By Tom Pow

CHAMBERS’ Scots Thesaurus, in its section on “Chit-chat”, tells us that “to blether” means “to talk foolishly, loquaciously or idly”; and that “a blether” is someone who does just that. The thesaurus also provides any number of alternatives: bluiter, buff, clytach, gibble-gabble, haiver, jibber, slaver, trattle, witter, yaag, yaff, yammer and yap.

“Blether” has escaped its boundaries. Yes, it can still carry a sense of emptiness, carelessness or tedium, but it also carries warmth and intimacy. Blethering is flexible: you can do it at the berries, in a supermarket, sharing a meal, on a journey with a friend or while walking your dog – even while your mother is about to pray.

Blethering while you’re doing something else is one of the most common features of the blether, something it shares with gossip. Linguists now propose that gossip – let’s call it blethering in this instance – played a significant part in the development of language itself. Language seems to have been the verbal equivalent of our primate ancestors’ mutual flea-picking. It is the human way of making and strengthening social connections. The other day, for example, at the newsagent’s, the person before me ushered me forward with the words, “I’m just waiting here for a blether”.The blether has no need of a focus or a shape.

Blethers can be intrusive (the unwanted questions) and they can be distressing (the unwanted voices), but more than anything, often the intimacy of a blether can cradle a deeper conversation – the sharing of a confidence or a hesitant revelation – until the moment feels right to share it. It will surface, albeit after a deep breath, through commonplace shared exchanges.

Conversation is something that nurtures communication, empathy and engagement; it is central to the arts, to education, to the worlds of mental health, old age and to the “loneliness agenda”; and clearly it needs to set up home in the shoutfest of politics. It is for this reason, Book Week Scotland, which runs until Sunday, this year centres on the theme of conversation.

“In my opinion, the most profitable and most natural exercise of our mind is conversation,” wrote the great French essayist Montaigne. It seems remarkable that this richness is available to us all, in some form, from the moment a mother or a father speaks to a foetus until our final breath. We need, more than ever, given the challenges we face, to pay it attention. That is why the aims of A Year of Conversation 2019 are to celebrate conversation, to initiate conversation and to explore conversation. All of these also happen during the activities of Book Week Scotland; a demonstration that, though some may wish to shrink the world, we remain a conversational nation. Or a Convers[n]ation.

You may see “conversation” as a Sunday word for “blether”. They are undoubtedly on the same spectrum, although conversation, to me, suggests a deeper engagement – an openness to change. But that is, in no way, to underestimate the power of the blether. I know that I am not alone in having once received letters from my mother, where she had written, eventually, that she was just “wittering on”. Yet that “wittering” or “blethering” about the hum of life was the most precious conversation to me. For what often underpins conversation is the blether, the warm touch, the familiar.

Tom Pow is Creative Director, A Year of Conversation

Book Week Scotland: November 18-24 2019, free events across Scotland. Join the conversation at: bookweekscotland.com