if words unsaid could sway

Counterfactual conversations
Yesterday, at the last rest-stop on the Bike the Barns ride, somebody asked, of the garment I was wearing, "Is that a kilt?"

Now that I take up my pen, it occurs to me to kick myself that I didn't just say "No, it's a skirt," in high dudgeon. Too late one thinks of what one should have said. Instead, I said, "Yes."

"Soooo.. does that mean you're Scottish?"

Oh man. There are a couple of tiers of wrong in this statement. The assumption that some article of clothing is an infallible signifier of cultural background is one, but I'm generally content to let that sit. Then I had my mouth open to deliver the whole rant about the Sobieski-Stuarts, and romanticizing a culture after annihilating it, ending up with John Prebble: "The Lowlander has inherited the hills, and the tartan is a shroud!" Possibly I would even need to explain the Highland Clearances, sometimes a necessity when living in some strange part of the world that was deprived of Highlanders for bizarre reasons of its own (climate too pleasant, agriculture too easy, not enough rocks, whatever).

Instead, my usual conflict-avoiding self, I just said "Not in the slightest," and pointed out that, being a plain black Utilikilt and not a tartan, there was no intended association with any Scots group. However mendacious such associations actually are, I didn't say.

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