Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  Well, I did have our World in One City project, which we were now close to completing, thanks largely to Mr Palatino’s hard work, and which was still garnering more than its fair share of media attention.

  My contact at The Times, for example, got back in touch and asked me to write an article about my experience. Of course I was delighted to help, grateful again that I hadn’t yet shut a potential door to my career with my fabricated words. With ‘honk’ making such good progress around the world, I decided to give ‘bollo’ a chance and was happily surprised when it slipped through the editors’ net. Saying ‘bollo’ live on Irish radio is one thing, getting it printed in The Times is quite another.

  This was my sentence:

  Buoyed by our success, [Mr Palatino] and I pushed back the boundaries of our bollo Britishness by actually getting into a conversation with our Iraqi, a lovely lady called Thana who told us she was thrilled that Saddam had been executed.

  Yes, remarkable alliteration in the first half, and an attempt, albeit clumsy, at politics in the second. But more remarkable as far as I was concerned was a sentence later in the article which read:

  We knocked on every door on my street in Kensal Green and were told to p*** off only once.

  I hadn’t inserted those asterisks there (they refer to ‘i’, ‘s’ and ‘s’, by the way. Just in case you thought they might be ‘u’, ‘s’ and ‘h’; ‘l’, ‘o’ and ‘p’; or ‘o’, ‘n’ and ‘y’); they were the work of the sub-editor. In their highly qualified eyes, ‘piss’ was far ruder than ‘bollo’. I don’t know what exactly they thought ‘bollo’ meant in my description of Britishness, but they certainly didn’t think it offensive.

  Bear in mind that ‘piss’ itself is, I hope you’ll all agree (otherwise this will have been a treacherous couple of paragraphs), a fairly harmless word. It was included in the dictionary decades before granny’s word was let in,44 and before being cast out onto the street during the more refined Victorian* era, it was used by all and sundry unthinkingly for its first four hundred years. It even snuck into the 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Bible (Isaiah 36, 12: ‘But Rabshakeh said, Hath my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?’), so if The Times deemed such an innocuous word worthy of censure, it says a lot about the innocent nature of ‘bollo’. Just as I’d hoped, it looks too cheery really to be rude.

  But part of me does wish they’d asterisked ‘bollo’ too, mainly because I’d be curious to know how readers would have reacted. If the sentence had read ‘pushed back the boundaries of our b**** Britishness’ an intriguing guessing game would have ensued. ‘Brown’, maybe? ‘Black’? They don’t sound quite right. But what else? I suppose ‘blunt’ would have been the main contender but, as explained earlier, that’s rhyming slang for something far ruder nowadays.

  In my desperation to succeed I was happy to let the meanings of my words slip slightly. I used ‘pratdigger’, for instance, to mean ‘any sort of slightly below average person’ in several interviews on the radio and in a couple of other, smaller newspapers. When invited to chat to Talksport’s ‘Hawksby and Jacobs’, the radio presenters queried my usage of the word and I explained that it actually meant ‘someone who is addicted to collecting things’, a fourth meaning for the comical term. I think that ‘obsessive gatherer’ works for the word; I can imagine ‘pratdiggers’ frantically searching car boot sales every weekend for the final stamp for their collections, or going on eBay to find the final sticker for their Euro 2006 Panini sticker albums. While it’s not our original meaning it is our original word, and that’s all that matters. Once we’ve got it in the dictionary we can worry about the order in which the meanings should be printed.

  Whilst on Talksport, by the way, Hawksby also asked me, ‘So, I heard you wrote your first joke for a cracker-joke-writing competition at Budgens. Can you remember the gag?’ It’s amazing how many people use Wikipedia as their main source of information nowadays.

  Thanks to in-depth interviews such as this, I like to think, news of our global quest soon reached the most important people at BBC News, and one day we were asked to come into a studio and be interviewed by George Alagiah. I couldn’t believe our luck. The main presenter of BBC News At Six, a national hero with his own OBE, was going to talk to us about our friend Mr Goudy-Stout’s idea on telly. Remarkable. This was our chance to pull off a ‘bovvered’.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t for the News At Six. George Alagiah is also the presenter of BBC World’s World News Today programme at 1 p.m., and this was the programme on which we were to feature. BBC World, in case you’re not familiar with it, is the televisual equivalent of the World Service. It is transmitted across the planet, but you can’t actually watch it from within the UK. So in terms of that World in One City Venn diagram, this interview was also missing the target area. It was certainly closer to the bit in the middle of the circles (foreigners who also live in London) than Radio Gloucestershire, but unfortunately it was only aimed at foreigners who haven’t moved to the UK.

  That notwithstanding, as the BBC’s flagship international news and current affairs television channel, BBC World does have the largest audience of any BBC channel, in fact of any news channel in the world. According to figures from June 2008, it’s available in 282 million homes, in 1.6 million hotel rooms, on fifty-seven cruise ships, forty-two airlines and thirty-four mobile-phone platforms, and over 78 million people watch it every week; so potentially a few more than I’d managed to broadcast my words to so far and ten times more than those who watched Catherine Tate’s Christmas special. If I could let one of our words loose on George Alagiah OBE’s BBC news programme, those viewers were bound to believe they were indeed actual words. Surely some of those 78 million people would absorb those words. And surely some of those people would then use those words themselves. After all, they had chosen to watch the BBC news because they trusted the content.

  And clearly the BBC trusted me too. Despite talking about ‘mental safaris’ and ‘pratdiggers’ on BBC2, here I was again, about to talk live on one of its key news programmes. And just to make things even more surreal, we were that day’s top story, shoving a scandal about Jacques Chirac, bomb attacks in Pakistan, a plane crash in Brazil and Tony Blair’s new role as a peace envoy, down the running order.

  Before going on air, the calm, attentive and dashing George had put us at ease. I’d say he was disarming, but I was still very much armed, ready to let off my word-weapons at the merest hint of an opening. As one o’clock approached we were shown to our seats and George was counted in.

  ‘You are with World News Today from BBC World, I’m George Alagiah. Now, it’s often said that the world is a global village,45 or at least a global city, now two friends are trying to prove it … Well, Alex and [Mr Palatino] join me now in the studio. Thank you both for coming in.’

  That’s OK, George! we thought, but didn’t say. Instead, he immediately asked Mr Palatino a technical question about why we were looking for 192 countries when there were well over 200 competing at the Olympics (we’d picked the smaller UN number simply because it was bound to be easier). Then he turned to me:

  ‘So, Alex, are there any themes that you’ve discovered running through the people you’ve met and their lives?’

  This was going to be easy!

  ‘Well, on a very superficial level,’ I began confidently, ‘everyone has said it’s a very expensive place to live. Everything costs a lot of honk. It’s a very expensive city to live in.’

  Bang! I’d aimed, fired and hit the target. Take that 78 million people!

  It was, without doubt, the greatest achievement of my life so far. I’d looked George in the eye, said ‘everything costs a lot of honk’, and I could see his eyes flicker in response. I could see him thinking ‘a lot of honk? Honk’s not a noun! Well, it can be a noun, but not in that sense! You don’t p
ay for things using honks!’ But there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t stop the news. There was no button he could press to cope with a situation in which an interviewee uses a made-up word. There was no way he could stop my honk being heard around the world.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t counted on the recoil. Reeling from the power of such a mighty verbal blow, my next sentence was one of the worst, quite possibly the worst – including the pathetically monosyllabic ones I came up with in my first five years – of my life:

  ‘But I think on a sort of nicer note the main thing that everyone says is that they like London because of its cosmopolitan nature. I think we, I mean, because … we realised very quickly that most of our friends actually are from Britain – not any more; we’ve got plenty now (at this point I giggled) – but um, people from Britain tend to maybe be more insular and don’t embrace the cosmopolitan nature of the city but people have said they love the fact that it’s a magnet for all these different countries.’

  I’ve re-watched and re-read that a number of times and it makes no sense whatsoever. After telling George, quite unnecessarily, that most of my friends were from Britain, I then qualified my own narrow horizons by saying ‘not any more; we’ve got plenty now’. What does that mean? ‘We’ve got plenty’? I think I was grouping together everyone in the world who is not from Britain and saying that, yes, I ‘had’ lots of them. I might as well have said I’d ‘done lots of them’ too.

  Understandably Mr Alagiah then took a deep breath and turned back to Mr Palatino. He continued talking to Mr Palatino for the rest of the interview, only returning to me to say thank you, with a rather quizzical look on his face, at the end of our feature. So I had broadcast our strongest word to a potential 282 million homes, in 1.6 million hotel rooms, on fifty-seven cruise ships, forty-two airlines and thirty-four mobile-phone platforms,46 but I had also looked like an idiot in front of 78 million people. Even so, before gliding professionally on to the next world story, George noticed from our website that we still needed to meet someone from Angola. ‘Well, I met an Angolan waiter last night,’ he said, so quick, so cool. Off air, he didn’t mention my outburst but did pass on the details of this South Central African man and the next day, we followed his instructions and ticked off another country. All things considered, it was a particularly useful episode of World News Today.

  The new ‘obsessive collector’ meaning of ‘pratdigger’ was wheeled out again (along with the faithful ‘honk’) a couple of weeks later on both Capital Radio and BBC Wales in conversation with the magnificently Welsh Rhun Ap Iorwerth. For, after a frantic final few weeks, Mr Palatino and I had come to the conclusion of our World in One City project and were at last able to say whether or not London was the most cosmopolitan city in the world and the people of London (and, for some reason, Wales) wanted to hear us say it. So, after a year’s worth of research, we did. And what we said was …

  Yes, it was.

  Probably.

  London was definitely the most cosmopolitan city in the world unless anyone else could be bothered to do similar research in New York, Montreal, Bahrain or Dubai and prove otherwise.

  For we didn’t actually manage to find someone from every single country in the world living in the capital; we found people from all but three of the UN’s 192 nations. And we were pretty much satisfied that the remaining trio, the Pacific* islands of Tuvalu, Palau and the Marshall Islands, simply did not have representatives living in London. We’d done all we could and had proved that London was definitely 98.4 per cent of the world in one city.

  It was a shame we hadn’t ticked off the Marshall Islands because I was looking forward to meeting someone from the land that gave the world the ‘bikini’, although in the history of verbal invention the story of the skimpy swimwear is far more solemn than the name or item suggests. After dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to bring the Pacific war to its awful conclusion in 1945, the United States continued to test the weapon on an atoll of these tiny islands called ‘Bikini’. It just so happened that at the exact same point in history the fashion designers Jacques Heim and Louis Réard were independently designing the brand-new two-piece swimming costume. In what seems like the crassest link of all time, the power of the atomic bombs was then equated with the shockingness of the revealing swimsuit and the word leaped from the islands to the clothes. Remarkably, the reverberations of the launch of the bikini were so far-reaching that the swimsuit is now far more famous than the atoll (who even knows what an atoll is?47). And just like the leotard, it has since spawned further types of swimwear from the same word-structure, like the ‘tankini’, the ‘monokini’ or the ‘mankini’ modelled so fetchingly by Borat.

  To read more about the characters and countries we came across, do have a look at www.worldinonecity.blogspot.com, but I must briefly mention Vanuatu, one of the more surprising countries that we did manage to track down. Dan, a music producer from this South Pacific republic, was our 121st find. Born on the island, he was brought to the UK by his (British) missionary parents at the age of four but could still represent Vanuatu at the Olympics (and would have a considerably larger chance of qualifying than for Team GB), so still counted on our list. I’ve singled out Vanuatu particularly because it was one of the countries I’d never heard of before commencing the project and because it’s the source of my favourite story in The Meaning of Tingo.

  ‘When the Duke of Edinburgh visits Vanuatu in the Pacific,’ writes Jacot de Boinod, ‘he is addressed as oldfella PiliPili him b’long Missy Kween, while Prince Charles is Pikinini b’long Kween.’

  That’s tremendous. It demonstrates both the exuberant way in which words can travel around the world and the inherent ridiculousness of a monarchy. And if I never actually manage to get a word in the dictionary I’d still die as happy as Larry* if someone somewhere in the world kept my name alive in such a creative way.

  Also, the Vanuatu national anthem is called ‘Yumi Yumi Yumi’. Honestly. In both senses of the word.

  43 I was recently alerted to the fact that ‘hond’ is actually used instead of ‘hand’ in parts of Glasgow. You’re welcome to use it yourselves if you think it stands a chance outside of the Scottish city.

  44 In honour of her outburst, ‘granny’s word’ is now my alternative euphemism to the overused ‘F-word’. I’m hoping it’ll catch on. ‘Don’t you dare say granny’s word at the table!’ a shocked mother might protest. Or ‘granny sword’. That could work too. Perhaps as a mythical weapon with which to threaten foul-mouthed children.

  45 The phrase ‘global village’ was coined by Canadian clever man Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s. And this footnote is more intelligent than anything I said in the studio.

  46 I don’t know what a mobile phone platform is either. I don’t even know if it’s a platform for mobile-phones or a mobile platform for ordinary phones. Either way, thirty-four sounds like rather a small number compared to a million and a half hotel rooms.

  47 I do. Well, I looked it up. On Wikipedia. It’s an island of coral that either partially or completely encircles a lagoon. Or it might not be.

  22

  Galvanised* by the completion of one project and with a whole lot more spare time now that I didn’t need to ask everyone I met if they or anyone they knew were from Equatorial Guinea, I hastily set up the tkday website (www.tkday.com). I wanted to ensure our 10,000 day mark was official. The site was basic, clear but also, I hoped, charming, with five seconds of tinkling music delighting visitors’ ears when they open the home page, and titbits galore appealing to their eyes.

  I wrote a tiny tkday poem and encouraged people to include it in their tkday cards:

  Roses are red

  Your hair’s going grey

  But don’t get upset

  Have a fab tkday

  Elsewhere I posted some fascinating tkday facts, such as ‘Jimi Hendrix died 158 days after celebrating his tkday,’ ‘10,000 follows 9,999 and precedes 10,001.’ ‘Jim Morrison died just s
eventy days after his tkday,’ ‘There are approximately 10,000 species of birds in the world,’ and ‘Kurt Cobain died ninety-three days short of his tkday.’ I thought it was good to mix the serious with the trivial, like on the actual news.

  Perhaps the most important application on the site was the means by which one might calculate one’s own tkday, which I included after a desperate Mr Goudy-Stout emailed to ask: ‘Do you just times your age by 365 or do you really have to go into it and count leap years and stuff?’ This was a fair point. You do, unfortunately, ‘really have to go into it’. But because not everybody saw Carol teach the relevant equation on that episode of Countdown, I attached a link to a site where you simply enter your date of birth and your computer will do the ‘really going into it’ bit for you (if you don’t have a computer or the inclination, the easiest way is to wait until your next birthday then times your age by 365.25. Happy birthday).

  With keen marketing nous, I added a section to the tkday website called ‘Custom Cakes’ where, at the click of a button, anyone could order their own tkday cake. This did, however, mean that I would then have to bake a cake, something I have yet to achieve successfully. But these were the lengths I was prepared to go to to get my new word out there.

  Finally, in a section entitled ‘celebrities’, I listed those famous people whose tkdays were on the horizon. Of these celebrity twenty-seven-year-olds, Shane Filan from Westlife was closest to his tkday, so I spent the rest of the day hand-crafting two more personal tkday cards for the cheerful Irish singer, sending one to his agent in London and one to his agent in Dublin. Predictably the Westlife boys each had various fan websites dedicated to them, so I also logged on to one of these to attempt to spread the word. Once more, therefore, I found myself communicating with very young children on the Internet. This was odd and slightly uncomfortable, but again the results just about justified the methods. On breaking the tkday news to his fans on the Shane Filan Forum, for instance, the following exchange occurred.