Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  Other examples of mountweazels include ‘apopubodabalia’, a fictional Roman sport resembling football that was slipped into volume one of the German work Der neue Pauly. Enzyklopädie der Antike, edited by H. Cancik and H. Schneider in 1986, and steinlaus (Stone Louse, Petrphaga lorioti), a phoney rock-eating animal invented for the German medical encyclopaedia Pschryembel Klinisches Wörterbuch by German humorist Loriot (who couldn’t resist sticking his name in the Latin classification). In the Swedish music encyclopaedia Sohlmans musiklexicon there is a fake entry for ‘Metaf Üsik’, a Turkish music scholar who specialised in the importance of beards in music-making, and in Niall Ó Dónaill’s Irish language dictionary, Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, he includes ‘searbhfhoghantaidhe’ as a ‘variant form’ of the word ‘searbhónta’ (meaning servant), which most editors have since viewed as a copyright trap, mainly because he says the extra letters aren’t meant to be pronounced and don’t seem to make any etymological sense.

  As well as the serious point of protecting copyright, mountweazeling is seen as something of a game amongst editors and publishers, and with my cracker story I’m joining in that game. It’s my mountweazel, my attempt to see how readily information is lifted from Wikipedia and what effects that level of research might have. I’m actually doing Wikipedia a favour. What really happened was that I did a couple of comedy slots at university, then a couple more on the London open-spot circuit, then a couple of competitions from which I managed to get an agent. And that’s the same standard ‘how I became a comedian’ story shared by a whole generation of comics today. I did work in Budgens (and I was Deputy Head of Dairy), but they don’t have a cracker-joke-writing competition. Nearly all supermarkets outsource their crackers these days. And that is the least romantic sentence in the book so far.

  An alternative name for my mountweazels might be ‘plinyisms’, a word coined in honour of Pliny the Elder, an author, naturalist and philosopher who died in AD 79. In fact, as far as I can tell, just one man has ever used the word ‘Plinyism’ in print to mean such a thing, the sweetly named Cotton Mather, who took against Pliny and once wrote, ‘There is frequently much likeliness between a Plinyism and a fable.’ For some reason the Oxford English Dictionary deemed this single utterance worthy of inclusion in its pages and still unfairly defines ‘Plinyism’ as ‘an assertion of doubtful truth or accuracy, as with some statements in Pliny’s Natural History’. So with one serendipitous* throw of the dice, Mather managed to both invent a word and memorialise Pliny’s name, albeit in a negative light.

  My attention was drawn to plinyisms by a book written by a New Yorker called Ammon Shea who managed to complete a truly herculean task when he finished reading the OED at 2.17 p.m. on 18 July 2007. Whilst I was attempting to infiltrate my word, he’d read the whole 21,730-page-long dictionary, from start to finish, in one year-long sitting, in a manner even more obsessive than my digesting of joke books as a child.

  I gulped down his subsequent book (entitled, helpfully, Reading the Oxford English Dictionary) in one afternoon. I loved it. I was too inspired and enlightened even to be too jealous. Here was, I felt, a kindred spirit. In one of the autobiographical sections that punctuate his favourite words he wrote:

  The margins of the ledger I’ve been keeping all my notes in are full of my own system of shorthand, little squiggles that tell me what to look for when I go back and read through my notes. A word I have a question about has, rather obviously, a question mark next to it. Words that are particularly charming have stars, and sometimes exclamation marks.

  That’s exactly how I read! I drew a star and two exclamation marks next to that very paragraph!

  In his paragraph about the word ‘Petrichor’ (meaning ‘the pleasant loamy smell of rain on the ground, especially after a long dry spell’ – a word coined by successful Verbal Gardeners Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas in 1964), he noted:

  I first came across this some six or seven years ago, thought to myself, ‘What a lovely word,’ and then promptly forgot what it was. I have spent far too much time since then wondering vainly what it was. When I found it there, buried in the midst of P, it was as if a kink in my lower back that had been plaguing me for years suddenly went away.

  That’s exactly how I forget! When I think of jokes or puns or anagrams or palindromes I sometimes forget to write them down, forget them altogether, then spend grumpy months desperately trying to remember them. This was brilliant!

  His final chapter begins with the line;

  I used to enjoy fishing. But I hated catching fish.

  That’s exactly how I fish!

  After ‘Petrichor’, ‘Philodox (n.) A person in love with his own opinion’, and ‘Pisupprest (n.) The holding in of urine’, the next word to pique Ammon’s interest was ‘Plinyism (n.) A statement of account of dubious correctness or accuracy, such as some found in the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79)’, after which he commented:

  Here is a word that makes me sad. Not because of its definition, but because of the man whose name it was taken from. Pliny the Elder … sounds like an all-around interesting fellow. According to his nephew, he died during the eruption of Vesuvius because he wanted to stay to watch the volcano and help those in need. Yet in the OED his name is for ever linked with error. Why? Because in 1702 a bitter small man by the name of Cotton Mather did not much care for Pliny and coined this word. Mather seems to have been the only person ever to have used the word, yet sometimes that is enough to gain entry into the annals of language, rightly or wrongly. Perhaps there should be a related term, something along the lines of mather, say, which would mean ‘to attack a writer of far greater stature than oneself’.

  I read those lines with a mixture of emotions. One man could coin a word all by himself, even if he himself has done little of note with his life, and this gave me hope! But he’d done so by attacking ‘a writer of far greater stature’ than himself and this made me feel bad. Had I not done precisely the same thing when creating ‘games’?

  Had I mathered Alex Games?

  14

  Apart from my two deliberate rumours, there may well be many more accidental plinyisms in this book. Many of the word histories I’ve passed on have been plucked from the murky world of etymology without what one could truly call exhaustive research. Did Dr Seuss really invent ‘nerd’? Did Jasper Carrot definitely import ‘zits’ to Britain? I’m afraid I can’t say for sure.

  But in my defence I would say that I have presented such stories in a celebratory fashion. Pliny may well have presented a couple of fables as fact. In his sections devoted to zoology, for example, he mixed the scientific work of Aristotle with his own descriptions of legendary animals and folklore. But I like to believe he told these tales in good faith, not knowing any better. I too don’t know any better (Kaplinsky might be that tall!). Perhaps the meaning of the word ‘plinyism’ should be adapted to reflect this positive quality, a declaration in support of something because we want to believe in it, because it makes us happy. Often, I think, fiction is better than fact.

  On that note, it was, of course, the Belgian father of a failed super-villain called Dr Evil, who invented the question mark.

  Actually no, I can’t throw my weight behind that Austin Powers-based claim, because whilst still avidly watching Countdown on a daily basis I learnt that in fact the ‘?’ comes from Latin, as does the ‘!’, which I, like many others, am guilty of overusing! During the last couple of series, Susie Dent, the programme’s afore-mentioned dictionary wielder, has been in charge of her own all too brief segment of the programme in which she explains ‘the origins of words or phrases’ (although occasionally I’m sure I heard the then presenter Des O’Connor call it ‘the oranges of words’). This was evidently a matter close to my heart and as well as scribbling my own attempts at the letters games, I have endeavoured to jot down any such origins that relate to single individuals.

  Those question and exclamation marks can’t be ascribed to individuals, unf
ortunately, but they are worthy of note, simply because we now take their existence so much for granted. The question mark was created, Susie told me, by taking the ‘q’ and ‘o’ from either end of the Latin word quaestio, meaning ‘question’ (and no relation to ‘quiz’, honest), and slipping the former under the latter. The same process applies for the exclamation mark which came from io meaning ‘joy’. So every time you see an exclamation mark you’re really seeing a tiny bit of joy! That feels better, doesn’t it?

  The Romans themselves, however, barely used these or any other punctuation marks. St Jerome introduced an early system of punctuation when translating the Bible in the fourth century AD so that anyone reading it could pause at appropriate moments, before the ‘?’ was developed from quaestio by Alcuin of York, adviser to Charlemagne in the ninth century AD. The word ‘question mark’ itself wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century. The exclamation mark was used for the first time in the fifteenth century by humanist printers and was called ‘the note of admiration’ until around 1650. Now that’s a much better name for the joyful symbol.

  In fact, the Romans didn’t even use spaces between their words. A Roman computer keyboard would have needed just twenty-three keys (all the letters, in capitals, except for ‘G’, ‘J’, ‘U’, and ‘Y’, which came later, with ‘I’, ‘V’, ‘X’, ‘L’, ‘C’, ‘D’ and ‘M’ conveniently doubling up as numbers. No need for a ‘shift’ or a ‘space’ key, let alone the mysterious ‘fn’, ‘ctrl’ or ‘alt’). Texts were written with the words shuntedrightupnexttoeachother. To the Romans this scriptio continua was normal. They wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at the penis from Russia.22

  So someone, reasonably recently, had to invent the spaces that go between words. Again I’d love to be able to give credit to one single person; that really would be quite a feat, but it’s hard to leave your signature in a vacuum. So instead we have to thank the Irish, and in particular, the Irish scribes, who first minded the gap in about AD 700 whilst painstakingly scribbling out their Libri Scottice scripti (‘Latin books written in the Irish fashion’23). Unlike native speakers, these Irish scribes needed to separate each individual Latin word to properly understand them and so they introduced spaces. Continuing this logic, they went on to separate the clauses in the texts for the first time and so invented key aspects of punctuation too, with the establishment of ‘construe-marks’, which were eventually developed into full stops, commas and all the other dots and dashes that clutter up our modern keyboards. The Greeks had long before marked a separate paragraphos by scoring a horizontal line under the relevant section, but the Irish refined this by indenting the text and making the first letter larger. Thus, people in the British Isles could read Latin more easily and the style of writing I’m using today was born.

  *

  If it was possible, I’d been paying even closer attention to Countdown after cranking up our rumour wheel because, soon after I started hinting about Natasha’s height, a letter had landed with a pat on my doormat, postmarked ‘Leeds’. Even though I didn’t know anyone who lived in Yorkshire I had no doubt who it was from. Countdown is made by Yorkshire Television and filmed in a studio in Leeds. Ten years earlier I’d applied for tickets to be in the audience for a recording and had waited patiently until I reached the top of the two-year waiting list, only to be given a date that clashed with my A-level French oral. Now I could start dreaming again:

  Dear Alex,

  Thank you for your application to appear on Countdown. We would like you to come for an audition at London Weekend Television on 15 January.

  I look forward to seeing you on the day and I hope that you will be successful in gaining a place on the show.

  Yours sincerely*

  [The Associate Producer]

  I immediately wrote back saying, yes. I explained that I didn’t have to pretend to ask someone the directions to the station at La Rochelle that morning so I could definitely make the date, and that I also hoped I would be successful in gaining a place on the show. This time I would make sure I made it to Leeds. What’s more I wouldn’t be in the audience, I’d be at the desk, alongside Carol and Des. I’d be a contestant on Countdown. My name would be for ever etched into the annals of the programme.

  I couldn’t wait to let my mum know. ‘In a few months,’ I told her excitedly over the phone, ‘you’ll see a familiar face on Countdown!’ She reacted in a far calmer manner than me, aware that only a lucky few survive the programme’s assault course to make it on to the show itself. But I could tell from her words of cautious encouragement that she was excited too. She’d taught me well. I wouldn’t fail her.

  As well as representing the verbal dexterity of the Hornes, I was also hoping to raise the Verbal Gardening standard on Countdown’s platform. If I was really lucky, I thought, I might be able to air one of my words on the world’s most respected language-based daytime quiz. For, unbeknownst to my mum, she’d shown me how words can be grown on the show by lending me ‘A Book of Family Sayings’, entitled As We Say in Our House by one Nigel Rees, another keen wordwatcher and occasional guest in Countdown’s Dictionary Corner. Standing out from the delightful and familiar tales of grandmothers and babies bequeathing idiosyncratic names on ordinary household objects was one particular story about the word ‘sugging’: ‘Once, when I was appearing in “Dictionary Corner” on Channel 4’s Countdown, I introduced this new seven-letter word (not yet in any dictionary’).’

  Mr Rees hadn’t invented ‘sugging’ himself, he’d been told by someone involved in market research that it meant ‘the very irritating practice of people who pretend to do an opinion poll but are really trying to sell you something’ (an acronym of ‘Selling Under the Guise’). But, as he explains, ‘I thought it was a word – or, rather, a meaning of a word – that deserved to have a wider audience.’

  Like ‘honk’, ‘sugging’, meaning ‘soaking’, was already present in the language, since the eighteenth century. But thanks to Nigel Rees this other, new, meaning was now known by all of Countdown’s loyal word-loving servants, and thirteen years later, when you type ‘sugging’ into Google it’s the first definition you find. It worked! I had to get on that programme.

  *

  In a spirit of optimism,* let’s end this chapter not with a question mark, exclamation mark, or even a full stop. Let’s end it, at last, with a bang.

  After learning about the ‘!’ and the ‘?’ from Susie I delved further into the punctuation pot and picked out the ‘&’, or, to give its full name, the ampersand. In his book Imperium, Robert Harris credits this symbol to a man called Marcus Tullius Tiro, the secretary (or slave, really) of Cicero (who himself invented the phrase – in Latin – ‘scraping the barrel’). But that is fiction. While Tiro did indeed employ a series of symbols to record his master’s speeches and so initiated the foundation of shorthand still used by journalists today, the ampersand itself is rather different to his ‘Tironian et’ and, like ‘!’ or ‘?’, can’t really be pinned on any one particular person.

  In 1962, however, a symbol was definitely invented by one man, an ominous-sounding American called Martin K. Speckter. As head of an advertising agency, Speckter grew sick of using the combination ‘?!’ or even ‘!?’ to convey a surprised sort of rhetorical question. ‘He did what?!’, he felt, looked rather cumbersome so he decided to unite them in one brand new symbol. In a magazine all about fonts (my sort of magazine) called TYPEtalks, Speckter asked readers to come up with a brand-new name for this innovative marker, and after dismissing ‘exclarotive’ and, my favourite, ‘exclamaquest’, he settled on ‘interrobang’ which, rather like ‘mental safari’, combines the Latin interrogation, with the more modern bang, printer’s slang for ‘!’.

  A new punctuation mark was an ambitious challenge. The sixteenth-century printer Henry Denham (according to Lynne Truss) or Randall Dillard (according to the Internet) had previously attempted to introduce a reversed question mark (the ‘percontation point’) to indicate a rheto
rical question. That would be useful wouldn’t it But Denham/Dillard failed to get his idea going, despite the simplicity of the idea and the fact that he owned his own printing press. Still, Speckter was determined, and four years after its invention, a man called Richard Isbell from American Type Founders issued a new typeface called Americana which incorporated the interrobang, and an interrobang key was built into many typewriters (alternatively you could buy a replacement interrobang keycap for some Smith-Corona typewriters, typewriter fans).

  It may have fallen out of use somewhat since then (I certainly can’t see one on my keyboard, even though there are plenty of ‘¬’s, ‘~’s and, ‘’s), but the word ‘interrobang’ did itself find its way into the dictionary after the mark appeared in countless magazines and newspapers during the sixties and seventies. How good is that

  22 Like a parent, history repeats itself. So in the noughties scriptio continua is in vogue once more, with companies like MySpace, HarperCollins and WHSmith opting out of the spacing convention and Internet domain names unable to accommodate a gap. Occasionally this can have unfortunate consequences. The website of the singer and former stutterer Gareth Gates had to be changed when people attempted to read the name www.ggates.co.uk out loud.

  23 This is all information I learnt not at university but, prompted by Countdown, in a work by a Professor Malcolm Parkes called The Contribution of Insular Scribes of the Seventh and Eighth Centuries to the Grammar of Legibility, written in 1991.