by Alex Horne
But I like to think there was some good in my actions. Despite the negative connotations, my taking of his name (hopefully not in vain) was a sign of respect. I didn’t really mean him any harm. Instead what I was really doing was immortalising my adversary. By making his name a word, I would also be getting his name in the dictionary. He would be granted the fame I was seeking. For there are many examples of people’s names passing into the language as bona fide words, many of which began in similarly distasteful circumstances. Take ‘namby pamby’, a dismissive adjective inspired by an individual’s name and introduced to the lexicon by a poet called Henry Cary. Like me, Cary had a rival, in his case a pastoral poet called Ambrose Philips. But as well as mocking Philips’s sentimental verse, Cary managed to prolong his adversary’s fame when he wrote the following couplet in 1725:
Namby Pamby’s little rhymes
Little jingle, little chimes.
Ambrose Philips thus entered the language.
A similar fate befell Thomas Earp, a student at Oxford in 1911, who managed to upset the entire rugby team with a series of superior, snotty and snide remarks. This time it was none other than dictionary contributor J. R. R. Tolkien who ensured Earp’s transformation into a word. The two had, apparently, exchanged verbal blows at a debate in Exeter College, Oxford University, and a lifetime later, in 1981, a letter was published written by the philologist to his son (in 1944) naming Mr Earp as ‘the original twerp’. According to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the word did indeed come into use around 1910, with its first mention in print in 1925, so the story stacks up. A poet called Roy Campbell also referred to this Mr Thomas Wade Earp in 1957, saying, he ‘gave the English language the word twirp, really twearp, because of the Goering-like wrath he kindled in the hearts of the rugger-playing stalwarts at Oxford, when he was president of the Union, by being the last, most charming, and wittiest of the decadents’,* and that’s more than enough evidence for me.
A whole family from Ireland had gained similar infamy in London a couple of decades previously. Apparently (from now on, I’ll always use the word ‘apparently’ when I really mean that this is one of many possible stories), the Hoolihans were a rowdy Irish family who lived in Southwark at the end of the nineteenth century. One of their number, Patrick, was particularly notorious, making a living and reputation as a bouncer and a thief. Such an impression did they make on the area that their surname lives on in the spectacular noun ‘hooligan’ today. So, I hoped, would that of Alex Games.
These stories were my inspiration for ‘games’; it could be done, ordinary names do go down in history, and the whole area of ‘annoying people’ was clearly as fertile as the money field. Whilst I did feel guilty stealing his name, I knew I was on the right track. ‘Games’ would be my namby-pamby, my twerp, my hooligan.
Thus with hope cuddling up to guilt in my heart I started to spread ‘games’. On an Internet forum called Digital Spy, for example, I wrote a review of a movie which was, in my view, at least ‘a little bit pretentious’. The film was A Cock and Bull Story,* a tricky film-within-a-film adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring two more of my comedy heroes, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
I watched the film with Mr Elephant who, I should point out, thoroughly enjoyed it. I, on the other hand, did not. I probably didn’t understand it. I didn’t think it was ‘really rubbish’, but, frustrated that it was cleverer than me, I was happy to imply such an opinion on the Digital Spy forum, justifying the following overly critical review with the thought that the sort of person who might use ‘games’ would almost certainly not like this sort of film. Being quite a snivelling sort of arselicker (a close relative of the pratdigger), I also hoped the likes of Coogan and Brydon might appreciate the idea behind using the word ‘games’ in the first place:
This film was utter games
I just watched Cock and Bull Story and thought it was affected and games, which is a shame. I really like Alan Partridge and think that Rob Brydon bloke is pretty funny (‘just a bit of fun!’), but this whole film about people pretending to be themselves making a film about something that happened ages ago but actually it’s all based on a book that wasn’t really about anything seemed just a tiny bit pretentious. As I said, too games for me.
As a demonstration of the meaning of ‘games’, I thought that did the job pretty well. A fellow forum user called ‘Miss Glitter’, however, did not. ‘What does “games” mean?’ she wrote, following it with the unrealistic emoticon:* . I was more than happy to elaborate:
games
Sorry, Miss Glitter, it means I think the film was a bit too showy and not really all that good. People use ‘games’ when they’re talking about things like wine lodges and jazz fusion. Stuff that’s pretentious. I think that’s right anyway.
This time the word was greeted with a sort of annoyed acceptance. Someone calling himself ‘Cornucopia’ replied with this more thoughtful review: ‘Thought it was a brave attempt at putting a clearly unstructured and anarchic book on celluloid’, while ‘Kenny at KACL’ wrote:
Maybe you just didn’t get it. (‘Games’, ‘Wine lodges’, are you Nathan Barley??)
This made my day. Nathan Barley, if it passed you by, was a sitcom written by two other comedy heroes of mine (I’ve named six now, any more and the title will lose all value), Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris, who described the eponymous central character as a ‘meaningless strutting cadaver-in-waiting’. Barley himself went further, calling himself, ‘a self-facilitating media node’; exactly the sort of person I was hoping might use the word ‘games’.
Except that almost immediately after I’d first sent ‘games’ out into the world I regretted it. Because Alex Games himself asked me out for a drink. Thinking back, it barely seems credible, but barely a month of the project had passed when Mr Games sent me an entirely unsolicited email. As nemeses go, this was excellent work.
In 2005 I took a show to Edinburgh called When in Rome in which Mr Elephant and I (it won’t be too hard to find out the identities of some of my Rare Men if you so desire) attempted to teach people Latin in an hour. We weren’t necessarily successful every night, but we were able to tell a few jokes (I managed to slip in my counter-productive tiddly-winks factory effort) and impart the odd dubious fact along the way (did you know that Sheffield, like Rome, was built on seven hills? Or that it was, unlike Rome, built in a day?). To make up for a lack of actual Latin education during the show we also held lively twenty-minute Latin lessons for anyone who fancied them in the Limax et Thridax in the Omni Centre (‘the home of entertainment in Edinburgh’13) at the top of Leith Walk at 12.45 p.m. every single day of the festival, a commitment I may well have regretted had it not been for the unexpectedly enthusiastic and numerous pupils. One chap, a delightfully proactive student called Jeremy who had a penchant for novelty ties, even emailed me a year after the festival to say he’d since continued his studies at home and had gained a GCSE in the language (an A star, no less). Despite having almost nothing to do with this achievement, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more proud.
As well as studying Latin and Greek at Cambridge like me, it turned out that Alex Games was also a part-time Latin teacher. The links between us really were quite profound. So, having heard about my Latin show on the surprisingly existent Classics grapevine, he got in touch. ‘Hello Alex,’ he wrote, ‘that show of yours sounds fascinating, I’d love to take you out for a coffee to find out more, how does that sound? We could go to this nice place in Marylebone if that works for you. Alex Games.’
My word, I thought. Because it was.
Speedily composing myself I decided that yes, I would definitely like to meet him, for I am a fickle person, susceptible to flattery and the offer of free coffee. I arranged to meet my archenemy one week hence. Clearly, this was a risky tactic, but one I thought worth taking. I would be on my guard. And if, somehow,
I could use my rival to spread our words further, I would seize that opportunity with both of my paddles. I was determined.
We met in Marylebone at a delightful patisserie and talked for two hours about Latin, words and writing, by the end of which I was sure that he knew nothing of the Verbal Gardening project. He had no idea that I was trying to get his surname into the dictionary. This was good news. The bad news was that I was also sure that I really liked Alex Games.
Trudging back to Verbal Gardening headquarters I felt ashamed, the sweet taste of pastries only intensifying* my ignominy. Thanks to my vain desire to invent a word, this man, this nice man who had bought me that delicious and not inexpensive food and drink, would be vilified, his name for ever associated with affectation, self-importance and rubbishness (if everything went according to my plan). I was the baddie. I was his nemesis. I was preying on an innocent and unknowing victim. Games wouldn’t just be my namby pamby, twerp or hooligan, he would be my nang.
I tried to convince myself that this wasn’t necessarily so bad. ‘Nang’ had ended up meaning ‘cool’. Perhaps ‘games’ would also change from ‘something really rubbish and a little bit pretentious’ to ‘something really quite good’. Even words like ‘shit’ and ‘bollocks’, unpleasant words, words that you certainly wouldn’t want as your surname, can mean something good. If something’s exceptional it’s ‘the bollocks’, the best stuff is ‘the shit’. So perhaps ‘the games’ could mean something utterly outstanding. Yes, it wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t so bad. Really all I was doing was giving Alex Games the gift of becoming, quite literally, a byword for cool. All he’d done was buy me a coffee and a cake.
But then to achieve such status I would first have to make the ‘rubbish’ meaning of ‘games’ as common as ‘shit’.
I decided to lie low with ‘games’ for a while.
13 This, in case you didn’t know, is the Latin for ‘Slug and Lettuce’, which was the incongruous setting for our geeky gatherings. ‘Omni’ is already a Latin word, meaning either ‘for every’ or ‘by every’. It would make more sense if it was ‘Omnibus‘, the plural, meaning ‘for everyone’, but that’s already taken in the word ‘bus’ which is indeed short for the Latin word. Latin is still alive, I promise.
6
A couple of months after starting the project all five words had been launched and were bobbing about on the vast linguistic ocean with varying degrees of buoyancy. Keen to see some progress and having scribbled ‘bollo’ and ‘pratdigger’ on over forty service-station toilet doors, I retraced my steps to find out how my ‘quiz’ had fared.
When I returned to the scenes of the non-crimes to reap my rewards it soon became apparent that my work hadn’t been as productive as the Irish theatre manager Daly’s. As if some plague of locusts had descended on the water closet fields, all my seeds had disappeared, wiped out, I presume, by the cloths of diligent workers or by general toilet-based friction. Within six months of writing my first message, I revisited twenty-seven of the infected toilets. Not one bollo remained. Nor were there any answers to my question. From Newport Pagnell to Norton Canes, from Membury to Knutsford, Clacket Lane to Birchanger Green, my seeds had been ripped out before having the chance to plant roots.
I kept my end of the bargain, wiping off any graffiti I could find with some white spirit and a flannel, but most other graffiti artists, it seems, don’t bother* with this wipe-clean marker nonsense. In Reading, for instance, an angry man had written ‘no wife, more money’ in broad black permanent strokes. In Northampton a more creative type had drawn a big face in green with the message ‘stop looking at yourself in the mirror’ written cryptically beneath. At Membury (eastbound), accompanied by some abuse towards Wigan FC, a neat swastika and a rather detailed skull, there was this short poem: ‘If we live in an open cage what’s the point in being trapped?’ I could only come to one conclusion and abandoned this particular plan of attack. Removable graffiti was, indeed, bollo.
Or perhaps it was I who was being a little bit games. Had I been too careful, too keen to stay the right side of the criminal line? Did Aleks in Connecticut have the right idea with his more blatant bollo? Was it time to get out of my comfort zone and stop travelling with removable markers, white spirit and dusters?
For perhaps the first time in my life, I took inspiration from the Bible. It was a theologian called John Wycliffe (or Wyclif) (or Wycliff, Wiclef, Wicliffe or Wickliffe for that matter) who first translated the Good Book from Latin to English in 1382 and in the process managed to pour a veritable flagon of new words into the nation’s collective mouth. He may not have invented all these himself, but in a bid to make religious texts finally mean something to the majority who knew no Latin, he used words like ‘behemoth’, ‘zeal’ and ‘puberty’ and phrases such as ‘woe is me’ and ‘an eye for an eye’ for the very first time. If you look up ‘birthday’ in the OED you’ll see that Wycliffe’s Bible is the first text quoted. The same goes for ‘crime’, ‘madness’, ‘glory’, ‘mountainous’ and even ‘frying pan’. Just as Caxton would a century later, Wycliffe shared these words with the general public and thus gave them life.
But what I admired most about Wycliffe was that he wasn’t content merely to spread the word in his writing. One might think that including ‘frying pan’ in what is still the best-selling book of all time (just beating Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book) would be enough to make it, ahem, stick. Not Wycliffe. Instead, as Melvyn Bragg describes in The Adventure of English, he started a campaign, and gathered together his own band of Rare Men called the Christian Brethren whom he sent forth into the ‘highways, byways, taverns and inns, on village greens and in open fields’ to spread his new words. My operation was not without precedent. Indeed, Wycliffe’s lot were far more organised than mine. According to Bragg they wore russet-coloured woollen robes and carried long staffs. I knew my team were lacking something; it turns out that something was red uniforms and wooden sticks.
In honour of Wycliffe, therefore, I sent a T-shirt to each of my Rare Men. A ‘long staff’ was going to cost too much honk to send through the post, but a modern version of a ‘russet-coloured woollen robe’ I could do, and on each top I printed one of the following Verbal Gardening slogans: ‘THAT’S BOLLO, CISSÉ!’, ‘GEORGE LOVES HONK‘, ‘JUICE BARS ARE GAMES’, ‘BEWARE PRATDIGGERS’ and ‘WE’RE ALL GOING ON A MENTAL SAFARI’. Yes, they were free clothes, but they were also striking, eye-catching clothes that would further cast our words in a broad sort of way. My men were to become walking adverts.
I didn’t expect to reap any rewards immediately. Wycliffe was unsuccessful in the short term, with the Church synod decreeing his actions intolerable, outlawing the English-language Bibles and causing many of his team to be arrested, tortured and killed. In the mid-term, things weren’t great for Wycliffe either. Thirty-one years after his own natural death, he was declared a heretic and thirteen years after that his remains were dug up and burned under the instruction of ‘The Primate of England’ (an archbishop, not a monkey), thus denying him eternal life. But in the long term, that’s exactly what his actions got him. Six hundred years on we’re all still using words like ‘envy’, ‘injury’ and ‘humanity’, ‘canopy’, ‘jubilee’ and ‘menstruate’, words which Wycliffe sacrificed everything for. I too was prepared to put myself and my men in very real danger for such future triumph.
The troops were happy to don their daring dress. Mr Goudy-Stout immediately wore his shirt (GEORGE LOVES HONK) to work (a national radio station) where the presenter ‘very nearly’ mentioned it on air to an audience of 8 million people (Goudy-Stout said he was sure if the DJ had seen it he would have discussed it but in the end he’d had to keep it covered up ‘because the air-con in this building chills me to the bone’), Mr Bodoni’s chest told all of Portugal that the former Liverpool striker Djibril Cissé was bollo and Mr Rockwell wore his ‘Beware Pratdiggers!’ to the Riverside Festival in Stanstead Abbotts where anything up to three hundred people may have seen the se
ed. While Rockwell did admit that in all likelihood not all of the Riverside ravers would have got a good look at the shirt, ‘two colleagues did ask me about it and I explained the definition, overheard by a few others. Then on Monday one of said colleagues was telling someone else about it and asked me to remind them what it said. It’s probably not part of their active vocabulary yet, but it’s a start.’ Of course it was. And a fortnight later I was present at a dinner party in Clapham where Rockwell’s pratdigger number became the subject of several intrigued queries. ‘So what is a pratdigger and why should I be wary of them?’ asked one diner. Rockwell reeled off the definition like a pro.
It’s quite an easy word to spread at dinner parties, pratdigger, both because of its historical appearance – ‘Oh yes,’ one might say, ‘it’s a typical word from yesteryear. Did you know the word “shot-clog” is in the OED too, meaning “an unwelcome companion tolerated only because he pays the shot, or reckoning, for the rest of the company, otherwise a mere clog on them.” It was used first by Ben Jonson in 1599 if memory serves me correctly’ – but also because it has global relations. If you’d like to quote from Adam Jacot de Boinod’s amusing collection of international phrases, The Meaning of Tingo, you might care to mention the Japanese phrase kingyo no funi, which literally means ‘goldfish crap’, to describe the digger’s prats, drop in the Czech word nedovtipa, which means ‘one who finds it difficult to take a hint’, or the German phrase er gibt seinen Senf dazu, meaning ‘he who brings his mustard along’, or, in other words, ‘one who always has something to say even if no one else cares’. These and others all echo our own pratdigger nicely, so if you want to help spread our word, please do bring these nuggets, along with a garage* bottle of wine, to your next social engagement.