A blue plaque has been unveiled in Long Buckby for Stanley Unwin, so we couldn’t resist a little homage press release.
For those that don’t know…
Stanley Unwin, the grandiloquent word-wrangler of gobblefunk and twistytalk, was himself a most unordinary ordinariness, a man who took the plainest speakabilities and turned them into wibbly-wobbly wonderments. In his own lifeful liveliness, he was both the teller and the tale, a sort of self-unfolding wordflower whose petals were all jumbly yet justly so. Born into the usual humdrummery, he soon unbecame it, splendiferating his sentences into cheerful confusions where meanings hid behind the sofa of sound and popped out again with a giggle. Audiences would listen with their ears all a-tilt, catching the drift of sense not by the straightline railway but by the scenic route of absurdical association.
And lo, this Unwinable Unwin would not merely speak but performulate, constructing whole thinkeries out of verbal curlicues and sideways logicums. His talk was not for the hurriedly hasty, oh no, but for those willing to tumblebunk into the cushioned chaos of his mindmaze. There he stood, a dignified undignitary, explaining the inexplicable by making it even more so, yet somehow clearer in the muddlement. For Stanley Unwin was not just a man of words, but a word of man—reshaping the lingual landscape into a playground of delightful discombobblement, where every mis-said saying was exactly the right wrongness.
