by Alex Horne
The Games seed, however, was then firmly planted over the course of a few days in central Berlin; first down by the Brandenburg Gate and the giant Fussball, then in front of a multinational contingent of thousands outside the Reichstag, and then later in a heady mix of around a thousand Germans and about ten Swedes in an enormous beer garden during their well-organised encounter.
As you can see from the pictures, Lord Gloucester made the best of a bad situation, even if later he confessed that many of the onlookers were volubly wondering, ‘“This is games?” No. It should be “These are games.” These English! We speak the language better than them!’
14 Being a responsible citizen, however, I should note that the pressure group ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ is firmly against reverse graffiti. It can be a nuisance. In 2005, for example, someone did a little reverse graffiti on the Wills Memorial Building in Bristol. It then cost three quarters of a million pounds to clean the entire building, the only way to remove the unwanted doodle. Then again, Bristol did get a nice clean building out of it in the end.
15 After this misadventure Mr Palatino and I embarked on another legal graffiti journey, writing (neatly) the words ‘this is honk’ on any banknotes that came into our possession. I’m pretty sure this is lawful (but not completely certain, hence this information being relegated to the footnotes). If you come across a note with ‘honk’ on, please get in touch. I’d love to track my honks. Also, if you want to join in, do scrawl your own honk-related message on a tenner or two.
16 The OED does antedate Dowie’s usage by some forty years, but it was definitely he who repopularised the word. He did what I was trying to do.
8
With the project floundering, Alex Games popped up once more, like the ghost of Banquo, reminding me of my wrongdoing with an offer of help.
Half a dozen months on from our croissants, Alex and I had struck up something of a camaraderie. We’d got on well over those pastries and had both written and met up since. I would almost call us friends, if the whole business about me trying to get his surname into the dictionary as a new word for the worst sort of conceitedness didn’t nullify such a claim. So, in a pathetic attempt at least to broach the subject, if not actually confess my crime just yet, I had sent him a message vaguely alluding to Verbal Gardening and asking for any advice as to how I might propagate a new word. Alex Games replied immediately, describing the idea as a ‘wizard wheeze’ and promising to give it some thought.
True to his word, a couple of weeks later he sent me a link to the Balderdash and Piffle page on the BBC website where the programme’s producers had announced they were once more looking for the public’s assistance in tracing the history of words and phrases. A second series was in the offing, he pointed out, and it surely wouldn’t do any harm if I was to contribute the histories of our very own words and phrases. Thinking and acting quickly I dashed out the following message and sent it to every single contact in my email account before I, or anyone else, could say Jack Robinson:*
Evening all,
Sorry to be one of those people who forwards you things but this looks like a good idea so if you’ve got a spare couple of minutes, why not do what this round robin says:
‘My granny makes up phrases sometimes. They’re quite funny. So I thought, as a birthday present, I’d try to get one of them into the Oxford English Dictionary. If I succeed, she’ll be a very happy grandmother. Here’s how you can help. The BBC programme Balderdash and Piffle are looking for new words and phrases that people are using today. They’re asking people to email them what they’ve heard.
‘So, if you could email [email protected] with the subject “euphemism” and tell them about my granny’s one, that would be brilliant.
‘She calls money “HONK”. I don’t know why but she’s always said it. And with your help, the whole country can be saying it too! Just drop them a line and tell them you’ve heard “honk” being used for “cash”, or that you call your loose change “honk” and keep your fingers crossed.
‘Happy Birthday gran! (she doesn’t have email so is unlikely to read this)’
I hoped the hundreds of people I sent the email to would think someone (not me) was simply trying to give his grandmother a birthday to treasure by getting her favourite saying onto the telly and, maybe, into the dictionary and therefore wanted as many people as possible to contact the programme to say they’d also heard her word. It was, I thought, a perfect plan.
Unfortunately, it was almost too perfect. A surprisingly large number of the people lurking in my address book took the bait and immediately sent it out to their own lists of contacts. Many of these second-generation recipients did the same. Within minutes, thousands of people had emailed the BBC whose researchers were suddenly swamped by people saying things like ‘Yes, I often say “honk” instead of money’ and ‘Well, I’m sure you’ve already got this in your book, but round here absolutely everyone calls money “honk”. Everyone!’
Naturally, the Balderdash and Piffle team smelled a rat – rather a lot of rats, actually – and within an hour of my initial email I was contacted by their leader, the presenter of the programme herself, none other than Victoria Coren (Oxford-educated author, journalist, presenter and highly successful poker player), who wrote me a very nice but vigorous email containing phrases like ‘Oh God! What have you done to us?!’, ‘PLEASE don’t email any more people’ and ‘Sorry … you’ll have to think of a different birthday present for your gran!’
To this day, I have no idea how Miss Coren became involved so quickly or how her team worked out I was behind the scheme. I was sure I’d swept over my tracks immaculately. But I was both impressed and embarrassed. I had got my comeuppance, a terrific word but a depressing experience. Not for the first time in the course of the project I felt terribly guilty, and hastily slammed the stable door shut by replying with a pathetically creeping email, apologising for my prank and promising never to do anything of the sort ever again.
I should have known I was being too smart. People called Alex traditionally get caught out when acting in such a way thanks to my nearly namesake, Aleck Hoag, a thief and all-round scoundrel from New York who spent the 1840s robbing men whom his wife brought home by pretending to be a prostitute. When this most cunning of ruses was uncovered by police, Aleck bribed the officers, escaped prosecution and continued the fraud for several years until being caught again and finally thrown into jail. Just as Jack Sheppard was the first ‘Jack the Lad’, Aleck Hoag was the original ‘smart Alec’ (and was only tracked down linguistically in 1985 by a very fine etymologist called Gerald Cohen who wrote up the story in Studies in Slang, Part I). I may not have pretended my wife was a prostitute or bribed the police but, as far as the dictionary authorities were concerned, I may as well have done.
Thankfully Victoria Coren was not going to dob me in. I would also escape prosecution for a while at least. In fact she effectively told me to pull myself together, ping-ponging* another email back (this really was a frantic morning of messaging) which instantly became one of my all-time favourites:
Re: Please help my gran!?
From: Victoria Coren
To: Alex Horne
No, I’m sorry … I know how you feel. My dad’s been trying to get the word ‘peripolitan’ (as an alternative to ‘suburban’) into the dictionary for years! Even I, with a direct route to the dictionary’s head-est honchos, cannot help at all … They’re terribly strict. Without a few examples of printed evidence, no dice!
This was amazing and seemingly heartening news. Victoria Coren’s dad, Alan Coren, the great writer, satirist and regular Call My Bluff panellist, had also tried his hand at Verbal Gardening. He had strived for years to get his fine word ‘peripolitan’ into the dictionary, slipping it into his various newspaper columns on at least half a dozen occasions, including ‘The Pleasures of Peripolitania’, his Spectator review of Griff Rhys Jones’s autobiography Semi-Detached, in which he confessed all:
Were you
to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there.
This irritates me no end, because I coined it, twenty years ago. I have, furthermore, deployed it at every subsequent opportunity, often in bold or italic, the better to catch the lexicographic eye; but whenever I ring the OED to ask them when it’s going in, some snooty philological time-server tells me that they already have a perfectly good word to describe those who live on the edge of cities: they are suburban. But suburban is not a perfectly good word, it is a perfectly rotten word, it degrades the environs I cherish into something woefully less than urban; it is a sneer, a snub, a smirk behind the metropolitan hand.
So I resolved to take on his word myself. I vowed to throw my own gardening weight behind it and keep pushing until it forced its way into the dictionary.17 And yet I still felt as low as ever since boldly setting off on this journey the previous year. I may have been following in the footsteps of Alan Coren, but Alan Coren had failed. He’d ensured there were more than a few printed examples of his peripolitan and yet he still had ‘no dice’. I’d never realised it before but I needed dice!
Alan Coren’s footsteps would not lead me into the dictionary. After twelve months I felt that I was meandering distractedly, and that I wasn’t even on the outskirts of where I wanted to end up. As Victoria made clear, the dictionary is ‘terribly strict’. She knew the ‘head-est honchos’ and wasn’t able to help. How on earth could I make it?
17 In 1955 an American writer called A. C. Spectorsky coined the term ‘exurbia’ to describe a community that had gained independence from its mother metropolis. This logical Latin relation to ‘suburbs’ is now in the dictionary, giving me confidence that ‘peripolitan’ can soon follow.
9
If at first you don’t succeed, blame your tools. With progress becoming more and more stilted, I decided it was time to reanalyse some of our Verbal Seeds. Propagation so far seemed to be limited to tiny Internet communities and a handful of German football fans rather than large swathes of the English-speaking world, despite numerous attempts to scatter them further and wider. It was time, I felt, to rest at least a couple of the original seeds and start again with a fresh batch. With a year of gardening experience now under our belts, surely we could come up with a couple of more effective ideas? I therefore announced the second Verbal Gardening Election after which we would return refreshed and replenished, determined to move closer to the dictionary walls.
Whilst disappointed with the performance of our words, I was pleased with my choice of Rare Men. Each and every one of them, including the ripened Mr Matisse, had at least tried to assist with the project, and they now suggested a mountain of fine replacement Verbal Seeds before voting with thought and alacrity for their favourites. As leader of the Gardening Team, it was time for me to be both flexible and strict: we could introduce three new words, I decided, rolling substitutes to complement our original five. But this meant saying no to words like ‘hot-girling/hot-boying’, a new verb meaning to see someone on a monogamous basis; ‘ale tales’, stories about the night before; and, probably my favourite, the childish ‘dickknickers’, invented by Mr Elephant as an alternative to boxer shorts or grundies* (‘Dick Knickers’ was also, by the way, the nickname of former US President Richard Nixon).
Instead, our energies would be focused on these three new terms, words chosen by the Rare Men on account of their brevity, topicality and usability:
paddles (noun) Hands. Suggested by the Farmer.
demi (noun) Slang for a fifty-pence piece. Suggested by Mr Bodoni.
honest (adj) A delicate alternative to ‘fat’. Suggested by Mr Elephant.
Of these brand-new seeds, ‘honest’ probably requires most explanation. According to Mr Elephant it was to be used when referring to someone who, often through no fault of their own (although sometimes because they’ve eaten too much), has become embiggened.* ‘Auntie Morag’, one might say, ‘is a very honest lady. But not as honest as Uncle Monty, he’s honest to a fault’ (a phrase strictly defined as over sixteen stone). Mr Elephant qualified the term further, saying, ‘If someone is putting on weight they are “becoming more honest” or “telling it how it is”. If someone has a problem with weight they can be said to be “frank” or that they “shoot from the hip”. “Lying” is the new word for slimming.’ ‘Have you been lying, Mrs Elephant?’ ‘Well, I can fit into these tights now, so yes I suppose I have been talking bollo a fair bit.’
There was, I felt, an opening for such a tactful term. ‘Honest’ is a pleasant euphemism for the brusque ‘fat’ or the blunt ‘overweight’, a congenial alternative to the derisive ‘chubby’ or ‘plump’. It also has linguistic heritage, Italians having long employed honesto to describe someone of larger proportions. All in all, it’s a very credible new word. Honest.
As for ‘paddles’, well, we all have hands and rarely does a day go by during which we fail to use them. Until now, however, there have been few slang terms with which to refer to them. Hand-business has been too formal for too long; ‘hands up’, ‘shake hands’, ‘hand me that pen’; dull, dull, dull. But henceforth we can discuss our wristy appendages in a new spirit of fun and adventure: ‘Put your paddles on your head, punk!’, ‘Oi, ref! That was a paddle-ball!’, ‘OK, then boss, we’ll do the paddle-over tomorrow.’ Much better.
Coins, like all money, are ripe for slang, but until now only the pound coin has any recognised nicknames in this country (quid,18 nugget and cherry, apparently). But now you can casually call the fifty-pence piece a demi. And, if you don’t want to leave out the other shrapnel in your pocket, Mr Bodoni also came up with ‘cutter’ for the ten-pence piece (the sharpest of the coins, used by prisoners to do bad things), ‘crab’ for a twenty-pence piece (which have seven sides, while crabs have eight legs; very nearly the same), and ‘kent’ and ‘whitey’ for one and two pence pieces (named after the two cheapest properties on a Monopoly board, Old Kent Road and Whitechapel; both also brown). He even came up with a ‘hope and glory’ for the twenty-pound note featuring Elgar on its back. ‘Fiver’ and ‘tenner’ have cornered the lower-note market but ‘twenty-er’ doesn’t work, so this has potential.
There have been attempts to rename these coins in the past, but somehow none has succeeded. The idea of ‘half’, so neatly employed in Bodoni’s ‘demi’, has been expressed more clumsily in phrases like ‘half bean’, ‘half jack’, ‘half ned’ or the rhyming ‘calf’. ‘Cartwheel’, ‘spanner’ and ‘heptagonal bad boy’ have also been suggested in honour of its shape. But none of these work as well as ‘demi’. If you go into a shop, hand over a pound and ask for a couple of ‘spanners’ or a couple of ‘demis’, I’m confident you’d have more success with the latter. Unless you were actually after spanners.
Similarly, the width of a coin like the modern ten-pence piece has been highlighted in the past by ‘bender’, ‘cripple’ or ‘croaker’, but these seem too un-PC nowadays. What’s more, you can really spit out the word ‘cutter’, pronouncing it with the one consonant at the beginning, followed by two ‘uh’s, ensuring you’ll blend right into any street chat: ‘Yeah, mate, ah fahnd a cuh-uh in dat fone box!’ And there just aren’t any other decent options for the other denominations. ‘Abergavenny’ is meant to be rhyming slang for ‘penny’, but it’s far too unwieldy for something so slight, and it’s no surprise the ugly backslang ‘yennep’ never caught on. A ‘kent’ sounds perfectly dismissive, and ‘whitey’ just enigmatic enough to be accepted (I have less hope for ‘crab’ or ‘hope and glory’, but it’s good to have the full set).
So, ‘honest’, ‘paddles’ and ‘demi’ came on board, three self-explanatory words that we hoped could be used in many situations: ‘It was a slow night for honest Ian. Why was no one carrying any honk? But as the pratdigger slippe
d his left paddle into the last mourner’s pocket he finally felt the reassuring weight of a demi alongside at least three cutters and a crab.’
Immediate success came from the unlikely source of hotel Health and Safety officer Mr Matisse’s son, whom I shall call Mr Matisse Jnr if that’s all right with everyone. I had no idea Matisse had taken the liberty of inviting Jnr on board, but when I received the following missive I was only too happy to overlook such presumption. Mr Matisse Jnr, I should explain, is, like Mr Garamond, a teacher:
I am pleased to report that seeds have been sown amongst a number of schoolchildren in Oxfordshire.
The first seed ‘demi’ was sown in a classroom of twenty-five pupils. As you will be able to see from the documentary evidence, the concept was readily accepted by the pupils, no questions asked. This worksheet has been distributed to a number of other Oxfordshire teachers for future use (with a word of warning – that schoolchildren find the word ‘crabs’ very amusing).
The second seed was paddles. Yet again, I decided the classroom was the best environment for the seed to be planted and cultivated. This seed was sown to around eighty students in various classes.
A class of twenty-five pupils were straining at the leash with their hands in the air to answer a question. I was not happy with this situation. I therefore asked for ‘paddles down!’ with a visual demonstration of what was needed. Immediately twenty-five paddles dropped to their sides. The word was nonchalantly accepted immediately by all, again no questions asked. In fact, this was the most cooperative they had been all lesson. If only all new ideas were accepted so benignly. From then on seeds were being sown everywhere, with ‘hands up’ turning into ‘paddles in the air’. Paddle spans have also been measured in the cause of scientific investigation.