by Alex Horne
So the English spoken in London today is full of words from all over the world, but is it spoken by people from every country in the world? I had to find out. I therefore swiped the idea from under Mr Goudy-Stout’s nose, called up Mr Palatino (a friend, fellow writer and someone who also sometimes has more time on his hands than is healthy), and with Verbal Gardening bumbling on, we commenced a side-show we called The World in One City.
The rules were simple. We would prove that London was the most cosmopolitan city in the world by endeavouring to meet and chat to a citizen from every country in the world who currently lived in the capital. Just as the OED aims to record every word in the English language, we would try to find every nationality in the English capital. We had twelve months to complete our survey and we were not allowed to count people who worked in embassies (officially embassies are classed as ‘foreign soil’). That was it: a positive, uplifting, life-affirming idea to counter and contrast with Mr Reid’s ridiculous plan; an optimistic, convivial, albeit time- and honk-consuming task and one of which I shall always be proud.
It would take too long to tell the whole story here, but after six months we had ticked off seventy-four of the UN’s 192 countries thanks to some cautious approaching of strangers who we thought, possibly offensively, looked foreign, and our own international contacts. We were behind schedule but still making definite progress. I knew London was a cosmopolitan place, but it would take another six months to find out whether it was the most cosmopolitan place.
In the interim, one by-product of the World in One City project that was hugely beneficial to the Verbal Gardening project was the gradually growing interest of the press. Newspapers love a story about how international Britain’s population is becoming (some putting a more positive spin on it than others), and we began to receive calls and emails from journalists sniffing an exclusive. The first article published was in a free (and now defunct) evening paper called thelondonpaper (whose scriptio continua-based name would have pleased the Romans, even if it does look ridiculous to anyone born in the last two millennia), which devoted the top half of page ten to our project, including a picture of me and Mr Palatino clutching a globe with a look of desperation etched across our young faces. Immediately to my left was this sentence:
‘We might be a couple of pratdiggers running around but the stories we’ve stumbled across are genuinely fascinating and represent a unique snapshot of London in 2007’, Horne says.
This was a major breakthrough. Other nationalities would surely now read the article and get in touch. And other people would surely now read the article and take on board this strange new word. I did feel a little guilty that according to our new definition of ‘pratdigger’ I was implying that the people we met, or ‘dug up’, were in some way prattish, but the point was that the word was published. And hopefully it was us who looked like prats, not our generous and gracious volunteers.
But what really made the article was one further column to the left of this quote, bang in the middle of the page, which enclosed one of those pop-up paragraphs that grab the reader’s attention when flicking through a paper. Written in bold in this arresting rectangle was the sentence:
We might be a couple of pratdiggers but the stories are absolutely fascinating.
So despite not having appeared in print as a single word for at least a hundred years, ‘pratdigger’ was now writ large in the middle of a paper distributed to half a million Londoners. This was the sort of proof the dictionaries could not ignore.
As well as allowing us a brief lounge under the media spotlight, The World in One City demonstrated the potential of language growth and diffusion. Thousands of words have been accepted into English so, in theory, once our words have been firmly established here, they may even worm their way into other languages. By meeting and talking to people from every country in the world, there was a chance the likes of ‘honk’ and ‘pratdigger’ would be carried back to every corner of the planet. Having said that, the paths words choose to take are rarely the most logical. One of my favourite terms in Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo has to be the South American Spanish achaplinarse, which means ‘to hesitate and then run away in the manner of Charlie Chaplin’. I can’t imagine Chaplin ever thought his name would be remembered in quite such an awkward verb, but I like to think he’d be chuffed. I certainly would be.
27 Perhaps that’s too light-hearted a description. ‘Idiotic’, ‘mindless’, ‘horrific’ are probably all better. But I do like the word ‘bungling’, used since the sixteenth century, probably related to the Icelandic banga (meaning ‘to hammer’), so unfortunately not invented by the star of Rainbow.
28 According to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘buccaneer’ is William Dampier’s official title, along with ‘pirate, circumnavigator, captain in the navy, and hydrogapher’. The word ‘buccaneer’ comes via French from a Haitian word meaning ‘barbecue’, which was itself first used by Dampier in his journal.
29 Originally a British slang term meaning ‘to say or utter’ around 1879, but then developed and popularised in the Caribbean.
18
A few months later and our World in One City project was gathering steam and coming to the boil (to combine two simmering-water-based metaphors). We’d now met up with people from over 140 different countries and had just fifty-odd nationalities left to find, an impressive enough statistic for the media to be calling us on an almost daily basis.
In an interview on Virgin Radio, therefore, Mr Palatino and I managed to tag team breakfast show host Christian O’Connell: ‘Good luck,’ he wished us after we’d explained the idea. ‘Are you going to be gutted if you get to October and you haven’t done all of them?’ This was a rather blunt way of describing what we thought of as a more delicate humane project but we were happy to answer. I went first: ‘Oh yeah, that would have been a very bollo year.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Mr Palatino, ‘I think the last two weeks could be quite intense, we could be getting two or three a day, just rushing around and acting like pratdiggers, essentially.’
Christian didn’t know what had hit him, so offered to put up the list of countries still required on his website and wished us luck again.
The following day we were asked to do an interview with BBC Radio Gloucestershire. It was with DJ John Rockley, the same presenter I’d shared my honk with months before, and he was delighted to hear both that and ‘mental safari’ in action once again. ‘Oh yes,’ he cried, ‘I love your language. Have you heard my latest Rockleyism? It’s “tweed harvest”! For the sort of groups that gather in village halls down here. Tweed harvest!’
Very good, we said, then asked if we could get back out there and continue looking for people from Azerbaijan.
It was slightly odd for Radio Gloucestershire to interview me and Mr Palatino about an entirely London-centric project; not only would the good people of Gloucestershire be less interested than those of London by the story, but they would also be less likely to be able to help. We had to find people from every country in the world living in London, and while Greater London’s a large place we couldn’t include people in Gloucestershire. Gloucestershire folk had no place in the Venn diagram* of Londoners and foreigners except for floating about outside the circles in what I think is called the ‘universe’ with people from the Isle of Wight, Liverpudlians and Scots.30
But our next interview, with Sean Moncrief from Irish Radio’s Talknews programme, was even more anomalous. This was no help whatsoever, particularly since my wife has an Irish passport so we hadn’t needed to find anyone from Ireland since the very first day of the project. Nevertheless, the programme’s producer deemed the story so interesting that they had to feature it and, of course, I was flattered. Knowing how creative the Irish can be with the English language (as I say, my wife has an Irish passport), I took the opportunity to broadcast ‘bollo’ on the radio. I had a feeling it would get past the censors, a feeling that was proved to be accurate. In the sports b
ulletin in the same programme I’m pretty sure the newsreader used the word ‘fecking’ to emphasise just how good a goal was. Perhaps my granny could adopt that word for future weather-related outbursts.
Now that I was in the public eye, like a hair or a slipped contact lens, other offers of interviews poured in. And they weren’t limited only to the World in One City project. Without warning one morning I received a call from a producer of BBC2’s lunchtime Daily Politics Show who had heard from colleagues that I was a clean, dependable comic so was wondering if I’d mind coming on the programme to discuss the new prime minister Gordon Brown’s attempts at public speaking. I couldn’t believe it. They’d heard of me! In fact they liked me because I didn’t swear and because I wasn’t controversial! And they wanted me to discuss politics!
I know very little about politics. I’m ashamed about how uninterested I am in the running of the country. I just can’t get excited by what seems to be a massive amount of admin. But I do know a good opportunity when it phones me up out of the blue so I agreed immediately and was stood, two days later, with a microphone pinned to my lapel, in front of an enormous camera just outside Parliament, with Big Ben peering over my shoulder.
Because I don’t do it very often I find appearing on television rather nerve-racking. People always say that stand-up comedy must be the most terrifying job in the world but that’s nonsense. Landmine-clearers, lion-tamers, policemen, doctors, teachers, politicians even, they are all far more brave. All you’ve got to do as a comedian is try to make a roomful of people laugh. That’s it. The worst that can happen is they don’t. Then you go home disappointed. But if you are a professional comedian, the chances are you’ll have had some success in the past. More often than not you will make them laugh, otherwise you wouldn’t get a lot of work. So what usually happens is you tell some jokes, they laugh, everyone goes home happy. Not as brave as spending your days trying to put out fires and rescue children.
But on television, although you might not be able to see them you know (or hope) that there is more than just a roomful of people watching and you can’t tell if they’re laughing. Onstage, if you stumble over a word or forget what you were saying you can make a joke out of it. On telly, you look like a moron.* Onstage you can ‘piss about’. On The Daily Politics Show they’re less keen on that sort of thing. Finally, onstage I can talk about whatever I want but outside Parliament I had to discuss Gordon Brown.
So I was always going to feel a little anxious about the interview. But the fact that I was determined to slip in at least one of our fake words made the whole experience even more of a challenge. The programme goes out live, so whatever I said would definitely be broadcast, which was great for the gardening but also meant that I really could end up looking like an awful human being. What would happen if I said one of our words and the presenter asked me to explain myself? How stupid would I look if what I said was simply greeted with confusion? What if they, like Victoria Coren and Wikipedia, somehow knew what I was up to and were determined to expose me on live TV? As I say, I don’t appear on television all that often, so I didn’t want to completely jeopardise any future work I might get with the BBC. But then, after almost two years of diligent Verbal Gardening, I couldn’t miss this chance. I just had to hope I was able to talk about something that let me use an appropriate-sounding word. I had to be entertaining, funny hopefully, interesting, apt, but also either mention things that were fat, rubbish or pretentious, money, rash acts or idiot-magnets. Simple.
I could hear what was going on in the studio (where the presenters, Jenny Scott and Andrew Neil, were joined by three politicians, only one of whom, Paddy Ashdown, I’d heard of) via an earpiece. That was off-putting too. Normally, when people are listening to things like iPods and Walkmen and have to talk at the same time they do so loudly and abnormally. This, I knew, I should avoid doing. I also had to listen to my introduction and talk to the camera as if the camera had just asked me whatever question was asked, whilst constantly thinking but not saying, ‘Right, I’m on TV, don’t cock this up, say one of the words, you’re on telly, everyone’s watching.’
The female presenter of the programme, Jenny Scott, didn’t help by throwing to me with the words: ‘Gordon Brown didn’t exactly set the world alight at PMQs last week. So, how can he improve? Well, one man with plenty of experience at performing under pressure is the stand-up comedian Alex Horne who joins us now to give some tips. Alex, how hard is it to get back out there in front of your audience after you’ve bombed?’
That, to me, was a harsh introduction. She made it seem as though I was chosen to comment, not because I’m interesting, amusing, responsible and don’t swear but because I have a long history of bombing onstage and then ‘getting back out there’ in front of my audience; not, as I’ve explained, usually getting laughs. Nevertheless, I hid my aggravation and managed to start speaking: ‘Oh, it’s difficult, I mean, he’ll be feeling pretty low, he’ll be feeling …’
At that point I petered out. I realised I was saying exactly the same sentence as I’d just said. If I used the words ‘pretty low’ again I would have repeated myself perfectly. And then what was stopping me doing the same again and again until the end of the programme and the start of Working Lunch? Taking a deep breath, I relaunched: ‘I mean, I’ve been in similar situations and you do feel … like a pratdigger.’
There! I’d related my own experiences to the Prime Minister’s and managed to slip in one of our words. If you took our meaning of ‘someone who attracts prats’ it doesn’t really make sense, but the word was out there. I was so relieved I managed to follow it with the tiniest of jokes: ‘But he’s done the right thing; he’s got back on the horse. He probably would have been tempted to phone in sick, but that’s not a good long-term solution for a prime minister.’
Phone in sick! What a funny idea for the Prime Minister to phone in sick! Andrew Neil even chuckled audibly. I’d done well.
And so did Gordon Brown. I’m not sure if he’d been listening to my introduction in the same way as I’d been following Jenny’s but after our build-up he came out and did his stuff (not using any made-up words as far as I could tell) and unlike his first Prime Minister’s Questions outing, he spoke commandingly.
Satisfied with how I’d performed first time round, the producers turned to me for more in-depth analysis after Brown had finished: ‘Well let’s see if our expert, the comedian Alex Horne, agreed with that,’ said Jenny. I’d never been called an expert before. I blushed. ‘So Alex,’ she continued regardless, ‘do you think he did a better job this time?’
‘I do, yeah, I think he held his own.’ Yes, I said ‘yeah’; a bit colloquial, quite urban, pretty cool. Well done me. ‘Performance-wise’, (is that a phrase?) ‘there were no tears or tantrums and if I had someone like David Cameron heckling me I think I would lose it. I’d go on a mental safari and just break down. So I thought he did well.’
In the space of twenty minutes, two of our Verbal Seeds had gone out on BBC2 in a historic programme analysing the first and second speeches of the UK’s fifty-second prime minister. And even though Jenny followed my use of pratdigger with the quip: ‘no tears, no tantrums, and not many jokes either. He must have taken your advice’ (does she not know that I was the inventor of the tiddly-wink factory joke?), I felt enormously pleased with myself. I skipped back over Parliament Square – then realised I was still wearing my microphone so skipped back, gave it to the sound man, and then walked back to the Tube again, not skipping this time, but still in a more cheery fashion than usual.
The very next day another letter arrived from Leeds:
Dear Alex,
Thank you for attending the recent Countdown auditions in London.
I am sorry to inform you that you were unsuccessful in gaining a place on the show.
I would like to say how much we enjoyed meeting you and wish you all the best for the future.
Once again, thank you for taking the time and trouble to attend, I hope y
ou continue to watch and enjoy Countdown.
[The Associate Producer]
I had done as badly as I’d feared and after the confirmation I didn’t leave the house for two days. For the three months before I’d been telling everyone I encountered that I had this audition coming up. I was convinced I’d breeze through, that I’d get on telly, that I’d say my words in the Countdown studio. Now I had to admit that I’d failed. ‘What did you do wrong?’ I was asked repeatedly over the following weeks by people who presumed it’d be easy. I had no reply.
I couldn’t face telling my mum. Instead I resolved to try again. By return of mail I asked for another audition. You can apply three times to be on the programme,31 I was quite prepared to blow all my chances in one glorious shoot-out.
To my surprise, it was just a fortnight before a third letter from Leeds invited me to my second audition in London – in just six weeks’ time. I was amazed another opportunity had arisen so soon but, the letter said, the producers were still looking for contestants for the forthcoming series and I had another chance. Determined not to make the same mistakes again, I cleared my diary for a full forty-eight hours before the allotted audition day, downloaded hundreds of conundrums from the Internet, slept and practised hard. With just two lives remaining I needed to nail it this time. There was no way, I thought, I could handle the pressure of a final Countdown chance.
Apart from an appearance on television’s best programme, I felt there was still something lacking from the project. Our new words were doing fine, but they were almost too subtle. They weren’t making a splash. So instead of simply substituting new verbal ideas that looked a bit like old verbal ideas I decided we needed to be bolder. It was late in the day, with just a year until my thirtieth birthday, but I informed the Rare Men that we needed to come up with a brand-new word: a word, unlike the previous seeds, that really hadn’t been seen before; a new combination of letters, nothing too wacky or ugly, but something that we could truly say was ours. I asked them to think, yet again, of a concept – not one of those clever terms that you get in the Guardian to describe an amusing social phenomenon, but something more fundamental that we could all recognise and understand and on which we could bestow the perfect moniker.