I never heard of Lingophobia until I was reading an article by Simon Schama called The Language of Food. I could relate to what he was saying immediately. Here’s a short excerpt from Schama’s book ‘Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother’ – but you can read the full article published in The Financial Times in 2010 HERE
“There’s not much I won’t or can’t eat. I’ve eaten crocodile in Holland; barbied kangaroo at Uluru and mountain oysters in Wyoming. But tongue has always tested my gag reflex. Lambs’ tongues are a particular problem because, since they are pretty much the same size as our own, one stands a fair chance of biting the former rather than the latter. Given that tongues are dense with cell receptors (50 to 100 for each so-called bud), the experience can be acutely painful and bloody. But there’s another telling aspect to my lingophobia, which is to do with the separate, but connected, functions of the tongue that precludes the possibility of consumption.
Biting one’s tongue is an act expressing pre-emptive remorse in the mouth. It’s the threat of damaging or mutilating that multi-tasking organ, the instrument of utterance and consumption, that is at the root (not to pun) of my tongue anxiety, I suppose. Do any of us really want to eat our own words?”
Extracted from ‘Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother’ (Bodley Head, £20), published on August 5. Simon Schama is a contributing editor to the FT
Photo: Necklace of Tongues by Alice Maher ©
photograph 43 x 61 cms edition of 7 (2001)
Buy a pice of art by Alice Maher HERE