Word of the Week
17th November 2008
Town
A musician has dedicated a love song to a town more used to receiving architectural booby prizes than accolades. 'Cumbernauld: A Love Song' has been penned by former resident Carolyn McGoldrick in response to the bad publicity the Lanarkshire town has received recently in the form of polls describing it has having Scotland's 'most dismal' town centre. The song is to be released as a single with the money raised going to a children's charity.
The word town was recorded long before Cumbernauld was just a glint in a planner's eye and is of Germanic origin. In Old English and Old Norse tun was simply an enclosure and it wasn't until well after the Norman Conquest that the modern meaning emerged. In the 17th century 'town-talk' was noted as a synonym for 'gossip', something perhaps the 'man about town' of the next century was keen to learn about before going 'on the town'. In America in the 19th century such a man would not have been seen dead in a 'ghost town' or a 'one-horse town' but would have been much keener to 'go to town' and 'paint the town red'. This latter phrase is of obscure origin although it has been attributed to the drunken antics of the 3rd Marquess of Waterford and his entourage who, it is alleged, painted some buildings red following a hunt.
A much more sober practice is that of 'town planning', an attempt to make urban development more rational. The squalor of Britain's cities after World War II inspired some town planners to create new urban centres from scratch, developments called 'new towns'. Cumbernauld was one such new town and initially won praise but its 'utopian' architecture has not worn well, particularly that of its monolithic shopping centre which some critics wish to see demolished. Perhaps some of Cumbernauld's critics have 'gone to town' just a little too much, though, and Miss McGoldrick's song could be considered a more than justified riposte.
Mo Just, Chambers Dictionaries
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