Like many others, I mourn the passing of Harold Paddock, a great man in many ways. I knew him as a gifted teacher, from whom I learned some of the fascinating foundations of the folk-speech of Newfoundland.
In the late 1970s, Paddock was teaching an introductory course in Newfoundland dialectology, and it was under his guidance that a love of the dialects of Newfoundland’s English and Irish settlers began to take root in my heart.
I know I’m not alone in feeling a great debt to this generous and vastly knowledgeable teacher, whose enthusiasm must surely have deepened the attachment to folk-speech of many students who came under his benign influence.
Such men are not easily replaced. Although the various dialects of Newfoundland English were then in the 1970s, and remain today, under threat of gentrification, thanks to films and television, misguided English teachers and other standardising pressures, Paddock taught us how to oppose these destructive forces.
We still, after all these years, tend to use dialect for comedic purposes, and insert unseen yet very noticeable quotation marks around the little bits of folk-speech that creep into our language, suggesting to the hearer that we share their amusement at the quaintness of such terms. I think we should
stop doing that.
Paddock was intent upon liberating dialect from any stigma, and returning it to its rightful place as our standard language.
It was, and is, noble purpose, and Paddock was a noble man, whose love of this land, its people and its language should remind us, from beyond the grave, that we and our dialects, are not to be discounted. And for that alone, among all his other achievements, is enough to earn him his place as a cultural treasure, a hero, or at the very least, a folk-hero. God rest you, Harold.
Ed Healy
Marystown
