Your country needs you…to knit!
Bloggers beware: your intended audience is not always the same as your actual audience, at least according to an article on writing styles that I read recently. Writers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, for instance, were easily understood in their own times because they were actively writing for a contemporary audience. Readers today, however, often have difficulty with them.
I can’t even begin to imagine what Shakespeare’s audience would make of some of the stuff in the blogosphere.
As an example of the above point, here’s what happened to me this morning at breakfast. Halfway through my coffee — and while still waiting for my nutty cereal to absorb enough milk so as to be soft enough to chew without breaking too many teeth — I picked up a copy of the Faber Book of Reportage (dog-eared paperback, ed. John Carey, 1987), which fell open at page 398. There, in a brief introduction to George W. Steevens’ account of the attack on the Atbara, it notes that “Kitchener had been appointed Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the army in Egypt in 1892″.
The only time Shana and I had seen the word ‘Sirdar’ before was as a brand name on balls of wool. And even though we knew Kitchener was the face on the ‘Your Country Needs You‘ World War 1 recruiting posters, we had never before heard his name associated with the title of ‘Sirdar’.
The history of Sirdar wool website has the full story:
In 1880 the original spinning company was established in Ossett by the Harrap brothers, Tom and Henry, originally using only wool fibres.
By 1934 the company was being run by Tom’s son Fred and he decided that the future of the business should be dedicated to spinning hand knitting yarns and selling them directly to independent retailers. Consequently he needed a strong brand name and chose Sirdar, meaning leader, after Lord Kitchener’s appointment as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army.
Although 1066 — and the dates of other key World War 2 battles — have always been taught in schools, I don’t remember being taught anything about Kitchener during my own schooldays in the 1970s. But presumably the reason for Sirdar wool’s name would have been easily understood in the 1930s. Sirdar wool, back then, could have had no way of knowing that a bigger war was still to come and that the importance of some of the names that meant something to Fred Harrap would fade into relative insignificance. Who knows? If Sirdar had been rebranding their company fifteen years later, maybe today they would be known as Spitfire wool.