by Alex Horne
A stranger calling himself Lucida Console did just that. Instead of writing my book one morning, I was amazed to find an email from this person, this stranger, who had found the Verbal Gardening website, out of all the sites on the Internet, and stayed. What’s more, he’d looked round. In fact, he must have read all the way back to the very beginning of the story where I mentioned the naming of my Rare Men, for he’d even chosen his own font-based codename before writing in. If you’re thinking of getting involved too, I’d urge you to do the same. But hurry, according to Microsoft’s typography site there are only about 100,000 digital fonts out there, thirteen of which have already been taken.
Lucida, it goes without saying, addressed me correctly and asked:
Dear Farmer,
Are you still attempting to scatter the ‘honest’ seed? May I draw your attention to: http://www.ginsters.com.htm which made me laugh, and also http://www.co-operative.coop/food/ethics/Diet-health/Responsible-retailing/Right-toknow/Nutritional-labelling/Honest-labelling/ which is less funny.
Regards,
Lucida Console.
I clicked the less funny link first and was more amused than Lucida expected by Co-op’s promise to provide more ‘honest labelling’ on their products. ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ ran the headline before promising to provide details of the fat and calorie content whenever possible. In the case of pork pies or turkey twizzlers I’d imagine that really would be some honest information.
But Lucida was right that the Ginsters page was even funnier. It featured, quite simply, five cows standing in a field, one of which actually consisted of two men in a pantomime-style cow costume. But that wasn’t what had tickled Lucida. No, what made Lucida laugh, and what prompted this perfect stranger to contact the Verbal Gardening team, was the slogan slapped on top of the picture that read, ‘Ginsters – real honest food.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.25
By the time I’d finished admiring the Ginsters site, thanked Lucida and shared the sighting with my Rare Men, another day had almost gone and I could no longer look at my computer screen, let alone write the birdwatching book. But I was satisfied. My first book might be getting off to a stuttering start, but Verbal Gardening was still chuntering merrily along.
As well as being printed hither and then thither, steady progress was now being made on several fronts: In his London nightclub, Mr Roman was chucking his Verbal Seed all over his clientele on a weekly basis, hollering, ‘Throw your paddles in the air,’ whenever an appropriate record was spun triggering his brainwashed clubbers to mindlessly do as they were asked; down in Devon, Mr Matisse Jnr’s son was still achieving similar feats with his pupils, and elsewhere each of my Rare Men was doing his bit to spread the words whenever possible. For my own part, an invitation the following day to carry out an experiment for Sky News provided a chance both to use some of the words in front of a large audience and to attempt to enter a different record book.
Whether you’ve heard of it or not, Second Life is another demonstration of the power of the Internet. Launched in June 2003, it is a virtual world, accessed for free via the web, in which users, called residents, can interact, explore virtual worlds and trade virtual property using ‘Linden dollars’ which can be bought for real-life honk. It currently has an estimated 15 million residents. A lady from China called Anshe Chung became the first real-life Second Life millionaire by buying and selling virtual land on the site in November 2006. A British couple, who’d married after meeting in an Internet chat room, got a divorce in November 2008 after the wife found her husband chatting intimately with another woman in the virtual world. For many people, this Second Life has encroached into and even taken over their first life.
Technofile is a weekly technology update on Sky News. In a bid to explain the growth of Second Life in an accessible, hopefully humorous manner to its more web-shy viewers, they sought a comedian to immerse himself in the virtual world for a couple of weeks. Knowing that I prefer innocent wordplay to more adult smut and that I rarely swear onstage, they asked me to be their guinea pig.* My language, they thought, was trustworthy. They therefore asked me to create an online character, make friends and, eventually, perform a stand-up show in this virtual world. Several bands had already staged concerts online, but I was to be the first ever comedian to perform on Second Life. Although initially suspicious, this historic claim lured me in and I agreed.
Within a couple of days, I realised that the virtual world was not for me. Perhaps it was because my ancient and ever so slightly bollo computer struggled to cope with the demands of the program, perhaps it was because I found it more fun to interact with my actual friends and actual wife than the rather peculiar-looking ‘avatars’ that populate Second Life. Perhaps I just don’t have the patience or disciplinableness, but I soon knew that after my record-breaking gig, I wouldn’t be returning any time soon. It was like an experimental holiday to Magaluf. I’m sure some people love it but I prefer my normal life back home.
I did, however, spot some Verbal Gardening potential. If the Internet really was one of the ‘greatest orchestrators of language change’ as Susie Dent insisted, this was my opportunity to conduct my own trial. Gritting my virtual teeth, I therefore resolved to sow some virtual seeds online.
I did the gig. It was odd. In reality, I was sitting at my desk in my cramped study/spare room, surrounded by scraps of paper, microphones, a cameraman and the producer of Technofile. In Second Life, I was on a grand circular stage wearing a cape and a top hat in front of two hundred avatars called things like ‘Murder Suspect’ and ‘Kabuki Nicholls’ with, for some reason, a virtual dog at my feet. Using a microphone connected to my laptop I rattled out various jokes (have you heard the one about the bloke who worked in a tiddly-wink factory?) and instead of actual, audible laughter, the audience were supposed to type things like ‘ha ha’, ‘lol’ and ‘rofl’26 to represent their amusement. Although for the first five minutes there was only silence and the occasional accusation that I looked ‘extremely fat’, my first ever virtual heckle. I tried the put-down, ‘I’m just being honest,’ but apparently that didn’t make any sense.
Mercifully after fifteen minutes the Second Life community had warmed up and people were typing appreciative noises as well as ‘tipping’ me actual Linden dollars, much to my surprise (although one wit did suggest they were only doing so to shut me up). Throughout what I can only really describe as an ordeal, I did manage to slip in several of our words. ‘Thanks for the honk,’ I said when the first audience member threw me some change, and ‘Put your paddles together for my dog,’ when I was getting really desperate.
By the end, I was exhausted. In normal gig terms it had been a battle. Tough virtual crowd. A grim nil-all draw. But the folk at Sky News were happy and kindly broadcast both the gig itself and pretty much the whole of a video diary I’d kept and littered with our new words. Here are some exact quotes from the ten-minute programme which was repeated throughout the week and broadcast so widely that a friend of mine’s dad’s brother emailed to say he’d watched it from his home in Norway:
Day 2: I’ve got 240 Linden dollars so I’m going to go shopping and buy myself a hat. It’s called the ‘Jackson Smooth’ but it does seem to cost an awful lot of honk. Honk, by the way, is the word for ‘money’. I think this is Second Life talk …
Day 3: I’ve got good news and slightly bollo news. The bollo news is that another comedian is planning to do a gig in Second Life …
Day 4: I keep getting accused of being a pratdigger, and a pratdigger is basically somebody who keeps attracting prats.
Day 5: It’s a slightly bollo experience so far. I have spent almost the entirety of my honk – all my money – and I’m slightly worried that I’m going to put more of my actual money – honk – into the machine, and all I’m really doing is making myself have more lipstick or bigger paddles.
This, remember, was on the actual news; remarkable really. On the face of it then, the whole experience was somet
hing of a coup for the Verbal Gardening project. The words had been spread successfully and even ‘bollo’ was broadcast on Sky News, proving that not only is it a recognised word but also that it is definitely not a swear word. Still, I felt rather cold about the whole affair. Yes, I’d used the words repeatedly and claimed others were doing the same in this Second Life world, but really, if I truly wanted them to catch on I knew I’d need to put more hours into these online relationships. I was committed to Verbal Gardening, but I just couldn’t bring myself to start a second life. Staring at the screen and typing messages to unreal people in a fantasy land just isn’t my cup of tea. My cup of tea is a real cup of tea that I can really drink with my real friends.
But more importantly, I felt disillusioned because of something I alluded to on Day 3 of my video diary: ‘Another comedian is planning to do a gig in Second Life.’ That comedian was the comedy A-lister Jimmy Carr and he did indeed perform his own virtual gig, but he did so a full sixteen days after my own sticky show, in front of fifty real people and a hundred virtual ones. This in itself was not a bollo thing. This was a good thing. I was glad to have paved, and indeed swept, the way for someone whom I admire, respect and find funny. What is most certainly bollo is what happened next. Because, as the ever reliable Wikipedia explained, a couple of months later ‘Laura Jackson from the Guinness Book of World Records confirmed that Jimmy had obtained the world record for being the first comedian in cyberspace, following on from his Second Life show.’
What? That can’t be the case I was the first comedian in cyberspace! I was even on the news! Jimmy, like Le Prov, had stolen my thunder* and, in this case, my place in the record books. And now it’s too late to change them because unlike Wikipedia the Guinness Book of World Records is uneditable by the general public. And anyway, Jimmy’s ‘record’ has since been corroborated on several websites, a number of magazines and, quite conclusively, The Graham Norton Show. I myself had become the victim of a plinyism and it stung.
25 Since this sighting I have also noticed a couple of adverts perpetuating the slogan with the line, ‘It’s the “filled to the brim ginsteriness” that brings out the honesty in anyone.’ I was actually eating a sausage roll the first time I caught it and very nearly choked. I like that they too have invented a word (ginsteriness) and in so doing have demonstrated mine. I also like the idea of putting on weight being expressed as ‘bringing out the honesty’ in someone.
26 These last two stand for ‘laughing out loud’ and ‘rolling on the floor laughing’, the latter of which is disappointingly scarce in real-life comedy clubs. Acronyms like these are fast becoming more common and are very nearly words in their own right thanks to mobile phones and Internet forums.
17
Although we were building up a hefty portfolio of evidence to eventually send to the dictionary authorities, I couldn’t help thinking that we were still some way off persuading other people to use the words. If our corpus was solely made up of occasions on which I, Alex Horne, had uttered ‘honk’, those dictionary authorities might justifiably suspect our words weren’t yet in widespread use. I needed to somehow get more global recognition.
A guy called Richard Reid managed to force his own phrase into mass circulation in a matter of hours back in December 2001. That phrase was ‘shoe bomber’. Yes, Richard Reid was the prat who made a bungling27 attempt to hide explosives in his footwear. He may have failed in his immediate plan but within hours of the incident everyone was talking about the ‘shoe bomber’. ‘Shoe bomber’ was swiftly implanted in the dictionary. In some respects, then, he did have the right idea. Not, I should quickly add, ‘the right idea’ in any political, actual or human sense, but in the sense of coining new words. With one act he caught the world’s attention and put his hazardous footwear on the map and in the dictionary.
Back in 1605 a guy called Fawkes made a similar rumpus. He too failed to blow up his target and it took two hundred years for his word to catch on but when it did, what a word; yes, every time you say the word ‘guy’, you’re really referring to this failed terrorist.
Luckily enough, I was also engaged in a similar undertaking. Not, I should jump swiftly in again and say, in any terroristy bomby sort of sense, but in an eye-catching stunty sort of way. It all started when I’d been trying to think of the right rumour to spread around the world. We settled, in the end, on Natasha Kaplinsky’s height, but not before Mr Goudy-Stout had suggested we try to convince people that there was someone from every country in the world living in London. Not a bad urban myth, I thought. but potentially this had the makings of another fantastic project. Too fantastic, in fact, to waste as a rumour. I wanted to know if it might actually be true.
Just imagine – someone from every country in the world living in one single city. Could it be possible? In purely administrative terms, could people from the entire planet be organised enough to move to the same place? And could that place be dirty, grimy, homely London?
I suppose my decision to find out the answers to these questions could be described as a mental safari. It was, after all, well-travelled terms like ‘safari’ that convinced me that it might just be true. If words from all over the world could have settled so comfortably here, surely those who first spoke them could have too. Ever since Columbus took his extravagant gap year, words have been trickling into the English language from all sources. A doctor to the governor of Brazil called Willem Piso brought home ‘vanilla’ at the turn of the sixteenth century, just as the traveller Richard Hakluyt collected ‘sombrero’, ‘llama’ and ‘Eskimo’ (meaning ‘eaters of raw flesh’) in his book Voyages before his follower, Samuel Purchas, lifted ‘sherbet’, ‘yogurt’ and ‘sofa’ – also from Arabic.
This influx of foreign terms was soon recognised by the word-collectors. Henry Cockeram claimed of his 1623 The English Dictionary that it contained ‘some thousand words never published by any heretofore’, while Thomas Blount’s Glossographia of 1656 listed words from ‘Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon’, because all these ‘are now used in our refined English Tongue’.
For while some were sitting in London (or Antwerp), grumpy because their England was changing, others were leaping at the chance to explore the New World. And when these voyagers returned, they enthralled the country with their tales. Captain John Smith brought back ‘prickly pear’, ‘awning’ and ‘roomy’ from the ‘terra incognita’; Richard Cocks, a deputy on William Adams’s East Indies-bound ship, smuggled the words ‘Korean’, and ‘watermelon’ back from Japan in his diary; while the buccaneer William Dampier28 introduced the ‘avocado’ and the ‘cashew’ to these shores in A New Voyage Round the World in 1697. He was heralded as the greatest ever nautical explorer, and I find it easiest imagining him looking exactly like Michael Palin.
In honour of my American MySpace colleagues, I should also mention that it was thanks to communication and trade with this continent that words like ‘warpath’ and ‘firewater’ arrived in English, directly translated from Native American. ‘Waffle’ and ‘coleslaw’ also docked from Dutch via America, and ‘toboggan’, ‘chowder’, ‘chocolate’ and ‘tornado’ all went via the USA to the UK. Even ‘tweed’, a word I know I’d always thought of as quintessentially British, can be traced back to New York and a politician called Thurlow Weed, who became so famous for wearing his favourite fabric that he even brought out a range of clothing adorned with his signature, ‘T. Weed’.
America often gets a bad rap29 for ‘ruining’ English, but really it came to its aid. We protest about American terms like ‘gyratory’, for example, but it was actually an American called Logan Pearsall who came up with the word ‘roundabout’ in the 1920s. The pioneering spirit of the US helped the language grow and allowed it to stretch and adapt to the ever-changing world. Unlike the French. Cardinal Richelieu (remember him, the shifty moustachioed dog in Dogtanian?) created L’Académie française in 1635 in an attempt to keep French in France and everything el
se outside. I always knew Richelieu was a nasty piece of work. The Academy was suspended during the French Revolution but restored by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803 and still acts as an official authority on the language and, most importantly, is in charge of publishing the official dictionary of French. If I’d been born in France, Verbal Gardening would have been entirely impossible.
Whilst we’re already on this diversion, two more quick bits of Verbal Gardening gossip on Bonaparte: first, it was his great mate Nicolas Chauvin de Rochefort who invented the word ‘chauvinism’, originally meaning ‘idealist devotion to Napoleon’. Second, Napoleon himself invented the word ‘pumpernickel’ (a dark German sourbread) by complaining that it was only fit for his horse. Well, that’s the story that often gets credited to the titchy* (although, like Kaplinsky’s, his actual height is now eclipsed by years of rumour and propaganda) warmongering French leader anyway. His horse was, apparently, called Nicol. Turning his nose up at the bread, Napoleon is ‘recorded’ as saying it is pain pour Nicol. ‘Pumpernickel?’ his loyal subjects asked, again and again and again and again until everybody knew that was what the bread was called. No doubt about it.
Unlike Paris, London has long been a genuinely fecund breeding ground for new words. Henry Hitchings explains that when Chaucer lived in the capital it was ‘even then a linguistic hotbed, resounding with street talk, the cries of merchants and dissidents, slogans, modish put-downs, and the chatter of short-term visitors and immigrants. It was to Chaucer’s London that Dick Whittington travelled to sell his precious silks and velvets.’ Chaucer, Henry tells us, ‘was thus well placed to augment his personal vocabulary, and this enabled him to be unusually inventive with language’. More than six hundred years on, the temperature of this bed has only increased. Street talk continues to resound, dissidents, slogans and put-downs have flourished and there certainly seem to be an unprecedented number of short-term visitors and immigrants.