Culture

The way that language is shaped by the facts of biological sex is a rich subject. (The way that biological sex is framed, and sometimes refuses to be shaped, by language is perhaps one for another day.) Some languages have evolved forms which are distinctly those of male or female users. Japanese has speech patterns described as male or female, such as (male) the informal use of da instead of desu. There are scripts used exclusively among women, such as the syllabic Nüshu in Hunan, China. Many languages have gendered grammatical forms in ways that are not just metaphorical. Nouns such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are masculine and feminine in French, but ‘girl’ is neuter in German. Some have masculine and feminine forms of adjectives and other parts of speech.

In the wake of the death of her mother, divorce from her husband and the loss of custody of her son, a young writer and poet in Seoul turns her attentions to lessons in ancient Greek. She walks miles across the city to the classroom, dressed in a black jacket, black scarf and black shirt – a ‘sombre uniform, which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral’ – and devotes herself to the unfamiliar alphabet, verbs and nouns. This delight in words – ‘the wondrous promise of the phonemes’ – has sustained her since childhood, when she first scratched Hangul, the Korean alphabet, into the dirt. There is only one barrier to her love of language. Not for the first time, she has completely lost the power of speech.

‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them. Ruthie observes everything in high definition, from her parents’ neglect (‘I have no memories of being held’) to their naked bodies flopping on top of each other while they all share the same bed. In a disturbing scene, her mother, who seems to have been traumatised by her own upbringing, asks her elementary school daughter to spell the f-word.

Humans live rigidly by the ticking hand of the clock, but few notice the passing of time with such precision as a horologist. Horology is the science of measuring time, and Rebecca Struthers is the first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology. After the Black Death, a wave of memento mori art swept Europe in the form of macabre cadaver tombs In her debut book Hands of Time she offers a personal history of time and watchmaking, inviting the reader inside her remarkable world. At her workshop in the Birmingham jewellery quarter, she dissects mechanisms that are ‘often smaller than a grain of rice’. Timepieces she has handled range from 18th-century pocket watches to Omega and Rolex wrist watches.