by Alex Horne
32 For those of you who are worried about the lingering effects of scriptio continua, the ‘Gregorian system’ is definitely not a system whereby one decides to name a child ‘Greg’ or ‘Ian’.
33 Though charming, this wasn’t a mathematical enough definition for the professors, who went on to pin a ‘googolplex’ down as ‘a specific finite number, with so many zeros after the 1 that the number is a googol’. This is a ridiculous figure: ‘There would not be enough room to write it, if you went to the farthest star, touring all the nebulae and putting down zeros every inch of the way,’ so I for one am glad there’s a reasonably lengthed word for it.
34 There is another folk etymology from the Civil War linking the word ‘hooker’ to a general called Joseph Hooker, whose undisciplined men were famous for frequenting the redlight district. While the general and his naughty men did exist, the word, like the profession, is much older, probably and predictably coming from the verb ‘to hook’.
35 If you try to type ‘cool’ in a text message with predictive texting switched on the word ‘book’ may be suggested first. Ingenious kids have therefore started using it as a new word for ‘cool’. This process has been named ‘synokia’ by an Oxford-educated physicist called Chris Simpson in the English Project’s book Kitchen Table Lingo. Other examples that may yet become synonymous are ‘awake’ and ‘cycle’, ‘shot’ and ‘pint’, ‘woohoo’ and ‘zonino’.
20
With a year and two weeks until our self-appointed closing date, I proudly announced the birth of our final word:
Tkday (noun). A person’s 10,000th day on earth, traditionally celebrated with a tkday party (the traditions of which are still to be ironed out). It represents the time in someone’s life when they actually are an adult (rather than sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one years – which are arbitrary and wrong). It’s about this time in life that you should probably know how to change a tyre/fuse/partner, not feel too awkward when you meet other adults and have vague but nagging thoughts about starting a pension.
Unfortunately my attempt to spread news of its arrival on my preferred radio station was unsuccessful. Five million people listen to Chris Evans’s show, which means that only a tiny percentage of those who try to get more actively involved can succeed. The one time I did actually penetrate his protective layer of researchers and producers with a message sent to the studio, my joint favourite DJ (alongside Radio Gloucestershire’s John Rockley) read out something crucially different to the text I’d sent in.
In a typically fervent feature called ‘Office News’, Chris read a number of texts from office workers, including:
Chris! We celebrated office boy Chip’s birthday today! He’s 10,000 days old and we had a cake. He’s about 27 and a third by the way.
That’s my brother Chip! But it’s not my word! Whether it was by a member of his staff or a part of Chris’s own brain, the ‘tk’ was edited out and ‘birth’ put in place. Such a slight difference but so crucial. Hence the continued success of Chinese Whispers on the dinner party circuit. He did pause after the text before saying, ‘Oh I see, so it’s a special birthday,’ but he never said the word ‘tkday’. I was furious. I even turned Radio 2 off. For a bit.
This was not the start I was hoping for. Nor did things get any better very quickly. Our high-concept digital birthday proved incredibly hard to bring up in conversation (after all, mine had passed almost two years previously). I therefore endeavoured to find the people for whom it was most relevant; twenty-seven-year-olds. But not just any old twenty-seven-year-olds, celebrity twenty-seven-year-olds, famous people who had their tkdays coming up in the next few months.
It was, though, a rather chastening list to draw up. Logically these people were all younger than me. But while I could cope with comparing myself to Darius Danesh or Kerry Katona, maybe even Paris Hilton or Jamelia, the rest were just too successful for my liking: England captain John Terry, tennis star Lleyton Hewitt, Beyoncé’s colleague Kelly Rowland, these were all people of the same vintage. Elijah Wood, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Vanessa Carlton – they’d all managed to achieve so much that their names seemed destined to be remembered in the future, even if they didn’t get a word in the dictionary. It wasn’t fair. If any of these people wanted to get their word in the dictionary they’d just have to tell their adoring public and the work would be done for them. I’m sure even Kanzi the Bonobo (born on the same day as footballistic badboy Alan Smith) could coin a phrase if he so wished. And he’s a bonobo.36
Nevertheless, I knuckled down and got on with the task at hand, sending each and every one of these stars a home-made tkday card via their agents and spreading news of their impending landmark through their respective fansites. It was time-consuming and, on the surface, unrewarding. No one sent me a thank-you card. Not even Vanessa Carlton.
But I like to think that in some small way my afternoon spent cutting out letters, sticking on sparkly sprinkle dust and sending mysterious tkday cards around the world will have made a difference. Presuming the agents didn’t shred them on the spot, each of these people would now have known the tkday concept. And celebrities, as we all know, rule the world. If Christina Aguilera celebrated her tkday, we’d all know about it.
With almost exactly a year until our self-appointed closing date, my second Countdown audition loomed into view.
While I was boning up* for the test, the series shown on TV had been nearing its end and the quality of competitors in the final eight was daunting. A quietly assured young man (well, probably the same age as me) from Northern Ireland called David looked the hot favourite, finding ‘diamines’, ‘ovates’, ‘nortena’, and ‘tzarina’ in a single episode. I’d never heard of these words before; nor, to everyone’s surprise, had Susie Dent. But there they were, in her dictionary, so he definitely wasn’t making them up.
Without Susie’s reassuring presence in the Dictionary Corner of my screen, the small amount of confidence I still possessed may well have crumbled to nothing. For as well as humbly admitting she didn’t in fact know every single word in the language, her daily monologues on the origins of other, slightly more common words were consistently fascinating and gainfully distracting, especially when they involved individual Verbal Gardening stories.
It was thanks to Countdown, for instance, that I discovered that American President Theodore Roosevelt was a Verbal Gardener. During a hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902, an American Black Bear was cornered by dogs, beaten and tied to a willow tree by his men, then offered to the hitherto unsuccessful President as an easy target. Admirably, Roosevelt refused to shoot the sitting bear but ordered it to be killed by others in an act of mercy. As soon as this scene was captured in a cartoon in the Washington Post days later, toys were created with the name ‘Teddy’s Bear’ and, Bob’s your uncle,* just eighty years later, my little brother Chip named his bear Ted.
Yes, I thought, names can become words. Games could become a word!
The jockey James Foreman Sloane had similarly circuitous success. You’ve almost certainly never heard his name before, but I’m sure you’ll have used (or at least heard of) a phrase that came into existence thanks only to him. Before accidentally turning his hand to matters linguistic he pioneered the ‘monkey riding’ position jockeys still ape today. He was, however, a rather difficult man and, after being struck from the jockey club on account of his arrogance, he died alone and in poverty. ‘Todhunter’ was his rather splendid (other) middle name and on his death the Washington Post wrote, ‘everything of Tod’s is gone’. The phrase ‘on one’s tod’, however, was born.
One must make sacrifices, I thought, if one is to succeed!
A Duke of Saxony, Susie explained one afternoon, triggered the entrance of ‘turncoat’ to the language sometime around 1557 with an ingenious reversible coat. Normally blue (the colour of the Saxons), he would turn the white (the colour of the French) inside out whenever strolling around land bordering France and that, apparently, was enou
gh to fool his enemies and for the word ‘turncoat’ to be born.
In the nineteenth century, Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, wore rubber boots before anyone else (and had the synonymous beef dish named after him); James Brudenell, seventh Earl of Cardigan, modelled a knitted jumper that opened at the front during the Crimean War; and over in a slightly camper field, Jules Léotard was brave enough not only to perform daring deeds on the flying trapeze, but to do so wearing the first ever skin-tight one-piece garment covering his torso and midriff but leaving his lovely legs free and unsheathed. Unfortunately it wasn’t until sixteen years after his early death that people starting using his surname to describe this economic article of clothing, so he wouldn’t have known his name has lived on in such a dignified fashion.37
Clothing can work, I thought! The bollo brolly may have failed but the Verbal Gardening T-shirts might just make the difference!
There seemed to be limitless tales of words and phrases created by everyday people. ‘That old chestnut’ was originally an innocent line in a play called Broken Sword written by William Diamond in 1816. One character had a tendency to say the same joke over and over with very subtle changes – like Le Prov’s reworking of my counter-productive gag; another character, Pablo, finally cracked and said, ‘A chestnut. I have heard you tell the joke twenty times and I’m sure it was a chestnut!’ The actor playing Pablo at the time found himself at a dinner party, away from the theatre, hosted by a pratdigger. One of the more prattish guests started telling a well-known corny* joke, and Pablo gave ‘that old chestnut’ its first airing outside of the play. Again, that one moment was enough. The conditions were right, the phrase was memorable and, like my Rare Men, the protagonists worked in the world of communication. They planted the seed (well, a nut), it grew and conkered all (that’s the sort of joke of which Richard Whiteley would have been proud).
That’s me! I thought. If I can bury ‘honest’ in a play, or ‘honk’ in a dinner party they too might blossom!
Susie even recounted the story of a comedian who managed to invent his own adjective in the late sixteenth century. In Italy, she said, there was an improvised form of theatre called Commedia dell’arte which featured, amongst various stock characters, a clown called Zanni. Zanni is the Venetian version of Gianni, short for Giovanni, the Italian version of John. But it is also the root of our word ‘zany’. Sure, this was a more general clown figure rather than one specific performer, but again it proved that my plan was possible.
Comedy can help, I thought. People remember the things that make them laugh!
Hearing these stories halfway through a gentle word-quiz, a cup of tea half drunk beside me, was both soothing and beguiling. Like my favourite word books, Susie could whisk me back in time and show me those miraculous moments when words were born. At five past four every day I felt that with a little luck and a good story, anyone, including me, could coin their own word.
*
After weeks of particularly intense Countdown viewing in which I tried to match the lucky contestants who’d already made it, hours of playing Scrabble online, and several evenings devoted to the Countdown board game (‘all the fun of the popular game show’ – for 2–6 players, aged 10 to adult) with my brothers and sister-in-law, I was feeling confident on the day of my second audition. On the Tube journey back to the same London Weekend Television office block I practised using the sheet of conundrums provided in the board-game box and enjoyed the thought that any nosy commuters might think I was some sort of deranged genius.
As I stepped into the lobby, a sense of déjà vu was augmented by the sight of shaven-headed Vic, my neighbour at the last auditions, who was sat staring into the middle distance, tense but apparently focused. I signed in and took the seat next to him, trying to edge into his zone. Lorraine Kelly’s daytime show, LKToday (Lo: tkday!) was being filmed in the same building and around us milled innumerable women who had congregated for a special feature on fake tans. I found it hard to concentrate on anything but their glowing faces (they ranged from ‘spicy sandalwood’ to ‘ginger glow’ with most at about the ‘rich Havana level’ of Dulux orangeness), and five minutes later I grew impatient and said hello to Vic.
‘Hello,’ he replied.
That was probably about the highlight of our chat. We were both desperate to succeed and now was not the time for niceties (or nice ties for that matter; I seem to remember something as gaudy as the girls hanging round his neck in true Countdown tradition). He did tell me he was bitterly disappointed last time round; after his initial nine-letter word he’d faded fast and had known he hadn’t made it before we even reached the last numbers game.
We’d just wished each other luck for this next audition when the same efficient researcher emerged and said she was ready for us. This time there were just three of us: Vic, me and Gail, an incongruously glamorous lady who I’d presumed was here to apply some unnatural colour to her skin. The limited numbers meant the temptation to cheat was thankfully removed. We were sat at three compass points of the oval table with the researcher at North, our life in her hands. As soon as she’d explained the procedure to Gail we were off.
First up: I T T E N E N I S. If you want to play along, I’ll let you know what I found in the footnotes.37
Then T A L T I E N V E. If you’re not playing along, I was doing OK, but unspectacularly.38
This form continued with H U O I S E D A M.39
From then on in I was, if not on fire, then definitely pretty close to combusting. The next combinations were P L A G D U R E D and C O U P L I S T E40 before I succeeded in making 414 out of 50, 3, 9, 1, 1 and 9.41 I even worked out two thirds of the conundrums thanks to: T R E E R A M B O and P A R T Y I N F O.42 I’d definitely done significantly better than last time, but had I done enough? I’d missed more nine-letter words but I had found some maximums that neither Vic nor Gail had spotted. He’d done well with the numbers but I was sure I’d sneaked it.
Back in the fresh air we said our goodbyes, Vic despondent, convinced he’d failed again; Gail stylish, still maybe in the wrong place.
I could now only hope.
36 A bonobo, as well as being a brilliant word, is an ape. Kanzi, as well as being in his late twenties, has featured on the cover of both Newsweek and Time magazine because of his ability to communicate.
37 Readers might be familiar with today’s ‘unitard’, also a skin-tight one-piece garment, but differing from the traditional leotard thanks to its long legs. They’re a bit like a leotard and tights combo. Freddie Mercury, wrestlers and superheroes have all tended to wear them. They’re a good example of how a word can be so accepted that speakers adapt it according to the traditional rules of their language even though those rules shouldn’t really apply (the thing about the original ‘tard’ is not actually its’ ‘leo’-ness).
37 Vic and I both got ‘sentient’ but missed ‘intestine’.
38 Again, I missed the maximum ‘ventilate’ but did grasp ‘nettle’ and ‘latent’, both longer words than Gail’s.
39 I didn’t see ‘housemaid’ but did get ‘shamed’.
40 I spotted ‘upgraded’ and ‘slopiest’.
41 (9-1) x (50 + 1) + 9 - 3.
42 ‘Barometer’ and ‘profanity’ – it’s so easy when you see it.
PART THREE
The doors to the OED are open as never before, and if you know how the system works, you can squeeze in and leave your mark.
Balderdash and Piffle – English Words and Their Curious Origins, Alex Games
21
When Viscount Horatio Nelson was ordered by semaphore to cease attacking the Danish Navy he raised a telescope to his blind eye, said ‘Order, what order? I see no ships,’ and the term ‘turn a blind eye’ was born. Almost two hundred years later, on the eve of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein addressed his nation and told them they were about to become locked in ‘the mother of all battles’. Thus the old Arabic expression ‘mother of all’ was brought crashing i
nto modern Western vernacular. A decade later, George W. Bush looked down at the good people of Bentonville, Arkansas, uttered the immortal phrase, ‘They misunderestimated me,’ and managed to create his own new word. Now, as leader of the Verbal Gardening project, it was my turn to act. The Rare Men were tired. I had to take control.
Television, it appeared, was the medium I needed to conquer. Dictionary authorities seem to pay particularly close attention to someone saying a word several times on a high-profile show, especially if other high-profile people are involved. So it was that sketch queen Catherine Tate’s catchphrase ‘bovvered’ was named ‘Word of the Year’ for 2006 by the compilers of the OED and featured at length in Susie Dent’s latest Language Report on emerging vocabulary.
This despite the fact that ‘bovvered’ isn’t, in my opinion, a very good word at all. It’s lazy, the product of esquivalience rather than inspiration. Yes, it’s a new word, but it’s only really a mispronunciation of an old one. It’s just a shift of ‘th’ to ‘vv’. We could all do that. We could all say ‘I’ve got toovvache’, ‘I’m your favver’, or ‘he’s vve vvinking woman’s Vviery Henry’; is that enough to get a word in the dictionary? When Mr Elephant came up with ‘paddles’ for ‘hands’ he first suggested the more subtle ‘honds’, a change I resisted because it just didn’t seem far enough from the original. ‘No one will use it,’ I said, ‘it sounds too similar to “hands”’.43 But perhaps I’d missed a trick. Perhaps subtlety is the key. By ‘coining’ a word that is basically already a word, Tate had found a cunning short cut that I’d driven straight past.
She’d also said her word repeatedly on a programme watched by millions of people, some of whom were fairly influential. The Queen, the actual Queen, used the word when she met Tate at the Royal Variety Show in November 2005. ‘Is one bovvered?’ she asked. Our former Prime Minister Blair then jumped on the bandwagon, saying the catchphrase during 2007’s Comic Relief appeal. How could I compete with that?