Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  So the seed was accepted, but is it growing outside the classroom? The one sign that I’ve had was when walking down a corridor, a pupil saw me coming and told his friends to ‘wave their paddles at sir’. I’d like to believe that this affectionate (or so I like to think) mockery demonstrates a small amount of success.

  This, to me, was a considerable amount of success, great gardening at true grass-roots level. A part of me did worry that we were using these kids, telling them things that weren’t true, playing a cruel trick on the future of our country. But another, more influential part of me thought, no, it’s fine. After all, these were just words. Or at least, they would be words if we managed to make them so. Furthermore, now that these kids were using them, we had a responsibility to make them acceptable English, otherwise there might come a time when one of these children, years hence, applies for a job and offers to shake paddles with someone he hoped might be his boss, only for the interviewer to say, ‘Paddles? Paddles? What language is this? I will certainly not give you the job!’ I couldn’t have this on my conscience so I now had to get everyone using paddles. That way, we’d simply have given Mr Matisse Jnr’s pupils a fast-track into modern-day vernacular.

  The schoolyard was clearly a productive pasture. The original sir, Mr Garamond, followed Jnr’s example and let me know that ‘“Paddles” is being enthusiastically received by some specially chosen classes I’ve been using it with. There’s no need to define it. The word does the work so you don’t have to.’

  Mr Garamond also alerted me to www.urbandictionary.com, where many of his pupils both shared and learnt their own new words. For someone trying to coin a new word this site made daunting reading. As I scrolled through its many many pages I was amazed and a little humbled by the sheer number of ‘made-up’ words already on the site. Set up in 1999, it boasts well over 4 million (probably 5 by the time you read this) definitions, with over five hundred new ones added every single day. Five hundred every day! Almost 10 million people look at the site every month, and it was recently named one of the world’s top fifty websites by Time magazine. If you hear some slang that you don’t understand you can almost certainly find it translated on the Urban Dictionary.

  But it’s not perfect. As almost all the fifty-odd definitions for ‘urbandictionary’ itself explain, there are also hundreds of thousands of words that are simply games; not carefully thought-through terms like ‘honk’ or ‘mental safari’, just rubbish. As far back as 2004 a user called ‘Fooby’ summed things up neatly:

  Urbandictionary:

  A website with a brilliant concept that could have become great if it hadn’t been overrun by a mob of losers, who spend their days trying to feel important and popular.

  So although I did chuck a few of our words onto this linguistic rubbish dump, I didn’t hold out much hope that they would be noticed amid what Fooby called the many other ‘nonsensical, hateful or just plain dumb’ posts. Instead, I started work on another editable website, the most famous user-generated site of them all: Wikipedia.

  An American computer programmer called Ward Cunningham is one of the men behind this thriving collaborative online encyclopaedia. He is also a successful Verbal Gardener, having ensured the word ‘wiki’ was officially entered into the latest update of the online OED in March 2007 with the meaning; ‘a type of website that allows the visitors to add, remove, and sometimes edit the available content’. Urban Dictionary, for example, is a wiki site.

  At the time, about halfway through my attempt, I read this news (because any new entry into the dictionary of a zeitgeisty word is regarded as ‘news’) with particular interest, focusing especially on the OED’s chief editor John Simpson’s statement, ‘Words are included in the dictionary on the basis of the documentary evidence that we have collected about them. A while ago this evidence suggested that “wiki” was starting to make a name for itself. We tracked it for several years, researched its origins and finally decided it was time to include it in the dictionary.’

  In terms of my own project, this ‘documentary evidence’ bit was fine. I was already building a respectable amount of proof that my words were being used. But the ‘several years’ business worried me. I just didn’t have several years. I wanted to wrap this up in three. And ‘wiki’ – a word born in Hawaii where wiki wiki means ‘quickly’ and where Mr Cunningham took the wiki wiki shuttle bus between the airport’s terminals, which is also present in the words ‘wiktionary’, ‘wikiality’ and ‘wikification’ which, along with ‘wikipedia’ garner 32,820,000 search results on Google, and which alone gets 286,000,000 results – was only reluctantly accepted after years of ‘tracking’? This was almost enough to make me give up.

  Instead, however, I decided to exploit wiki’s popularity. The fact that it allowed ‘the visitors to add, remove, and sometimes edit the available content’ meant that I could add my content. So I did. I created a new entry for ‘pratdigger’, explaining its history and resurgence. I changed the existing entry on coinage to include ‘demi’, ‘crab’ and Mr Palatino’s other coins, all garnished with a liberal sprinkling of ‘honks’. Hopefully this could be my wiki wiki shuttle bus.

  18 Latin for ‘what’, implying, it is thought, ‘what one needs’.

  10

  The editors of Wikipedia, I soon discovered, are not all that keen on linguistic creativity. When logging on to the site a week later to add a couple more cutters and crabs I noticed that I’d received an alarming message in the ‘user talk’ section of the site.19 Accompanied by a foreboding picture of a hand raised defiantly in front of a red octagon, it was polite, patronising and threatening all at the same time:

  Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits are considered vandalism, and if you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the work of others.

  The underlined words represent ‘links’. If I clicked on the words ‘welcome page’, I was taken straight to the introduction to Wikipedia itself. The word ‘vandalism’, therefore, was a helpful link to a page all about ‘vandalism’, so I could see and understand exactly what it was I was doing. I followed the link and found a long entry, detailing exactly what vandalism was:

  Any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. The most common types of vandalism include the addition of obscenities or crude humor, page blanking, or the insertion of nonsense into articles.

  I hadn’t deliberately tried to compromise anyone’s integrity. Nor did I count my changes as obscene, crude or nonsensical. I’d simply introduced a couple of new words, words that people were now using (not many people, sure, but ‘people’ nevertheless).

  Peeved, I read on. The sixth section (of eight) detailed ‘what is not vandalism’, beginning:

  Although at times incorrectly referred to as such, the following things, which may or may not violate Wikipedia policies or guidelines, are not considered ‘vandalism’ and are therefore treated differently.

  This, I thought, was relevant to me. I was not a vandal. Definitely not. And to make that point I subtly adapted the following two sentences:

  Rather than label such users as vandals, just explain to them what our standard style is on the issue at paddle – perhaps pointing them towards our documentation at Wikipedia: How to edit a page, and the like.

  And:

  We have a clear policy on Wikipedia of no personal attacks, and harassing other contributors is not allowed. While some forms of harassment are also clear cases of vandalism, such as user page vandalism, or inserting a personal attack into an article, harassment in itself is not considered ‘vandalism’ and should be paddled differently.

  This, I thought, was a marvellously subtle way of registering my grievance at having been mislabelled a vandal.


  But I thought wrong. What I’d neglected to remember (or mention here) was that earlier in the day I’d made a frenzied attack on the Wikipedia article on the human hand. It took me a couple of hours, but by the time I’d finished, the word ‘hand’ was nowhere to be seen. In its place stood ‘paddle’, a proud new word, challenging the might of the old guard:

  The paddles (med./lat.: manus, pl. manūs) are the two intricate, prehensile, multi-fingered body parts normally located at the end of each arm of a human or other primate. They are the chief organs for physically manipulating the environment, using anywhere from the roughest motor skills (wielding a club) to the finest (threading a needle), and since the fingertips contain some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the human body, they are also the richest source of tactile feedback so that sense of touch is intimately associated with human paddles. Like other paired organs (eyes, ears, legs), each paddle is dominantly controlled by the opposing brain hemisphere, and thus paddledness, or preferred paddle choice for single-paddled activities such as writing with a pen, reflects a significant individual trait.

  Knowing that many school kids (and journalists) use Wikipedia as their source of all information, I saw this as a brilliant shortcut to their vocabulary. Perhaps, for some reason, they had to write an essay about fingers; some would almost certainly use Wikipedia to look up the location of the fingers and see ‘paddles’. ‘Ah,’ they would say. ‘You have five fingers on each paddle. It’s on Wikipedia. It must be true.’ They would then write it in their essays, their teachers would read it and presumably be a little confused. But then they too would check Wikipedia and see that yes, what they thought of as ‘hands’ are indeed officially called ‘paddles’. They might even assume that ‘hand’ rather than ‘paddle’ is modern slang. They would then start using ‘paddle’ themselves, their future pupils would learn ‘paddle’; ‘paddle’ would travel around the world in a matter of months!

  Except that the editors of Wikipedia are a vigilant bunch. Within hours of vandalising (I suppose, just maybe, that was what it was I was doing) the page, I received another message, this time a touch more personal:

  Stop with the fake words

  We know all about that little project, so please stop it. This is an encyclopedia … we report on what is already notable, we don’t make stuff up.

  My paddle-prints had led them straight back to me (they also had something called an ‘IP address’ which alarmingly stands for ‘Internet Protocol’ and which even I, a geek, don’t understand but essentially, and terrifyingly, means they can trace every change back to an individual Internet server. They’re watching us! Get out of the house!). Again, the underlining meant ‘little project’ was a link to my MySpace site, and while it was quite disturbing that they’d put so much research into what I’d thought was quite a low-key project, it did please me that they were now effectively advertising Verbal Gardening, albeit in a rather negative way. They may have politely used the word ‘please’, but the implication was that my project was not ‘notable’, that it was merely a load of people who ‘make stuff up’. That wasn’t nice.

  In fact, so adamant were they that I was doing something very wrong that they even created an entry about my project on the ‘Administrators’ Noticeboard’:

  Spreading neologisms

  I thought I would dump this here as it is outside my comfort level. User Vgfarmer seems to have an agenda to post new words and synonyms (neologisms) into existing articles and one new article Pratdigger. What is notable is that the words may all come from http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=57262821. From there: ‘We are planting Verbal Seeds around the world to see what will grow. Please help us disseminate the seeds, water the shoots and then reap the harvest.’ I began by reverting the additions, but I think it needs more than that, but I don’t know what. There is some still unreverted in British coinage: I began by adding a ‘citation needed’ …

  This was later followed up a by a brief.

  Everything’s been reverted now, and he’s been warned. The behavior halted about six hours ago.

  For everything had been reverted. My new words were no longer on the Wikipedia site. I had halted my behaviour. I felt chastened. I felt so naughty! Perhaps I’ll go to prison, I thought! Becoming a martyr could only help.

  There have always been those intent on preventing rather than embracing change. In The Adventure of English Melvyn Bragg could have been describing the arbiters of the editable online encyclopedia when he wrote: ‘There arose guardians of what they claimed as the True, the Old English, who were every bit as determined to repel the invaders as Drake and his fellow captains to repel the Armada. These were serious scholars, men of stature, zealots, fearful that their language would be overwhelmed by immigrant words.’ That’s right, they were fearful and they were certainly serious.

  In fact Bragg was describing the Verbal Gardening Haters of the seventeenth century. Much like the Daily Mail, there was then a small band of angry men who attempted to infect the country with their own fear, as Henry Hitchings explains in The Secret Life of Words: ‘Anxiety about new coinages, around half of which were sourced from Latin, gnawed away at patriotic consciences. The result was an outpouring of public condemnation, which has come to be known as the “Inkhorn controversy”.’

  The Wikipedia hullabuloo was my Inkhorn controversy. After all, I am Horne and I use (wipe-clean) ink. Back then, according to Hitchings, ‘Inkhorns were small vessels used for carrying ink, and the image summoned up by the controversialists was of writers spurting out horrid polysyllables.’ That is a strangely discomforting vision. These controversialists knew what they were doing. Among them, one Sir John Cheke whinged, ‘I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled.’ I don’t think he would have thought much of my mental safari. Nor would George Gascoigne, Member of Parliament for Bedford and my home town Midhurst, who in 1575 wrote in his Certain Notes of Instruction, ‘I think it not amiss to forewarn you that you thrust as few words of many syllables into your verse as may be.’

  My favourite anti-Verbal Gardener of that period was a man called Verstegan. Well, he wasn’t really called Verstegan. He was called Richard Rowlands, he was educated at Oxford, and he was so keen on his own Britishness that he reclaimed ‘Verstegan’, his ancestral surname, in a bid to hammer home his rigid points. In his 1605 work, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antwerp, he argued that only Anglo-Saxon and, in particular, Teutonic words should be used in English. This was a little odd because, as the title of his polemic suggests, he spent nearly all of his life in Antwerp. But, despite his protestations, the OED actually credits Verstegan with the first uses of ‘conjuncture’ and ‘confederated’, two visibly Latin-based words, as well as ‘blood royal’, a calque20 of the French ‘sang royal’. While it was a little galling that someone so against linguistic change managed to achieve it, this gave me hope.

  While Verstegan was alive, however, there was no OED. A Table Alphabeticall, English’s first monolingual dictionary, was published in 1604 by Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster presumably making the most of his long holidays, and it too avoided what Cawdrey called ‘strang ynkhorne terms’. This was largely why it was the size of a pack of playing cards (so could justifiably have been entitled A Pocket Table Alphabeticall) and contained just 2,543 words, with ‘cow’ and ‘fish’ among those not making the grade. Its full title made up one per cent of the whole work (A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English words, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French, &c.). He may have accepted the Classics, but Cawdrey disliked those ‘far journied gentlemen’ who ‘pouder their talke with over-sea language’ (other than the French, of course). Instead, his words were ‘gathered for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull person’.

  Today’s dictionaries aren’t quite so restricted or impenetrable, I hope, l
argely thanks to Samuel Johnson who was happy to allow a little artistic licence in his own work, the first great English dictionary, published a century and a half after Cawdrey’s. While including multiple definitions for the first time – before then a word could mean one thing only, not good news for a pun-maker – his own language was memorably creative. He could be self-deprecating, defining a ‘lexicologist’ as ‘a harmless drudge’, as alluded to by my Latin tutor in a previous chapter. He could be politically cheeky, famously describing oats as ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’. He could be egotistical, including the Latin Salve magna parens under the entry for ‘lich’ (‘a dead carcasse’) in subtle tribute to his ‘great’ mother-town, Lichfield; Salve magna parens is probably the earliest form of the contemporary phrase ‘word to your mother!’ (which itself originally refers to the ‘motherland’ of Africa). In short, Johnson demonstrated a wordy sense of humour that I could only hope current lexicologists still possess.

  He even included this fanciful definition of ‘sir’: ‘a title given to the loin of beef, which one of our kings knighted in a fit of good humour’. I doubt that Johnson believed any of the kings linked with this story actually knighted a steak (although it was included in Thomas Fuller’s po-faced The Church-History of Britain published in 1665). Rather boringly, the word really comes from the French sur longe (meaning ‘over’ and ‘loin’, much like ‘surname’) and was spelt ‘surloin’ until the eighteenth century. But Johnson, like me, believed that no matter what the facts, a good tale is always worth telling.

  This creativity wasn’t limited only to his definitions. In his biography of the book, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, Henry Hitchings tells of an occasion in 1773 when Johnson was on holiday in the Hebrides with Boswell, his friend and biographer, and ‘used the word “depeditation” in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg, appropriately enough. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted making the word up, before adding playfully, “that he had not made above three or four in his dictionary”.’ Not made above three or four? I’d be ecstatic with just one!