Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  V.G.Farmer It’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday!

  Hi everyone,

  Hope this doesn’t make me sound too weird but I’ve worked out that it’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday! He’ll have been alive for 10,000 days !

  Not sure if I’m the only one who’s realised but wanted to be the first to wish Shane a happy Tkday! It only comes around once so I hope you have a lovely day!

  Bye!

  Nicky Re: It’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday!

  That is weird, y would u want to find that out

  Joanne Re: It’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday!

  Hi nicky

  Sum people like to think of things like that, i think that i have got a bday every yr but i would like to celebrate two if u get wot a mean by that. Its weid thinkin that shane has been alive for 10,000 days its sounds weird when u say it like that lol

  xJoannex Re: It’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday!

  Hi

  Yer i would lov 2 bdays that means more presents lol.

  xX-sophie-Xs Re: It’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday!

  WATS A TKDAY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

  xJoannex Re: It’s Shane’s Tkday on Monday!

  I think it means that shane has been alive for 10,000 days or something like that.

  I may have looked a little peculiar, but these were the people we needed to infect with our words. Without any prompting from me, Joanne managed to work out what a ‘tkday’ was. And if she told her friends about her own tkday, and those friends planned tkday parties of their own with guests who would then know about this extra birthday, pretty soon the entire planet would be using the word.

  Based on this logic I made a big decision of my own. It was time, I determined, for me personally to start passing on the rest of my words more directly. I had realised (perhaps a little slowly) that the more people who knew about honk, bollo and mental safari, the more chance they had of survival. I therefore resolved to tell the tale of Wordwatching to as many people as possible. There was a danger that if the dictionary authorities themselves found out about my plans they might squash them immediately, but I was banking on them being too busy rejigging definitions to come and see a comedian tell a story. So I chose the Edinburgh stage as my launchpad once again, and this time I would openly shout out the words rather than whispering them in the backstreets. Yes, I would be abandoning our initial principles of never explicitly explaining the project, but without such affirmative action I was sure we would fall short.

  The stage was, after all, whence our finest inventor of words had sent forth his 1,700 neologisms. That man was, of course, William Shakespeare or, if you like, Shakspear, Shakespeare, Shaksper, even Shaxberd. In his six surviving signatures, his surname isn’t spelt the same way twice. There are over eighty versions noted in contemporary texts, so I’m going to refer to him as Shakey, partly because I don’t think that’s been taken yet and because that was always my nickname at university (for no reason other than that I was quite nervous on my first few days. If you fancy inventing a more interesting back story please feel free. Why not add it to my Wikipedia entry?). This way I can cheekily associate myself with the great man, and make him seem less like some supernatural being and more like a normal person. So here goes.

  The latest edition of the OED assigned 2,035 ‘first usage’ words to Shakey and quoted him no fewer than 14,000 times. Charles Dickens has 262 citations, Jane Austen just sixty, and they’re really influential writers. Shakey was a really really influential writer. The real McCoy.* But I do wonder how much of his influence was self-fulfilling, how many of these words are attributed to him simply because he’s The Bard. One must assume that other writers used at least some of the same terms at the same time or before Shakespeare, otherwise his audiences would have had even less of a clue what he was on about than GSCE English students today.

  But the words were perfectly preserved in his treasured texts and he is extremely quotable. Moreover, his reputation was such that he could get a word like ‘trolmydames’ into Johnson’s dictionary even though no one else seemed to use it, causing Johnson himself to write, ‘of this word I know not the meaning’, instead of a definition. That’s just not fair.

  Whether or not he invented them all, the depth and variety of Shakey’s words is astounding. From the dense ‘abstemious’, ‘accessible’ and ‘assassination’ to the expansive ‘fair play’ and ‘pomp and circumstance’ or the fun ‘barefaced’ and ‘leapfrog’, he’s the man behind almost every word that’s any good. ‘Blanket’, ‘bump’, ‘buzzer’, they’re his. ‘Gossip’, ‘hobnob’, ‘luggage’, ‘mountaineer’ and ‘skim milk’, they’re all his too. He was the first to write ‘deafening’, ‘laughable’, ‘downstairs’ and ‘puke’, and thanks to their memorable contexts, they’ve all been in constant use ever since. I personally think his word ‘undress’ isn’t great; it’s too literal and straightforward a description of what is often an exciting occasion. But because he introduced it in Henry V, it’s still the most common word for ‘stripping’ today.

  Bear in mind that during Shakey’s lifetime an estimated one out of every two men in London would have seen one of his big plays. Shakey was everywhere; a bit like Beyoncé but even more prolific and, I would dare to say, with an even greater vocabulary. His is estimated to be twice as large as the average educated person today. It is widely reported that Shakespeare used 29,066 different words in his works (although Bill Bryson quotes the number 17,677), compared to just 10,000 in the King James Bible and 9,714 in this book.48

  But as well as a dubious nickname, Shakey and I do share attributes. He liked puns, for example. As well as the famously sordid phrase ‘country matters’, he indulged in more innocent gags like Mercutio’s remark shortly before his death in Romeo and Juliet: ‘Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.’ Grave man! Brilliant! Or my favourite, from Henry IV, Part One: ‘If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.’ That one only works if you pronounce ‘reason’ as ‘raisin’ as they did in Shakey’s day, but you can still see that it’s not such a leap forward to today’s Christmas cracker jokes after all.

  And like me, Shakey often failed. Not all of his words have survived. If someone dropped ‘vizament’, ‘substractor’ or ‘bepray’ into conversation today, you’d almost certainly wonder what was wrong with them. ‘Barky’ and ‘brisky’ look more sensible but never caught on. And I don’t think ‘soilure’, ‘vastidity’, ‘fustilarian’ or ‘anthropophaginian’ would be understood any better than ‘honk’, ‘bollo’ or even ‘tkday’. So I was inspired rather than intimidated by Shakespeare. It was time for my words to take centre stage.

  *

  The road to the Edinburgh Fringe festival starts, for me, in London, where I attempt to buff my stories up into something presentable over a series of previews. These are inevitably experimental affairs, so instead of wasting more honk on advertising performances, I try to drum up a modest and friendly audience with emails to friends and family. But now that I’d resolved to reveal myself to the world as the Farmer I thought I might as well try to get the press involved with my show. I therefore stooped to ask for help in publicising my show from someone on the inside of a well-known magazine. Instead of sneaking past security in a furtive fashion I hoped to side-step the whole issue of censorship and walk brazenly through the doors. So, for the first time, I explained my scheme to a journalist, the editor of Time Out’s comedy section, and asked if he could give me a leg up. Fortunately for me, Tim, the magazine’s main comedy man, has an excellent sense of humour and fun:

  I am very happy to print a quote in the mag with one of the words in. Send me a couple of examples and I’ll see what I can do. I’m always very happy to help, especially when it comes to messing around a bit.

  In the very next edition the first preview was listed as ‘Wordwatching – well worth your comedy honk.’

  Whether or not it was this recommendation that did the trick, enough people came
to the early shows to make them worthwhile. I gradually whittled our rather unwieldy Verbal Gardening campaign into something approaching a coherent story and, to my surprise, many of those who heard it felt stirred to join in. An accountant called Dave from Brighton was amongst the first to offer support, promising to use ‘honk’ when talking to his clients. A professional young lady called Poppy sent an email along similar lines, saying:

  I just tried to use the word ‘honk’ in a report and had it edited out by my manager, as in: ‘… since moving to the new property turnover has not increased as forecast, and the rise in rental and other overheads has led to honk flow difficulties.’ I think I might get fired.

  She may have failed to spread honk further than her manager, but she did get it noticed by someone in a position of some authority. And if it cost her her job at least we’d be recreating the sacrifices of Wycliffe and Wild. I hoped that would be some consolation anyway.

  A man called Mike, meanwhile, managed to take ‘mental safari’ away with him and pop it in the editorial of the next issue of his European fruit-based trade magazine: ‘After three days of journalistic hunting and gathering,’ his column concluded, ‘our carefully plotted excursion around the world of fresh produce had become something of a mental safari. Next year, thank goodness, we’ll have the whole weekend to recover …’ I can’t quite imagine an exhibition all about pineapples causing a mental safari, but this was excellent work. When we finally came to sending our evidence to the editors of the OED this would surely convince them that this phrase at least was being widely used.

  After the third Wordwatching preview I received an email from an audience member whose colleagues in Westminster had ‘agreed to take up the challenge to insert the sentence “We’re putting a lot of honk into the post office network” into a ministerial speech’. This was more like it. Our words were hitting the big time. This was the sort of push that could send us over the edge and into the dictionary.

  This same correspondent (who, I think, should also remain anonymous) went on to alert me to the new phrase ‘collateral misinformation’ which, according to Urban Dictionary (and someone called ‘wildefox’), means;

  When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the ‘error’ is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation. E.g. I changed the scientific classification of red foxes last night in order to win an argument with Judy. I hope some stupid high school student didn’t suffer from collateral misinformation.

  It had certainly worked for my Budgens rumour. Whilst I was plugging away with preparations for the Edinburgh show no less a media giant than ITV advertised a programme called Comedy Cuts in which Mr Elephant and I briefly appeared with the sentence:

  THAT‘S AMAZING! Alex Horne’s first gig came after winning a Christmas Cracker joke writing competition whilst working as Deputy Head of Dairy at Budgens.

  Maybe they had no reason to doubt the veracity of the story, but it was encouraging to see word spread so far so quickly. Momentum was gathering on all fronts.

  The Wordwatching previews were instantly accelerating the whole Verbal Gardening process. By telling audiences about the plan, demonstrating the words, then swearing them to secrecy, my team of word-distributors was increasing. The Rare Men were still my generals, but I now had an increasing number of foot-soldiers happy to pitch in, pass on the words and, in turn, tell me about their own verbal creations; because everyone seemed to have invented a new word themselves or to know someone who had.

  People like Jonny, who told me about the verb ‘to tristan’, which he’d made up to mean, ‘to christen your kid with a gratuitously fancy name’; Derek, whose mate JP coined ‘dillion’ for ‘the biggest number you can think of, plus one’; or Peter, who made up ‘smuttering’, meaning ‘a very small innuendo’. Everyone was at it. The Aucklands alerted me to their ‘duggle fuggle’, used to describe someone who is both bald and bearded (from ‘duggle’, meaning bald and ‘fuggle’, meaning bearded), Martin’s eighteen-month-old son had invented ‘poodly-poodlies’ as a name for furry slippers with animal faces, and Nat coined the rather less saccharine ‘kitten-drowner’, to replace ‘bin-liner’. Rich told me his dad calls headaches ‘nogglers’. Hildegard said she refers to the aperitifs you have with canapés as ‘bibbles’. Sophie shared the beautifully tragic ‘romicide’ which she’d crafted to describe a ‘romantic suicide’.

  They didn’t all show such flair. Many were simply rude; I’ll leave you to guess the meanings of ‘scruttocks’, ‘bogclogger’ and ‘biddy fiddler’. Some were rather mundane; a man called Marc told me he’d invented ‘cupboardy’ which meant ‘like a cupboard’. While others were just a little impractical; Conor’s flatmates came up with ‘spanther’ meaning ‘a panther which is from the future’. But no matter how imaginative the neologism, they were all invented by individuals and, more importantly, used by them and others.

  Nor were these inventions limited to words. Helen told me her friends have used the phrase ‘are you taking my shoes off’ instead of ‘are you taking the piss out of me?’ ever since its creation in a pub one lively evening, Daniel said he’d come up with the precise ‘blancmange man’ to describe ‘someone without personality or taste’, and Gary let me know that he’d created ‘morning long foot’ for ‘when you wake up and your socks are half off’. A man called Dharmesh Patel pricked my curiosity particularly effectively with his phrase, ‘wider than my arm’, for which he gave this explanation: ‘Depends how you say it but it’s used to describe something as either good or bad, e.g. My friend’s yellow shoes are wider than my arm.’ Intrigued, I got back in touch with Dharmesh to ask how this broad phrase came about, expecting some sort of convoluted etymology involving either an enormous bicep or a very skinny upper arm. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Dharmesh, as if he’d never given it a thought. ‘We’ve just always said it.’ So if it catches on and you hear your own friends describing things as wider than their arms, feel free to invent your own derivation.

  Around this time, I also received an email, quite by chance, from my old sparring partner, the BBC Radio Gloucestershire DJ John Rockley, whose noodling I had offhandedly mentioned on the Verbal Gardening website.

  ‘Thanks for the mention on your wonderful site,’ he wrote, exaggerating a little (it’s a very basic site that gives you a headache if you look at it for too long) but instantly winning my affection and attention. ‘There is one other Rockleyism that I enjoy and I’m yet to work out the origin. I don’t think it’s mine by any means but I’ve been using it for so long that I can’t remember where it came from: “Giddy Kipper” – noun. Any person who shows signs of taking very little seriously. Also used for a camper version of “ebullient”. “Stop being a giddy kipper, and listen!”’

  I smiled when I read the email, partly because I like the idea of a ‘giddy kipper’ and know I can occasionally be one, but mainly because Mr Rockley must have googled himself on his way to finding our site and then, having found his name, made sure it wasn’t taken in vain by contributing further to our cause. That’s exactly the sort of thing I’d do. He was clearly proud of his Rockleyisms and keen to share them with the world. Who was I to get in his way, especially when I was in a position where I could actually help him get there?

  But perhaps my favourite coining story came from a man called Tom, aged thirty, who’d been to school with a boy who claimed to have made up the slang adjective ‘cool’. That is a terrific declaration, as good, if not better than Samuel Johnson’s friend and source Thomas Coryate whom he refers to as ‘Furcifer’ in his dictionary because he once claimed to be the first man in England to use a fork. Brilliant.

  In the playground, Tom told me, his friend had boldly stated that he was the first person to ever use the word to refer to anything ‘good’, it had proved an instant hit, and went global within weeks. If only it was that easy. Unfortunately for the lad in question the word has quantifiably been around for at least h
alf a century, although the identity of the original ‘cool’ dude* is unclear. Nominees include jazz musicians Cab Calloway, Charlie Parker and Lester Young, Eton, The Yardbirds, the 1950s and Italy – but probably not Tom’s mate from school.

  It was all set up for the run in Edinburgh. Well, almost all. A week before I set off up the M1 my telephone rang. ‘Withheld number’ flashed up on the screen.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, nervously.

  ‘Hi there, I’m one of the producers of Countdown. I’m just phoning to say that we’d like you to be a contestant on the show. Would that be ok?’

  ‘Ok? Ok! Yes! Ok. Ok!’

  Eureka!*

  I hung up and dialled one of the few numbers I know by heart.

  ‘Mum, I made it. I’m going to be on Countdown.’

  ‘I always knew you would.’

  Everything was falling into place at exactly the right time. I just needed to take a deep breath before shouting my words from the rooftops of Edinburgh with the Wordwatching show and then on the streets of Leeds through Countdown. I was going to make such a racket that the dictionary doormen would simply have to open their gates if only to find out what all the commotion was about.

  48 It took me a long while to find out that figure. After weeks of failed applications I used a programme called ‘NoteTab’ to calculate the number of different words. It probably would have been quicker for me to list and count them.

  23

  With the story written and rehearsed, if not yet concluded, I charged up to Edinburgh to commence the Verbal Gardening endgame with fire (and some real honest food) in my belly. Now I felt ready to sow my seeds properly. Last year I had indiscriminately flung them by hand onto the Scottish streets, this year I was driving my own tractor.* Here I would come out to the rest of the press and the wider world as the Farmer, I would expound the Verbal Gardening concept and I would encourage anyone and everyone to join my dogged band. Having been first afraid that setting out my aims so openly might dissuade the dictionary authorities from taking our new words seriously, I had since come to realise that what I needed wasn’t secrecy but exposure. It was all very well attempting to slyly insert our words into the language, but for people to actually notice and take them on themselves they had to be accompanied by some sort of fanfare. And at least at the raucous Edinburgh Fringe such a fanfare would soon fade into the general cacophony of the festival. I could holler my words in such a way that the dictionaries might not necessarily be put off.