Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  Such reasoning was proved wholly inaccurate in the first two days of the festival, first by a Rare Man and then by a hitherto nebulous Dictionary Authority. The journalist Mr Rockwell had come to Edinburgh at the very start of the festival and kindly chose to watch my show whilst in the capital and whilst wearing his own Verbal Gardening T-shirt (featuring the slogan; ‘BEWARE PRATDIGGERS’). As he queued outside the box office a girl sidled up to him and quietly said, ‘I hope that shirt didn’t cost you too much honk,’ before sidling off again. Mr Rockwell immediately reported the incident and I was both pleased and bemused. Had she seen one of the show’s previews? Or had both ‘pratdigger’ and ‘honk’ successfully made it to Scotland already? Either way, the words were spreading. Perhaps I didn’t need such a fanfare after all.

  The following night, after the second show of the four-week run, a girl sidled up to me too. This time she introduced herself; ‘Hi, I’m Morven. I just wanted to let you know that I’m from the Chambers Dictionary and I enjoyed the show.’ I blushed. My cover had been blown. One dictionary was already on to me.

  But she’d said she’d had a good time* at the show. What did that mean? Might she push our words into her dictionary? Or was this more of a sinister ‘I enjoyed the show. You’ve had your fun. Now leave us alone’ sort of a comment? She didn’t seem like a sinister person, she seemed like a friendly person. I felt warily optimistic, mainly because Chambers was the one dictionary I thought might see the funny side of our project.

  First published in 1901, the Chambers Dictionary has always prided itself on its sense of humour. A week before I arrived in Edinburgh, the people behind the dictionary brought out a ‘lexicon of laughter’, entitled Gigglossary, which celebrated the company’s lighter sensibilities. Chambers was, according to its editors, ‘unique among contemporary mainstream dictionaries in including humorous definitions scattered among its more serious ones’. That was exactly the sort of thing I needed to hear. Not since Johnson’s day had there been a dictionary that actively enjoyed wordplay, but here was one whose ‘humorous definitions’ were both stylish and witty, rather than bawdy or wacky. ‘Jaywalker’, for example, is defined as ‘a careless pedestrian whom motorists are expected to avoid running down’, a ‘track-suit’ as ‘a loose warm suit intended to be worn by athletes when warming up or training, but sometimes worn by others in an error of judgement’, and, most famously, an ‘éclair’, ‘a cake, long in shape but short in duration’. This could be a perfect home for my words. I just hoped they passed muster.

  After this initial dictionary jolt, the shows settled into a productive rhythm. I narrated the story so far; how the words were chosen and then spread and what the audience could do to help. There were a paddleful of jokes too, some nifty multimedia trickery and a picture of a pirate so all in all, I had confidence in my hi-tech-word-coining-themed-comedy-package (although towards the end of one show my critical computer went on a mental safari and stopped working, rousing a cry of ‘hit it with your paddle’ from the crowd, soon followed by ‘your laptop’s bollo’ and ‘your laptop’s a pratdigger’. Those were a bittersweet few minutes).

  Before each show I asked people to write down their own invented words, any terms that had sprung up naturally in conversation with their friends and family and which had clung on to life in their own homes and heads, and again they responded with remarkable enthusiasm, especially considering this was really just enforced audience participation. In his afterword to Kitchen Table Lingo, David Crystal wrote that ‘everyone has been a word-coiner at some time or other, if not around the kitchen table, then in the garden, bedroom, office or pub’, and I can only agree. Inventing words does seem to be something we all do; maybe not quite as deliberately, self-consciously or egocentrically as me, but as a natural part of communication. This is how language grows.

  While I then told my story in the Pleasance Above, a sports hall converted into a 150-seater theatre, my luminous heterochromic amanuensis Hannah diligently typed up and printed out the audience’s words and phrases in the store room two floors below (some cracking Classics-based words there; if you don’t know what they mean, why not look them up in the OED? You never know what you might find). At the end of the show, when I’d told them about my Countdown experience and the audience filed out full of my new words, Hannah handed them each a Verbal Gardening Pocket Dictionary, tailor-made and full of theirs. She produced and distributed over 2,000 of these bespoke dictionaries during the festival. They may have been very limited editions, but my words were in these dictionaries.

  The Free Pocket Dictionary strategy was one I’d nicked from Wycliffe’s biblical successor William Tyndale, whose 1525 version of the New Testament housed several freshly minted words including my favourite, ‘scapegoat’, whose creation was the enduring result of a simple mistake. Tyndale was trying to translate the Hebrew azazel. Unfortunately, instead of its real meaning of a ‘fallen angel’, he mistook it for ez ozel, which, as we all know, means ‘the goat that departs’. He thus invented ‘scapegoat’, short for ‘escapegoat’ (which I wish had stuck because it conjures up the image of a goat that you only use in an emergency).

  Such coinages were tucked into a book made deliberately small so that people could easily hide it on their person. This was passed around the country, from universities to ordinary townsfolk, and his ‘scapegoats’ travelled from his pen to the people. But, as we’ve seen before, Verbal Gardening is a dangerous business, and while Tyndale’s efforts did reap linguistic rewards they also resulted in another rather grisly end. Whilst in Antwerp he was kidnapped and imprisoned in Vilvorde Castle by two men working for the vengeful Henry VIII. There he continued to work, somehow managing to invent apposite phrases such as ‘a stranger in a strange land’, ‘let my people go’ and ‘a law unto themselves’, until his voice was finally snuffed on 6 October 1536 when he was found guilty of heresy and strangled. I can’t stress enough how daring I was even to attempt this project.

  Whether it was the size of our own dictionaries, the fact that they were free or the chance that they might have included some of their own words, they were lapped up by the Edinburgh crowds. Unfortunately I don’t have space here to include any more of the huge assortment of amazing words and phrases they volunteered themselves, some ingenious, most vulgar, all creative, but I have written them up as a list on www.alexhorne.com, so do have a look. I’m sure you’ll discover a few to tickle your personal verbal fancy.

  (Oh, go on then, just a few more of my favourites: ‘disastrophe’, coined by Rob, meaning ‘not as bad as a catastrophe but worse than a disaster’; ‘chello’ from Jane, ‘the way musicians greet each other’; and ‘cockbongo’, ‘an indoor sport involving bongo drums and shuttlecocks’ invented by Tony. Marvellous.)

  If you want to add your own, just send me an email with the word or phrase, when and by whom it was coined and how others might use it themselves. By collating this inventory I like to think that I too am creating some sort of revolutionary dictionary; like Johnson, Murray and the Urban Dictionary team, I’m beavering away, finding and defining words that would otherwise roam free and vulnerable, liable to pass away without record. I mainly like to think this because my words are in the list too and if I call it another dictionary I can keep convincing myself that I have already succeeded. It is fate. It is written: A lexicon: Alex. Icon.

  When it came to the spreading of my own invented words, the audiences were again kind and keen to take up the challenge, with charity providing an unlikely theme in early dispersal. Throughout the festival, volunteers for the Waverley Aids Charity collected money in buckets outside the various venues. Several of these chuggers* told me that many people exiting my show were effortlessly saying, ‘Yes, I’ve got some honk here somewhere,’ or ‘No, I’m afraid I’m honkless,’ as they passed. The words were on their way.

  I also received an email during the first week from a man called Ian who wrote:

  I found a certain affinity for your cause and in par
ticular the word ‘honk’. I go to a big church in the centre of Edinburgh with a congregation of about 1,000 each week. I’m involved with the youth group and saw an opportunity for some gardening. I planted a notice about the upcoming youth weekend away in our weekly notice sheet ‘the bulletin’ and included the word honk in a way which hopefully made it easy to understand. As I say there is a readership of over 1,000 and copies are sent all over the world to our missionaries so it should do rather well. I’m planning other church-related plantings which I shall let you know of if they work out. Does this qualify for a T-shirt??

  Of course it qualified for a T-shirt (I didn’t have any more with me but immediately had some fresh ones made up, my favourite of which read; ‘I’M SHORTER THAN NATASHA KAPLINSKY’). The bulletin itself was perfect in its usage of the word:

  YPM September Weekend … For more details ask a member of committee. Places may be limited so get your form and honk back to us ASAP (cheques playable [sic] to Charlotte Chapel YPM).

  That was exactly what was needed. And there was more. A lady called Margaret let me know that she’d stuck the word ‘honk’ onto her ‘Just Giving’ charity page for a sponsored walk she was soon to do:

  As a team we have a target of £1,000-2,000 so please help me do my bit. I will be very happy if we manage to smash our target, so please give as much honk as you can.

  Again, I sent her a T-shirt (and some honk for the charity) and grew quietly more excited that others were now spreading the words for me. I could almost smell pratdigger, honest and honk beginning to percolate Britain.

  Others got in contact with valuable Verbal Gardening sightings of their own. Someone called Amy let me know about the headline ‘Paul McCartney Lauded for his Honesty’, that had caught her by surprise and made her laugh. Nick pointed me towards an American ‘Honest Weight Food Co-op’ advertising ‘honest food’ to ‘honest people’, and Thomas sent me an article cut from the Sunday Times that stated that Mike Tyson had become ‘brutally honest’ in recent years. Every night, strangers were joining in with our fun.

  One audience member whom I already knew fairly well was my brother Chip. As always, he laughed loyally throughout the show he came to see. It is, I suppose, funny to see your brother make a fool of himself onstage. But this time I did notice him laugh particularly loudly at certain moments. He found my mention of the Ginsters advert outstandingly amusing, for instance.

  After the show I asked him what he thought; he does occasionally come up with some quite useful constructive criticism. Instead of such advice, however, he asked me what I thought of the Lucida Console font. I said I liked it. Then I twigged.

  He was Lucida Console.

  Having read the article in The Times in which I used the word ‘honk’ to mean money, he’d done a little research (as any attentive reader should) and found his way to the Verbal Gardening website. Being a bright sort of a Horne, he soon worked out that I was the Farmer. Being a sneaky sort of a Horne he then emailed the Farmer pretending to be an interested member of the public. As you’ll remember, this Farmer was entirely duped and got very excited that an ordinary member of the public was interested. Oh well.

  The easiest way for others to get in the spirit of the project was still by passing on the Natasha Kaplinsky rumour, and in particular by spreading it via Wikipedia. Considering my history with the website I felt uneasy potentially pissing them off again, but once I’d told my own story onstage there was little I could do to stop others joining in. If you look up the history of Kaplinksy’s page for August 2008 you’ll see a frenzy of activity, all focused around the newsreader’s height. Audience members were editing the page every single day, often with various further details furnished with a flourish; someone wrote that she won Strictly Come Dancing ‘despite her height’; when this was deleted another wrote she won the competition ‘thanks to her height advantage’; more creatively, an anonymous contributor explained that she ‘has a specially modified chair in the studio to hide her incredible height of six foot two inches.’

  Other words were implanted too. For a couple of weeks the site reported that she’d appeared on Strictly after ‘going on a mental safari’, that she was ‘not as honest as Dawn French’, that she had recently ‘told a fellow reporter that she was earning ‘a lot of honk’ and that ‘she is known to be a pratdigger due to her many relationships with bollos’. ‘Bollos’; I’d never seen it as a noun before. It looked good.

  Back in real life, away from Edinburgh, news of her height was spread further with my previous wide-armed correspondent Dharmesh Patel sending me my favourite Kaplinsky-orientated email:

  Me and Kunval are very bored at work so we decided to try something … We said, quite loudly so that people could over hear, ‘Did you know Natasha Kaplinsky is 6 foot 2 inches tall …’ One person overhears and says, ‘Really?! I didn’t know she was that tall!’ Another guy asks ‘Who’s that tall? Natasha Kaplinsky?! six foot two?! Serious?!’ This guy then turns to the person next to him and passes on the amazing piece of information that he has just picked up … Upon hearing this, the guy very confidently declares, ‘Yeah, I know. When she was on Top Gear she was almost as tall as Clarkson!!!’ As soon as we hear this, me and Kunval look at each other and burst out laughing to the bemusement of all those around us!

  There we go. That’s how simple communication can be. Yes, we can use the Internet, we can edit online encyclopaedias and we can create our own websites, but we can also talk to one another. This was something well worth remembering. All I really wanted was for people to start using the words amongst themselves. If I achieved this, the rest would follow.

  Another audience member, Simon, wrote to tell me that after crowbarring honk into a couple of conversations, ‘a friend of mine has now adopted this along with the rather fun “oink” to specifically relate to coins’. That’s what I wanted, for people to have fun with the words themselves. And ‘oink’ is a great development; ‘I think I’ve got some oink here somewhere …’ Please do try it for yourselves.

  The word ‘crowbar’, incidentally, does occasionally (but falsely) get attributed to one person. A ‘black-faced minstrel’ called Thomas D. Rice wrote a song called ‘Jim Crow’ around 1828 about an old Kentucky labourer he’d observed in a field. As the song grew in popularity the term ‘crow’ began to be used to refer to black people. Because of this etymological link it has since been presumed that the crowbar (also called a Jim Crow) was some sort of racist’s tool, a weapon with which to cajole slaves to work. The original crowbar was, however, invented four centuries earlier and simply happens to share the surname. It’s far more likely the crowbar is so called only because it vaguely looks like the beak (or even feet) of a crow.

  The monkey wrench, on the other hand, might not be named after monkeys. Certain killjoy historians may deny it, but there is a shred of evidence to suggest that the handy spanner was invented in 1858 by a man called Charles Moncky who then sold the patent for $2,000 and bought a house in Kings County, New York. The ‘monkey’ is therefore simply a more intuitive misspelling of the inventor’s unusual surname. And even though those spoilsports will tell you that the phrase ‘monkey wrench’ was around decades before Moncky and that it’s a British phrase anyway, I’m going to hold on to that shred.

  Being an aspirant word-coiner I do find myself gunning for the underdog when it comes to these etymologies. Whilst researching this book I did uncover many genuine stories of individual word coinages, but I found even more that were dismissed by lexicographical sticklers as ‘folk’ or ‘false’ etymologies, fantastical explanations, far more interesting than the mundane facts but not, I was told, true.

  Well, I’m not sure who to believe. I think we can be too quick to cynically write off so many of these stories as codswallop. We can too easily mistrust ‘history’ and presume any tale with even the slightest whiff of an old wife to be bunkum. Can we really say for sure that ‘codswallop’ itself wasn’t invented in 1870 in honour of British soft-drink
-maker Hiram Codd and his ‘Codd-neck bottle’ that beer drinkers said was only ‘good for a wallop’? Or that ‘bunkum’ wasn’t created when US Congressman Felix Walker, representative of Buncombe County in North Carolina, rambled inarticulately during a speech in February 1820, was heckled and accused of irrelevance, but refused to yield the floor, claiming that his speech was not intended for Congress; he was simply ‘speaking for Buncombe’? Both of these old stories have been dismissed as false by curmudgeonly etymolo gists, but I think they deserve to be retold.

  At the risk of attracting similar criticism to Felix Walker, I’m going to bluster on for a little longer, this time about the word ‘teetotal’. There are reports in this and many other reputable word books that the word was created by a Mr ‘Dicky’ Turner from Lancashire who had a stutter. At a meeting of the Preston Temperance Society he is said to have sworn that ‘nothing but t-t-t-t-total abstinence will do’ which the other attendees found so amusing they themselves started using the word ‘t-total’. Others, however, insist this can’t be true. How could a lowly fishmonger invent a word in such a simple fashion? Why is it pronounced ‘tea-total’, rather than ‘ter-total’ like the original stutter? And how can you possibly believe such a romantic story?