Last week I touched on the subject of talking animals – specifically a bilingual parrot, who had gone away to learn Spanish. It was never intended to become a running theme but then inspiration fell into my lap with a splash in the shape of Wikie the talking whale from Antibes in France.
Talking whales? Everyone knows that whales communicate – either that or they get amusement from doing impressions of Geiger counters – but what set Wikie apart was that she was apparently speaking English. In France!
On further investigation, it turned out that Wikie’s English was no better than your average French impressionist’s after a particularly heavy night on the absinthe. So it wasn’t really talking at all. Neither was it a whale. There are 40 different species of whale and the killer whale is not one of them. It’s a dolphin. But then ‘Wikie the not talking not whale’ isn’t a headline that’s going to sell.
If a proper whale should ever come forward with something to say, though, we really owe it to them to pay attention. Firstly, they’re supposed to be very intelligent and, therefore, they ought to have some interesting insights to share. Having said that, as Pete and Dud pointed out, “They’ve produced nothing in the way of literature.” Secondly, having spent thousands of years slaughtering them in their millions for oil, food and ladies’ undergarments, we probably owe them an apology.
It was the Norwegians who led the way in European whaling and it was from them that the word whale entered the English language, initially as the Old English ‘hwael’ – a word best pronounced while clutching the bow of a large rowing boat and trying to keep your lunch down. During one particularly stormy hwaeling expedition, the word was thrown up so violently that it came down with the letters in a completely different order, giving us the spelling we all know and love.
The world of performing animals is highly competitive and as we await the entrance of this year’s World Cup predicting octopus, Wikie the not talking not whale is likely to slip quietly back beneath the waves and return to doing what it does best. It’s got a long way to go to match the linguistic prowess of Prince, the dog that said “sausages” on That’s Life, or Blackie, the cat from Augusta, who went on tour with his owner Carl Miles in 1981, wowing audiences with his pronunciation of phrases like “I love you” and “I want my mama”.
A cautionary tale, though. The work soon dried up (it was a somewhat limited act) and Miles and Blackie found themselves performing for dimes on street corners. When the City Council of Augusta Licensing Department came down on them, Miles filed a law suit, claiming that talking cats were not listed under the Council’s licensable occupations, and, more cunningly still, protesting that the Council was violating Blackie’s right to free speech, as protected by the Bill of Rights. (This is true.)
A year later, the US Court of Appeal trumped Miles’ argument, ruling that if Blackie wanted to demand the right to free speech, the cat should make the appeal himself, as he was clearly capable of doing so.
How does it go, Wikie? “Touché!”
