And Silence Fell....

for which I must apologise. I got a bit crippled when it came to writing anything in the public domain, because my Ph D supervisor, revisiting an old piece of work for some reason unbeknown to man and beast, accused me of putting a sentence in it which was nothing but academic show offery. He followed this up by stating that the only reason for the sentence to be there at all was so that I ''could draw my reader's attention to how clever I thought myself' and I wasn't being clever anyway because 'this is something everyone knows'.^

Some of you will be aware, either through personal knowledge or from reading this blog, that I deplore showing off in all its forms but particularly in an academic context. To be told that I was one of the despised tribe of show offs therefore came as something of a shock. In fact I'm not sure that I said anything for the rest of the forty minutes he so graciously spared me.

Of course he may have believed sincerely that that was what I was doing, and thought he was doing me a favour by nipping a nasty tendency in the bud. If so he could have found a more constructive way of raising the point, and also had the courtesy to listen to my somewhat strangled denials. But he didn't.

It took me a long time to get over this and while I was recovering I couldn't write anything - not a comment on Facebook, not a blog post, not an e-mail. Because once you start thinking about it everything you say could be taken, if someone were determined to do so, as showing off. Where lies the line between sharing exciting things with friends and showing off what a wonderful life you have? Suddenly everything I wrote was suspect, and I started to worry that everyone who read anything I wrote thought I was a nasty little show off.

And of course I couldn't go back to writing my thesis, because every word I chose,  every turn of phrase, every idea put forward, every unusual but pertinent comparison - what are they but showing off? I daresay the guy never gave what he was saying a second thought, but perhaps he should. Last time I looked supervisors were supposed to help and encourage, not turn you into a trembling wreck who daren't put pen to paper.

^ and excuse me for trying to get myself off the hook, but actually I suspect the vast majority of people don't know that classic Gaelic poetry occasionally  takes a circular form.