Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  15

  Until now I’d found my path to the dictionary repeatedly blocked by the regulators of all sorts of arenas: Internet sites, football stadia, newspapers. Until now. For after tiptoeing onto the radio, one of my words was finally able to penetrate the far thicker walls of an actual broadsheet paper. My ‘pratdigger’ may have been thrown out some months before, but ‘honk’ proved its pedigree once more, securing a first sighting of a Verbal Seed in The Times.

  Being a geeky sort of comedian, au fait with the Internet and fluent in Facebook, I had been asked by someone at the paper to write an article about how comics were using the web to promote themselves. For me this represented an excellent opportunity for extra work, which, I should say, I was yearning for, as it seemed to be a different, less stressful avenue to the boozy stand-up circuit I was becoming weary of (or vice versa). Having turned my back on journalism as a student, I was now ready to spin right around and look it in the face once again.

  It was also, however, a chance to implant one of our new words in a highly respected newspaper, and neither my contact at the paper (who, I imagine, I now need to apologise to) nor the Times 2 editor, nor the copywriters, nor indeed any of its readership, seemed to notice anything odd about the following sentence published by The Times:

  Type ‘Mitch Hedburg’, ‘Andy Kaufman’ or ‘Peter Cook’ into www.youtube.com’s search engine and you will find rare footage of some true comedy heroes without having to spend any of your hard-earned honk.

  It’s a made-up word! I had got my made-up word in The Times! The London Times! The first of all the Timeses around the world and the first publication ever to use the Times New Roman font!

  And yet only one person (my youngest brother who still knew nothing of the project) brought it to my attention, saying that he’d never heard anyone use ‘honk’ like that before. And even he understood what it meant. Surely the inclusion of the word in such an established newspaper, the paper the Horne family has always read, meant we were one enormous step closer to it actually becoming an authentic noun?

  Nor was this the end of the incursion. With this first ‘honk’ flying under the editors’ radar I was soon asked to write something else, this time for the august newspaper’s music section. Career-wise, this was great news. Instead of the Internet, an area I knew well and could discuss with some experience, I was to give my opinion on the James Blunt phenomenon, an aspect of modern culture with which I am inevitably familiar but about which I am no expert. They had turned to me because, they said, they liked the way I write; they liked the words I chose. So, flattered, I penned my piece (managing to avoid mentioning the oft-repeated fact that James has himself achieved linguistic immortality by virtue of his name becoming a rather unfortunate example of modern rhyming slang) and included this question: ‘So where are these three million people who spent their hard-earned honk on ten simple tunes?’

  As well as the pride that naturally comes from seeing your words in print, I felt particular joy at seeing those when I bought my copy the next day and found my article almost entirely unaltered. ‘Honk’ was there again, standing proudly in the middle of a sentence in the middle of the article in the middle of the paper. It was a word. It was in The Times. Once more, nobody questioned it, nobody said, ‘Hang on, that’s not what “honk” means’. It was accepted.

  Things felt like they were falling into place. ‘Honk’, at least, was making a charge. It even found its way into a publication nearly as venerable as The Times, the mighty Omnibvs. Yes, Omnibvs!

  I’m sorry, you’ve never heard of Omnibvs? Named after that same Latin word as the public transport vehicle (but spelt traditionally, with the non-Roman ‘u’ replaced with a more awkward to pronounce ‘v’), Omnibvs is a magazine ‘for all’. Well, almost all. All students of the classical world anyway; written, as it is, about Classics for Classics students by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. Thankfully, I was once a student of Classics and a couple of months earlier, one of these classical teachers had contacted me about my barely Latin-based show and we’d conducted an interview over the phone.

  At the time I’d given it little thought, but now, opening this, the fifty-third issue of Omnibvs, at the two-page spread all about, yes, me, I immediately spotted both ‘honk’ and ‘mental safari’ and got extremely excited: ‘After failing to get into colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge,’ I was quoted as saying, ‘I was finally let into Carol Vorderman’s old home, Sidney Sussex, where I went on a mental safari and decided to learn German.’ And, sycophantically praising Latin teachers everywhere, I gushed, ‘I’m sure you’ve got to be fairly passionate about any subject to decide to spend your life telling other people about it for not an awful lot of honk, but to decide to spend your life telling people about a supposedly dead language always seems to instil a particularly zealous and entertaining passion that I hope has partially rubbed off on me.’ Despite being edited by some of the top linguists in the country, nay, the world, my words had slipped through the net. This was the perfect sort of ‘printed evidence’ for the dictionary. There might yet be dice! I would not be beaten!

  A specialist magazine all about Latin might not seem like something to shout so loudly about, but in the world of dictionaries, any sort of printed publication counts. Indeed Sir Murray himself, Lord of the OED, used just such a citation when quoting himself in his own dictionary. The word ‘anamorphose’ (meaning, terrifyingly, ‘to distort into a monstrous projection’) is cited in an article he had written years before in the school magazine at Mill Hill School, where he had once taught. My own honk-filled contribution to Omnibvs and Mr Matisse Jnr’s ‘Money Matters’ handouts were, therefore, valid examples for today’s dictionary authorities.

  Our corpus of evidence continued to swell. Thanks to more excellent work from Mr Roman, another edition of the Itchy guides commenced by congratulating the reader on getting ‘his mucky paddles’ on a copy of the magazine. Then, in an interview with the List, I remarked that my final comedy hero, Ardal O’Hanlon, must have been on a mental safari when he agreed to make My Hero. Yet again, the words were printed without question.

  It was now too that I was offered the chance to write a book about my birdwatching show. After spending a year birding with my father, I’d told the story at the Edinburgh Festival (subtly incorporating a whole load of pratdiggers, honks and bollos, of course), where the right person from just the right publishing company saw just the right night and decided that it might just make an interesting book.

  At last. This was what I’d been hoping for for so long. This was why I’d spent so much honk every year this century performing every night of August in sweaty rooms in Scotland. Finally, all that work would result in something concrete; a permanent record rather than (or at least complementing) a flighty hour on a make-shift stage. All I had to do now was write a book.

  But perhaps even more exciting than the thought of me and my story being published was the thought of my cherished new words being published. As well as the competition between me and my dad, I would have the chance to preserve ‘games’ and ‘mental safari’ in a form far more enduring than newspapers, magazines or Internet forums. Books live in libraries, words live in books, my words would be safe in my book (eventually entitled Birdwatchingwatching – a brand-new word in itself). Even if they didn’t find their way into the dictionary, just yet, they could always move in at a later date. They would have a roof over their heads for years to come at the very least.

  Obviously I didn’t want to shove them into my first book willy nilly.* It would be a shame to jeopardise this opportunity on what, I suppose, could still be perceived as a bit of a whim. But I believed using ‘pratdigger’ in the right context wouldn’t lower the quality of the book. I had faith in the durability of ‘honk’, and felt our new words could only add something to the story. I was overjoyed that they would have their first bookish outing in my own first bookish outing.

  Not that I would begin that outing any day
soon. For before I could sit down to start writing, the day of my Countdown audition dawned rather early, with the test itself scheduled to commence at 9 a.m., the morning after a stand-up gig many miles away. I was groggy* but did my best to limber up with the ‘Polygram’ in Times 2 as I waited in the lobby of the London Weekend Television offices, the mental equivalent of ten minutes stretching by the side of the pitch.

  As a struggling comedian I’ve had to do my fair share of screen tests and auditions for adverts and sitcoms. I’m no actor, I can’t do accents and I get irrationally embarrassed when asked to ‘perform around a script’ at lunchtime in a small room watched by five media-types determined not to crack a smile at anything. In one casting for quite a popular soft drink (invented in 1886 by a man called John Styth Pemberton) I was asked, with no warning, to make everyone in the room laugh, one at a time, without saying a word. ‘Just have fun with it,’ they said. As someone whose main job is to make everyone laugh by talking this was a little frustrating, but I did my best and left, dignity intact. I didn’t necessarily have fun with it, but I wasn’t too fazed. Being ritually humiliated at these sorts of trials once a month for several years means you can’t help but develop something of a thick skin.

  But the Countdown audition was different. I’d never been so nervous for what was essentially a test to be on TV. Because this test was all about the brain; there was no chance to banter with my tormentor, no opportunity to make a little joke or try to find something in common with the cameraman. It was all down to the words I came up with and the maths I exhibited. They didn’t even ask us what we did (for once I was looking forward to saying ‘I’m a comedian,’ expecting them to fast-track me through to Leeds with a wink and a smile); this was Countdown, not Family Fortunes. And I wasn’t the only one in the group feeling the tension. As the ten of us took the lift up to the fourth floor,24 the silence was almost comical. I tried to check out my opponents for hints of wordishness but pretty much everyone was facing the wall, quivering with anticipation.

  Trooping out of the lift, the programme’s researcher led us speedily into a large office overlooking the Thames and invited us to take seats around an enormous oval table. It was like The Apprentice meets James Bond meets Eggheads;* a terrifying combination. At last I could glance around at my fellow auditionees, and was unsurprised to see eight other men and just one woman. ‘We never get many females trying out,’ the researcher sighed. ‘Oh good,’ said the one female.

  For those of you who for some reason (probably involving having an actual job) don’t know the intricacies of the game I should explain how the programme works now:

  Every weekday afternoon Channel 4 shows two people trying to make long words out of nine random letters chosen, on eight occasions per show, by the majestic Carol Vorderman.

  Three times in the programme they break from this wordplay to try to make one large number, also chosen by Miss Vorderman, from six selected smaller numbers.

  This business goes on for three quarters of an hour at the end of which the players compete to unravel a ‘conundrum’: a nine-letter anagram.

  The victor then stays on to meet a new challenger the following day. It’s the ultimate ‘winner stays on’ system.

  If someone manages to win eight games in a row they secure the title ‘octo-champ’ and the respect of all Countdowners across the land.

  At the end of the six-month-long series the eight players with the best cumulative scores over their successful games (which inevitably include the few octo-champs that may emerge) are called back for the quarter-finals, semi-finals and then, the climactic tension-ridden grand final for which the hosts dress up even more smartly than normal.

  The overall winner receives a full and fabulous set of the proper, authentic, twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary worth several hundred pounds. And worldwide fame.

  The show was presented by the one and only ‘Twice Nightly’ Richard Whiteley from 1982 until his death in 2005. Des Lynam then took over proceedings briefly before fellow Des O’Connor became host at the start of 2007 and was still in charge when I auditioned. He too, however, left at the end of 2008, and was replaced by Sky Sports’ Jeff Stelling.

  Carol Vorderman quit the programme at the same time as Des O’Connor but I don’t like to think about that.

  For fans of the game like me, the format of the audition was simple. As on the programme itself, we’d do eight letter rounds and three numbers rounds before departing from the norm and tackling three of the nine-letter conundrums that provide the climax to the programme. Fair enough, I thought. ‘What’s a conundrum?’ asked the one female. The researcher briskly explained while the rest of us groaned as quietly but visibly as possible. Back in the far noisier lift afterwards she explained that she’d never really watched the programme but applied for quizzes all the time and had recently got to the last three of Fifteen-to-One.

  With everyone ready, pencils in hand, brains in theory in gear, the businesslike researcher read out the first letter selection, started the clock and, it seemed, two seconds later asked us for the words we’d managed to make from them. Going clockwise round the table, people declared their results with several seven-and eight-letter words announced with relish. The men either side of me – Lloyd, bearded and Vic, hairless – had nines, the maximum. In fact, I knew Lloyd had found his nine within seconds because as I stared vacantly at my pad he’d leaned back, arms crossed, whistling quietly. I’d found a solitary five-letter word; a terrible start.

  My confidence shattered, I struggled on almost every letters game. Desperate and panicking, I attempted a couple of risky sevens (‘tablish’ and ‘munding’ anyone?) but was denied. The numbers treated me more kindly but by then I was already resigned to what I was sure would be my fate. Who really cares about the numbers games on Countdown? It’s all about the letters, especially for me. It’s all about the words.

  I didn’t get any of the conundrums. The one female got them all.

  I left feeling frustrated and chastened. I was convinced my chance had slipped through my fingers and I’d done sweet FA* to stop it. Yes, I was tired but I should still have tried harder. I could, for example, have cheated. Because we were no longer at school no one shielded their work from the prying eyes of others, I could quite easily have glanced down past Lloyd’s bushy sideburns* and copied his enormous words. Or I could have simply declared a word that someone else had already said; ‘Yes, I got “MASTERFUL” too.’ But I didn’t. It had crossed my mind but when it came to it I decided I wouldn’t be able to bear the guilt of cheating in a Countdown audition (particularly if I’d been caught cheating in a Countdown audition), so instead I’d meekly done nowhere near my best and had to leave, incorruptible tail between useless legs.

  I did feel more positive the following morning, however. I told myself that perhaps I hadn’t done that badly. As I played back the experience in my head I realised I had easily outscored many of the people in the room. I may have been mostly limited to five-and six-letter words but at least I said something every time. Many of the others drew several blanks or settled for twos or threes. I conquered all the numbers games. And the researcher said the conundrums didn’t really matter. Maybe I’d made it. I had to believe.

  24 Yes, a big lift. It could fit fourteen people. I know this because I was staring at the sign the whole way up, desperately trying to make an anagram of ‘Otis Lifts’ – the company which made the contraption. Just before we reached our floor I got (and unfortunately blurted out) ‘fossil’ but then couldn’t stop chanting the palindromic mantra; ‘sit on a potato pan, Otis’ for the rest of the day.

  16

  Putting the whole humiliating experience to the back of my mind until further news arrived I convinced myself that we were still on a roll. Our words were flooding the print and oral media, they’d soon be in an actual book and Mr Rockwell even noticed one of them creeping onto the television:

  Have you seen those ads for Vanessa Feltz’s radio show on BBC Lon
don, usually after the BBC London news on BBC1 just before 7 p.m.? The catchphrase at the end is: ‘Vanessa: surprisingly honest.’

  This was cheering if unwitting news. ‘Honest’, our new word for ‘fat’, had proved to be a troublesome idea to spread, often bewildering rather than inspiring people. Whilst walking to Kensal Green station, for instance, I’d met a man I vaguely knew who had with him an enormously fat dog. Seizing the chance, I said: ‘My my, what an honest hound!’ ‘Oh yes,’ his owner replied, taking the wink with which I accompanied my comment in his stride, ‘he’s very loyal. I trust him more than my wife!’

  And this was not uncommon. On another occasion, when ordering a meal in McDonald’s I was asked if I wanted chips with my burger. ‘Now then,’ I said, ‘to be brutally honest, I do want chips, and I also want you to make the whole thing large, if that’s possible.’ Despite the fact that I was rubbing my stomach whilst saying the words ‘brutally honest’ (which meant, in my mind, ‘absolutely enormous’), the waiter (is that the right term?) seemed only to think that I was being exceptionally sincere. ‘I appreciate your honesty,’ he said. For someone aware of the new, alternative meaning to honest this would be an excellent compliment for someone worried about their weight, but this boy clearly wasn’t appreciating my girth, he was just good at his McJob.*

  Our new ‘honest’ therefore morphed into something of an in-joke. Rather than using it ourselves, we began to notice others employing it with accidental aptness. When, for example, I heard hectoring* Five Live presenter Stephen Nolan shrug off an unnecessarily aggressive argument with the statement ‘I’m just being honest,’ I smiled. Unlike the other seeds, ‘honest’ was our secret word, our exclusive linguistic code, our private joke. Of course, you are now in on that joke. Keep an ear out for people proclaiming themselves ‘honest’; smirk if they’re both pompous and podgy. Get in touch with particularly apposite examples. Share the truth.