
