by Alex Horne
We needed a word that described a phenomenon, like wiki, that hadn’t been named before. This would be the ultimate Verbal Seed, a seed we could throw our colossal collective weight behind and spread with confidence and abandon. A truly original word whose progress we could track as it sped its way from person to person, town to town, country to country.
We needed to come up with a new ‘chav’; our very own ‘bootylicious’.
The Rare Men dutifully stepped up to the mark once again, suggesting a plethora of imaginative ideas for this hitherto unlabelled concept. ‘How about a word for something that is done for money rather than art or love?’ proposed Mr Goudy-Stout, ‘or the one song you like from an album, which is why you bought the album or people you nod to in the street but who you never have a conversation with or scooter drivers who are shit at driving?’
These were excellent suggestions, recognisable but unnamed things that would benefit from their own tags. But after much soul-searching I realised the word I wanted us to spread (and at this point I admit I was ignoring the democratic aspect of the project and behaving like the egotistical megalomaniac behind the ultimately vainglorious self-important narcissistic project we all feared I might be) had been under my nose the whole time.
30 To the pedantic amongst you, yes, to achieve our aim of meeting someone from all 192 UN countries living in London we did have to meet one person from the UK (which is, after all, a UN country). But surprisingly enough we did manage to meet such a person early on in the project. Perhaps less surprisingly, when we told them what we were doing they said they weren’t too keen on all these immigrants, coming over here – you know the rest of that refrain.
31 I should point out that this rule has since changed, so you can now apply any number of times. If you thrice fail, try, try again. Unless you’re absolutely positive you’ve had enough humiliation for one lifetime.
19
I started this project because I was worried about the passing of time and wanted to ensure I left my mark somewhere along the way. The trigger was my ten thousandth day on earth and that was exactly the concept we would name. That was the idea we would solidify in a word and share with the world.
As you might just remember, this landmark does have a name: tkday. But that is our name. We invented ‘tkday’, a word we felt was ripe for the job. How well did it do with you? Did it snag your eyes as they moved across that early page? Or did you accept it as a word you just hadn’t heard of? I suspect ‘tkday’ did strike you as a bit odd. It is a strange-looking little word. But a lot of thought went into its creation.
I was convinced the subject itself was a good one. For a start, we love birthdays. Our ruling queen, the Queen, loves them so much she has two. Indeed we love any reason to celebrate a day: Christmas, Easter, St Patrick’s Day, both the Queen’s birthdays, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, even thirsty Thursday, Bank Holiday Mondays and, particularly, New Year’s Eve, even though it merely represents the passing of more time. There was definitely room for one more special occasion. I remember learning at school that the French celebrate another birthday on the day in which a Saint with the same name as themselves has their ‘Saint’s Day’. If that happened in this country, we’d all change our names to ‘Wednesday’. We love special days; they give us something to look forward to. ‘Wednesday Horne’ would have a fun-filled life.
For too long now we’ve been chained to the Gregorian system (well, since 1752 in England, 170 years after Pope Gregory XIII decreed Aloysius Lilius’s system of leap years was definitely the best idea and the rest of Europe took heed), a predictable plodding arrangement that sees Christmas landing coldly in the middle of winter every single year. By focusing more on this decimal idea of counting days in the thousands, we could celebrate mini-tkdays (‘kdays’, to be precise) at different times of the year every thousand days. It would be exciting! As well as Christmas every December, we’d celebrate Jesus’ tkdays with his next one, when he’ll be 760,000 days old, landing on 16 January 2027; two Christmases in one month = double Christmas!32
We shouldn’t shun the idea of a ‘tkday’ simply because it’s an unusual measurement. People were suspicious of the metric system, but ‘kilometres’ and ‘litres’ are now well established in the language, if not on road signs or in pubs just yet. In Allan Metcalf’s Predicting New Words he includes a cheering story about a nine-year-old Verbal Gardener, ‘the youngest successful word coiner on record’, who succeeded spectacularly with a novel number. In 1939 a mathematician at Columbia University called Edward Kasner wrote a book with his colleague James R. Newman called Mathematics and the Imagination. Neither of these men was nine years old but as they themselves wrote, ‘Words of wisdom are spoken by children as least as often by scientists.’* They continued:
The name ‘googol’ was invented by a child (Dr. Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew) who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a hundred zeros after it. He was very certain that this number was not infinite, and therefore equally certain that it had to have a name. At the same time that he suggested ‘googol’ he gave a name for a still larger number: ‘Googolplex’. A googolplex is much larger than a googol, but is still finite, as the inventor of the name was quick to point out. It was suggested that a googolplex should be 1, followed by writing zeros until you get tired.33
The child, unnamed in that book, was called Milton Sirotta (or Siroter, depending on whose account of the story you trust) and today his ‘googol’ is not only in the dictionary, it’s also the first word many of us type when using the Internet, with Google inspired by Milton’s term and the most popular search engine on earth.
Nor was Milton’s achievement unprecedented. In the sixteenth century the mathematician Robert Recorde, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, coined the word ‘zenzizenzizenic’ to describe a very large figure (a number to the power of eight, or, in Recorde’s own words, ‘the square of squares squared’ from zenzic, a German word from the Italian censo, meaning ‘squared’). As ludicrous (and as close to French headbutt challenger Zinédine Zidane) as it looks, this word did indeed make it into the online version of the OED, which lists it as a ‘historical curiosity’. Surely ‘tkday’ could be granted entry on similar grounds?
Even more impressive (if that’s possible) is the fact that in the same ‘Recorde book’ as he invented the Z-word (which contains more ‘z’s than any other in the dictionary), the mathematician introduced the ‘=’. Yes, in his Whetstone of Witte, written in 1557, he was the very first person to use the ‘equals sign’ with the following sentence:
I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a pair of paralleles, or Gemowe [twin] lines of one lengthe, thus: , bicause noe 2 thynges, can be moare equalle.
It may not look exactly the same as the neat ‘=’ we use today, but there’s no denying the lineage. And I like the fact that his ‘pair of paralleles’ were about an inch long. Why not That could only have made maths more satisfying: 5 × 5 25. That’s better. And, in case you’re wondering, while the originators of ‘+;’, ‘-’ and ‘×’ are frustratingly anonymous, we do know that the division sign (÷) was first used in an algebra book from 1659 called Teutshe algebra by Johann Rahn (who also designed ‘’, the symbol for ‘therefore’). Back in the sixteenth century and more literary circles, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (whom I include in this mathematical paragraph in honour of the palindrome, ‘sums are not set as a test on Erasmus’) coined the name ‘lunulae’ (meaning ‘moon-like’ in Latin), a term still used today to describe round brackets (six of which I’ve used in this sentence alone).
So despite appearances and precedents, ‘tkday’ could become as standard as ‘google’ or the equals sign. Just because it doesn’t ‘fit in’ with the way the earth spins round the sun shouldn’t matter. We’re humans! We can do what we want! And lots of humans do do what they want! A pal is a Hindi measure of time equal to twenty-four seconds. Why measure twenty-four seconds? Because it’s a laugh! A
ghari is twenty-four minutes! They’re having fun with it! The OED includes ‘sesquihoral’, an adjective meaning ‘lasting an hour and a half’. Yes! The Chinese word xun means either a ten-day period in a month or a decade in someone’s life. The Indian word lakh means 100,000, while ‘crore’ means 10,000,000 and a crorepati is someone with 10,000,000 rupees (hence Slumdog Crorepati, the name of Danny Boyle’s film in India). That’s the spirit! Counting to ten is fun. Why do you think we’ve got ten fingers on our paddles? It’s so we can count the kdays till our tkday! That’s the sort of speech I was preparing to give when the tkday celebrations started taking over the entire country.
At first glance it might appear an ugly, cumbersome word. It’s certainly unlike normal English, with no vowel separating the hard T and K. The only other example I’ve found of those two letters standing side by side at the front of a word is in Jonathon Green’s book of slang where he tells us that meat killed in an abbatoir is called ‘teekay’ or ‘TK meat’ in butchers’ slang (who knew there was butchers’ slang?). HK, according to Green, is the term for meat that’s been killed at home (the T of TK presumably stands for ‘trade’). On balance, I’d say I’d rather have a TK burger than one which vaguely implies the death of a pet.
But there are plenty of examples of words which look similarly spiky and unusual prospering, especially in recent times. The ‘word’ ‘Y2K’, for example, sprung up during the nineties as a modern alternative to ‘the year two thousand’, particularly with reference to the mythical millennium bug. Y2K does now appear in several dictionaries and would, I’m sure, be more widespread, if only there had been a global catastrophe when the millennium ticked over.
In Predicting New Words, Metcalf goes on to examine the reasons why some words fail and some succeed. ‘Y2K’, in his opinion, is now only moderately well known not because of its looks, but because the year itself has passed by. He also spends a lot of time discussing the word ‘sputnik’, another word with a slight resemblance to our ‘tkday’. ‘Sputnik’ was the Russian word for the first satellite sent into orbit in 1957 meaning, literally, ‘something that is travelling with a traveller’. At the time, as Metcalf explains, the word made quite a splash: ‘Upon hearing the news and the name sputnik, Clarence L. Barnhart, editor-in-chief of the Thorndike-Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary, pulled the page where sputnik would appear, consigned a lesser word to oblivion, and inserted a three-line definition of sputnik in its place. Only then would he allow the new printing of the Thorndike-Barnhart to proceed.’ Fifty years on, however, and the real meaning of the word is hardly known. ‘Perhaps’, Metcalf argues, ‘it looked too strange.’
Strangeness in a word, however, should not be dismissed as a flaw. An odd-looking word can soar to remarkable, even record-breaking heights, simply because it looks so odd. After all, the most universally understood term in the whole of the English language is the bizarre two-letter word, ‘OK’. We all say ‘OK’ all the time. We don’t think about it. It constantly seems to be on the tip of our tongue, the first sounds to pop out when we are asked anything at all. It has become an adult ‘mama’, despite the facts that it doesn’t resemble other English words (except, now, ‘tkday’) and that we still don’t really know where it came from.
The birth of ‘OK’ is perhaps the ultimate Verbal Gardening story because, while it almost certainly did sprout from just one person, its branches, stems and roots are now so gnarled and intertwined it’s impossible to work out for sure who that one person is. There are many, many theories. Allan Metcalf insists that he knows the truth; that ‘OK’ definitely represents a deliberate misspelling of the phrase ‘all correct’ as ‘orl korrect’. In the late 1830s, he tells us, there was a ‘craze for humorous abbreviations’ in America with ‘OW’ also used to mean ‘all right.’ Not hilarious, but humorous. The following is an extract from the Boston Morning Post, 23 March 1839: ‘… perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have the “contribution box”, et ceteras, o.k. – all correct – and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.’ Despite making no sense whatsoever, this is, in Metcalf’s opinion, the first-ever published OK.
According to Metcalf, this obscure jokey abbreviation survived and flourished mainly because it was picked up by a candidate in the following year’s presidential election. Martin Van Buren, born in Kinderhook, New York, was given the nickname ‘Kinderhook Cabbage Planter’ by his witty rivals, the Whigs. His own Democrats combined this with the fashionable ‘OK’ to spin the name to their advantage with the slogan, ‘Old Kinderhook, OK?’ And that was that; a not very good joke made up by someone whose identity is still unknown was made enormously popular by a politician.
But this ungainly anecdote is far from being the only explanation. Others suggest ‘OK‘ is a simple version of the Scottish ‘och aye’ or the Finnish oikea meaning ‘correct’. Some maintain it represents the Haitian city ‘Aux Cayes’, famous for its rum, or the dock in New Orleans where workers would take cotton au quai. The Germans swear that Baron von Steuben signed documents ‘Ober Kommando’ when he fought with the US Army in the War of Independence; confectionery fans contend rather that it grew from biscuits made for the army in the Civil War by Orrin Kendall & Sons, who stamped ‘OK’ on their products in their factory in Chicago.34 It might be from Greek (ola kala), Wolof or other West African languages (o ke or waw kay) or even Choctaw Indian (okeh). It could be a reversal of the boxing KO. Or it might be a mixture of all of these things.
But I like to think it was one man who invented it, one man who lent his own initials to create the most famous expression in the world. So I’m going to give my backing to a humble railway freight agent called Obediah Kelly who is said to have written his initials on any documents he checked. Working on the trains, we are asked to believe, these letters were then dispatched out in every direction, taking the meaning of ‘fine’ along with them, in much the same way as my ‘I am the bollo!’ messages were being sent hither and thither on Tubes and trains in the UK. It’s no more likely than any of the other hypotheses, but it’s the one I want to believe and that makes it as good as fact in my mind.
I try to reflect a little of that fogginess in the etymology of ‘tkday’. It looks like it’s probably from 10K, short for ten kilo (the Greek prefix for a thousand). But the letters could be the initials of one of our finest Rare Men, the ever creative Mr Elephant, who actually celebrated his own thirtieth birthday on the same day we launched ‘tkday’. Despite being an elder statesman (decades younger than our Health and Safety watchdog Mr Matisse but older than everyone else), Mr Elephant is the sort of person who has always been bad at adult things like bank statements, driving or not getting locked out of your own house on your birthday and waking up the next morning on someone else’s sofa with red wine on your T-shirt and said sofa, so a coming-of-age moment might just have been named in his honour.
I need to believe that individuals can successfully coin words. Encouragingly, the second-most universally understood word or phrase in English was unquestionably the work of one man, although his actual name has been rather forgotten in the process. For it was that man, John Styth Pemberton, who sloshed together a load of cocoa nuts, caffeine, coca leaves and various other secret ingredients in a bath-tub in his backyard in 1886 and thus invented Coca-Cola. He may only have sold his concoction for the modest price of $283.39, but the immortality of the name is priceless. It’s the world’s only successful product with two names, ‘Coke’ and ‘Cola’, something Mr Roman was aiming to emulate with ‘honk’ and ‘hoot’.
A century after its creation, the Coca-Cola company brought out its own new drink, OK Soda, harnessing, in theory, the two most powerful brands in history (if we can call OK a brand, which we can: it’s a brand). The deep and meaningless slogan for OK Soda went, ‘The true nature of OK-ness is elusive. OK-ness embraces mistakes and contradictions. It is optimistic, yet ironic.’ Unfortunately that doesn’t really make sense an
d people were too confused to buy the drink. But it does show how unusual-looking words can be used. ‘OK-ness’ is in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined more sensibly as, ‘The fact or quality of being OK’ and used as early as 1935. If ‘OK-ness’ is in, ‘tkday’ could surely follow.
After all, like those madcap abbreviators from the 1830s, we modern folk love sharp shortnings and kool spelling. Tkday fits right into modern vernacular. We watch endless TV with our TV dinners and try to buy KY jelly from TK Maxx. In fact, it’s this letter ‘K’ that is currently so fashionable. K-9 is one of the best films ever to come out of Hollywood* (I know I’m in the minority here), everybody likes Peter Kay, Jay Kay from Jamiroquai and J. K. from Rowling (that’s ‘everybody’ in the loosest sense – i.e. ‘some people’) and the breakfast cereal Special K has almost made us forget about the KKK. A simple ‘K’ transforms the mundane ‘today’ into an exciting ‘tkday’, which itself fits neatly into the contemporary trend of text-speak or txtonyms. ‘Tkday’ is already a snappy abbreviation that can sit happily beside ‘lol’s and emoticons, blogs and podcasts. It’s book. Which is predictive-texting slang for cool.35 Which is a synonym of wicked. Which now means good.
Tkday is all these things. Have I convinced you yet?