by Alex Horne
Versus Leyton Orient: I expect an early season treat here at the Banks’s Stadium this afternoon with a great game in prospect that, as they say down here in London, will give great value for your honk!
On a Post-it note Andy had written: ‘around 3,000 or so programmes are sold per home game, so your etymological erudition, ghost written by me, is now in the homes of football lovers everywhere. Moreover, as this is an official publication, the editor tells me that all copies of the Walsall FC programme are also sent to the British Library. So you are now there as well in the published archives of Walsall FC. Now isn’t that exciting! Have I earned a beer?!’ Of course he’d earned a beer – a beer and a T-shirt and his pick of any five things in my house; this was enormously exciting. My words would now be housed in the British Library in an official capacity.
Other formal publications were similarly infiltrated. In an article about facebook in the Telegraph* I was quoted as saying; ‘I do have quite a few friends. But they’re not all real friends: I’m a pratdigger.’ Rival paper the Ecton View (a parish magazine published monthly for the 250 residents of the Northamptonshire village) featured these sentences in an account of a trip to Edinburgh:
The only downside was that we were opposite a nightclub which was a load of old bollo, and did not close until 5 a.m., so as you can imagine, every night was ‘disco’ night in our apartment!
This was my second year and you can get carried away if you are not careful and end up spending a lot of honk on tickets, but we saw more free comedy this time round which I have to say was equally as good as some of the paid venues.
Food and alcohol was plentiful, as you would expect, and we all came home slightly more honest than when we left.
If I am not careful I could ramble on about all the different shows we saw and the interesting habits my fellow companions have, but if you want to experience a mental safari for yourself then book yourself on next year’s tour … you will not be disappointed.
Two more T-shirts were duly sent out to Colin and Sophie, the magnificent authors.
Perhaps most importantly, the words were now cropping up in everyday communication too. About to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, a gentleman called Jot emailed these travel arrangements to his party:
It’s very easy to get there. There’s a train to Diss from Liverpool St (cab at the other end costs about a tenner) which can be booked in advance for very little honk.
On the same day a Mr Roberts got in touch to say that having used it in a message to his USA branch, ‘mental safari’ had now entered office jargon (his initial message; ‘Before we go off on a bit of a mental safari on this matter, I’ll get the guys together on Monday morning to clarify our findings and get back to you all’ was greeted with: ‘Mental safari – now that’s funny’, and ‘I love “mental safari”. Great line’ – both sent ‘via BlackBerry’). And a typical MySpace message from a lady called Amelie read:
Hello we met @ the fringe – i know fletch hope u now dont think he’s a pratdigger for introducing us, loved the show!!
All these usages I carefully collected, printed up and placed into my now bulging file of evidence. So widespread were the examples and so apparently random that I felt the dictionary authorities had to take the words seriously. Either that, or they had to recognise the preposterousness of my proposal and take the words humorously. Or maybe there’d be an administrative cock-up at Dictionary Headquarters and the words would end up in the ‘accepted’ tray by mistake. One way or another, they would surely get in.
There is a history of words sneaking into dictionaries by extraordinary means. The word ‘syllabus’, for instance, shouldn’t really be taught at school but was included in the OED thanks to a misreading of a fifteenth-century manuscript of Cicero in which the Greek word for ‘labels’, sittybos, was mistakenly replicated as ‘syllabus’. Accidents do happen. And they can easily be forgotten, especially when they’re hidden in a 15,490-page-long work featuring 414,825 different words illustrated by 1,827,306 quotations. How else can one explain the OED’s inclusion of ‘cellarhood’ (‘the state of being a cellar’) despite it being completely impossible to think of a sentence in which it might be sensibly used, or ‘admurmuration’ (meaning ‘an act of murmuring’) which is printed with an accompanying note explaining that the word was ‘never used’. Surely there’s room for one of my words, all of which are definitely usable and have indeed been used, many many times! Please let me in!
When Americans refer to ‘The Dictionary’ they usually mean Webster’s Dictionary, first published in 1806 by the aforementioned lexicologist (and schoolmaster) Noah Webster under the grandiloquent title A Compendius Dictionary of the English Language. So esteemed was his book that the word ‘Websterian’ soon entered the language meaning ‘invested with lexical authority’. Webster had always been determined to get things right. He even lobbied Congress to make simplified spelling a legal requirement; this was a dictionary written almost exclusively by one man, an unsmiling teacher desperate to steer clear of in-jokes and creative definitions; an attempt to sanitise a language defiled by the likes of Johnson (whose dictionary, Webster whined, was ‘extremely imperfect and full of error’).
But despite such austere authority, at least one less recognised word did slip though Webster’s tightly woven net. That word is ‘dord’, perhaps my favourite of all those featured in this or any other book. ‘Dord’. Do you know what it means?
If you look it up in your own dictionary you probably won’t find it, unless you happen to own the 1934 edition of Merriam-Webster. There you will find this entry:
dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chemistry. Density
Yes, ‘dord’ is a synonym of ‘density’. Well, it was for five years anyway. Before that, the letter ‘D’ was used as an abbreviation for density. Its little brother ‘d’ was also short for density. In the offices of Webster’s Dictionary a slip bound for the ‘abbreviations’ section somehow found its way into the ‘words’ pile, clearly stating that ‘D’ or ‘d’ could mean density. ‘D’ or ‘d’ could mean density. And so, for a while, ‘Dord’ did mean density, until the mistake was discovered and erased from all subsequent editions. It’s now a strange ghost word; a term with dictionary history and heritage but without a real meaning. I think it would make an excellent first name. Dord Horne; he (or possibly she) would definitely make his mark.
Such a mistake is understandable. Proofreading a dictionary must be one of the most laborious tasks in the world of publishing, and this lexical blunder is infused with the reassuring scent of human error. Nowadays, we rely far more on computerised spell-checkers, and one would expect ‘dord’ not to survive even one proof of a contemporary dictionary. But we shouldn’t be so sure. Mistakes do still creep into books. Take my book Birdwatchingwatching as an example. When the first finished copy arrived at my door I grasped it excitedly; my first book, my first words bound and locked away for ever and ever. I opened it at random on page 364. Yes, there they were: my words. Just glancing down the page I could instantly recognise them as mine, used by generations of people before me of course, but never in this order. This was my collection. Except, hang on, what was that? Near the bottom, in brackets at the end of the penultimate paragraph; that wasn’t one of my words! I quote verbatim:
‘I stole (wicustJeremyStrongJth their permission this time) many of these words when describing the birds I saw in Africa’.
I was pretty certain I hadn’t included the word ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ in the last manuscript I’d handed in. In fact, I was sure it hadn’t been in the last version the publishers had sent me for a final inspection. It’s not the sort of word you fail to spot. So what was it doing in this, the actual printed version? Was every ‘with’ changed to such an odd-looking twenty-two-letter word?
No. Thankfully, there was just the one ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ in my book, the result, I have since been informed, of ‘human error’. An exhausted typesetter somewhere was working on two books at o
nce, so for some reason decided to plonk ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ onto the 364th page of my first book. The ‘word’ seems to contain the name ‘Jeremy Strong’, a successful children’s author with more than eighty of his own books to his name (including his very own joke book). Look him up on Wikipedia, he’s there (that’s how I now know he worked in a bakery after leaving school), but that doesn’t really explain his appearance in my ‘with’ in my book, flanked by ‘cust’ and ‘J’.
So ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ is a ghost word too, an unidentified interloper in a book published and shipped off to bookshops all over the country. And although it’s not as simple or attractive as ‘dord’, I grew to like it. It had character. Have a closer look:
wicustJeremyStrongJth
It’s got three capital letters in its midst, an unpredictably jazzy rhythm; yes, it’s definitely unique. So I’m now fighting to keep it alive. My official line is that ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ wasn’t a mistake, just a more formal version of the word ‘with’ to be used sparingly, perhaps once in a book, when you really want to stress the idea of togetherness.
So, just in case you happen to be a dictionary editor reading this, ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ definitely means ‘with’. It should also be included in the dictionary. And while you may worry it’s too unwieldy and outlandish for inclusion, there is precedent. For in 1903 a man called Rupert Hughes published The Musical Guide: a guide to music, unsurprisingly, which included a short dictionary of musical terms and instruments. One would imagine such an edifying work would be a haven of good, proper words. Like the debate section of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music’s website, one would expect such a cultural book to be a paradigm of grammar and lexical principles. But at the very end of this 252-page hardback detailing the numerous non-English words found in Classical music terminology, there can be found, just after an entry for ‘zymbel’ (the German for ‘cymbal’), the following entry;
zzxjoanw (shaw). Maori. 1. Drum. 2. Fife. 3. Conclusion.
Yes, according to Hughes, ‘zzxjoanw’ is a Maori word for a drum (or, a type of flute or, bizarrely, a ‘conclusion’).
Visually, the similarities to ‘wicustJeremyStrongJth’ are remarkable; a name trapped inside some fairly random letters to create an ugly unpronounceable word. But this didn’t stop ‘zzxjoanw’ which, Hughes helpfully informs the reader, is officially pronounced ‘shaw’. The entry survived several reprints with various different titles between 1912 and 1954 and was listed as a genuine musical instrument in Mrs Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words in 1974, although Mrs Byrne did question the pronunciation, suggesting the far more reasonable ‘ziks-jo’an’, instead.
In fact it wasn’t until seventy years after its first appearance, in a 1976 publication called Word Ways, that the etymologist Philip Cohen finally said, hang on, that can’t be a word because a) it’s spelt nothing like how it’s pronounced, b) the meanings are weirdly diverse, c) Maori only uses fourteen letters, which don’t include ‘z’ ‘x’ or ‘j’, and d) look at it, that can’t be a word.
But by then it was too late. Zzxjoanw had found its way into the mains water supply of the English language and could even be sampled in the unmusical science fiction novel Earth written in 1990 by David Brin. A 2001 book called The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler included it, despite the author’s claim that ‘the avowed purpose of this witty little book is to equip the reader to be the superior person of the title by expanding the vocabulary of the rare and arcane’. This ‘eminent alternative lexicographer’ was then quoted in a 2005 book called You Say Tomato: An Amusing and Irreverent Guide to the Most Often Mispronounced Words in the English Language. So whilst it’s not in the OED yet, ‘zzxjoanw’ has made it into dictionaries.
The keen wordwatcher and eventual spoilsport Philip Cohen viewed it as a joke on the part of Rupert Hughes. Indeed, if you squint hard enough, ‘zzxjoanw’ does look a little bit like a ‘hoax’. But I like to think that it was actually a desperate attempt to win a competitive game of Scrabble (you’d need to use a blank tile, of course) between Hughes and his wife. It might simply have been an innocent typo like mine. But whatever its origin, zzxjoanw does prove that unlikely-looking words can succeed. The English language is flexible enough to accommodate wicustJeremyStrongJth which, by the way, is pronounced ‘wermstraw’, to rhyme with zzxjoanw and Featherstonehaugh.
I’ve got Jeremy Strong’s blessing too. After tracking him down on the forum of his own website (alongside countless kids all extolling the virtues of his many books), I explained the situation and asked if he’d mind what I suppose is half his word one day landing in the dictionary. Within days he wrote back: ‘You are welcome to use wicustJeremyStrongJth as you wish and I applaud your efforts to introduce new words to the language. Do let me know how things go. It’s very exciting to know that I have somehow infiltrated your book without either of us knowing.’ So for both our sakes, please do use wicustJeremyStrongJth yourselves. It’s not easy to drop into conversation, but if you don’t mind making a splash, give it a go.
My thirtieth birthday arrived with just a few weeks of the project to go. That’s what happens about a thousand days after your tkday: you arrive at the start of your fourth decade. This brief time between two turning points is, I think, a perfect period at a crucial moment of your life to give something a go, to head off in a different direction, to at least attempt to make your mark. That’s what these thousand days had been about, bucking the trend, stepping off the treadwheel and trying not to fall into every cliché going. Some people change jobs, some live in another country for a year or two, I tried to invent a new word.
Despite huge efforts and generosity from my family and friends, the birthday present I’ll treasure longest came from a comedian who had also been up in Edinburgh and who didn’t even know it was my thirtieth. Liverpudlian comic John Bishop was performing his show in the same room as me a couple of hours after mine. He wanted to show a film at the end of his slot, so I loaned him my projector and thought nothing more about it.
But as an unnecessary thank-you, a month after the festival, John sent me something quite extraordinary. He is, like me, a Liverpool fan. But John is a proper Liverpool fan, in that he’s from Liverpool. He also does a bit of work at the club, on the LFC TV channel and at various functions throughout the year. So, instead of a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates, John sent me the following thank-you gift; a photo of Steven Gerrard, featuring footballistic facts about Steven Gerrard and signed by Steven Gerrard. Steven Gerrard is my sporting hero. This was a great gift.
But John didn’t only get Steven Gerrard to sign his name on this card. Beneath his signature, in large legible letters, Steven Gerrard wrote:
Don’t sell this for any honk!
Having seen the show, John had explained the project to Steven Gerrard and persuaded him to join in by writing what to him must have seemed an utterly bizarre sentence underneath his own face. My own gob was smacked. I’d always thought that despite him being my hero, I had nothing in common with Steven Gerrard. I could have had a laugh with Rafa Benítez, a drink with Fernando Torres, but Steven Gerrard wouldn’t have had time for me. He was too focused on his football, not interested in the sort of linguistic hi-jinks I spent my time engaged in. But no, Steven Gerrard had joined in. He’d endorsed my honk. If it was in the world’s best footballer’s vernacular, it was definitely a word.
A few days after my thirtieth birthday, Samuel Johnson celebrated his two hundred and ninety-ninth. Or rather, other people celebrated it for him. Amongst those paying tribute to the original lexicologist was a man called Ed Baker who chose this date to launch his own twenty-first-century dictionary, called Wordia: a word-based wiki-website and the world’s first ever visual dictionary. By uploading videos onto the site, anyone can now describe any and every word in the language, thus providing unique and instantly intelligible definitions as opposed to the scientific and often dreary entries in
most modern dictionaries. In its democratic attributes Wordia is similar to Wikipedia, but now that I’d come out as the Farmer, I didn’t have to hide from its editor. In fact, knowing my interest in words and definitions the editor specifically invited me to contribute to the site. If you go to www.wordia.com you can see my entry for ‘honk’. It’s there. In a dictionary.
After all the excitement of the past couple of months Mr Elephant, Mrs Farmer and I went out for a few drinks in the Queen’s Head (a pub, not the sovereign’s skull), where we happened upon the weekly pub quiz. In honour of Dharmesh and Mr Daly, we entered under the name ‘Natasha Kaplinsky is six foot two inches tall’ and two hours later, after a scrapping performance, the question master announced, ‘in fifth place we have – and this is quite a controversial name – Natasha Kaplinsky is six foot two inches tall!’ We cheered heartily. Dharmesh was right. As we polished off our drinks three other quizzers asked us if she was really that tall; we confirmed the story, they passed it on. It had worked. I felt wider than my arm and will feel yet wider if you too could spread the rumour whenever she comes up in conversation (which she will, on average once every six weeks for a normal UK adult).
By now I was satisfied that I’d done all I could. But Stuart Goldsmith, the comic and street performer (he won bronze in the Street Performing World Championships in 2008, don’t you know) who’d asked folks to put honk in his hat up in Edinburgh, was not.
One of his many day jobs was to warm up the crowd for ITV’s lunchtime show, Loose Women, a programme occasionally derided, often by me, but never again. They’re lucky to have Stu’s services as warm-up artist. He’s a fantastic comic, an excellent improviser and a real hit with the ladies. As well as providing him with many a dinner party-tale, this job meant Stu had access to the eponymous Loose Women and, being Approachable and Up for a Laugh Women too, Stu decided to explain the whole Verbal Gardening concept and ask if they could contribute to the final push.