Wordwatching

by Alex Horne

  They said they might.

  So in the middle of a heated discussion about the etiquette* of serving up leftover food to one’s guests, The Cruise star Jane McDonald brazenly announced that it was becoming more and more common, because ‘People just haven’t got the honk these days.’ ‘What’s honk?’ came the innocent cry of the other liberal ladies. ‘You know, honk, honk; money,’ Jane replied, offhandedly, before going on to blame the credit crunch.

  I watched agog, spine tingling, scarcely believing that our words had hit the dizzy heights of this flagship ITV daytime programme. ‘Honk’ alone had now appeared on several BBC channels, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky One, countless radio stations and in almost every broadsheet newspaper. That’s quite a CV for a word applying for a place in the dictionary.

  There was just enough time for one further twist thanks, again, to the Edinburgh Fringe. Sitting on the sofa, still staring at the screen even though Loose Women had finished an hour ago, my phone rang waking me from my reverie. ‘Withheld number’ flashed up on the screen.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, nervously.

  ‘Hi there, I’m one of the producers of The Verb. I’m just phoning to say that we’d like you to be a contributor on the show. Would that be OK?’

  If you’ve not heard The Verb, you must. You literally must. It’s a programme on Radio 3 hosted by the marvellous Ian McMillan51 all about, you’ve guessed it (or heard it), words. The show’s producer had indeed been in Edinburgh sniffing about for people who might be able to appear on the programme. On the strength of Wordwatching she asked me to be the programme’s resident ‘Language Spy’; I was to keep my eyes and ears out for anything unusual and each month report my findings to Ian on how language was changing, why people were saying what they were saying and what new words were sneaking into the language. Somehow I was now a professional Wordwatcher.

  One of the esteemed guests on my first programme in this role was the New Yorker Ammon Shea, whose book Reading the Oxford English Dictionary had just been published in the UK. As I’ve already explained, it’s about reading the Oxford English Dictionary and I loved it. While I’d been busy banging on its doors, Shea had spent a year locked inside the OED. Now fate had brought us together. Happily he liked the sound of my own words and promised to take them back with him to America.

  After a lively discussion, Ian closed the programme with the words ‘I don’t get paid enough honk for this,’ and I felt closer to the inner sanctum of the dictionary than ever before.

  50 The most recent sighting of this type was made on 3 September 2009 by Lucida Console who spotted this confessional headline on the BBC Sport website: ‘“I’m an honest player,” says Rooney.’

  51 Who himself had got the word ‘griddle’, meaning ‘to piss down railings after fifteen pints’ into a Yorkshire dictionary called Chelp and Chunter – How to Talk Tyke; which, I should probably add, he himself wrote, much like Johnson centuries before.

  26

  Long after the festival had finished I received this text message from the ever-caring comedian Josie Long:

  Blockbuster video has a video games section. The slogan they have is ‘Blockbuster. We are games.’ This amused me.

  This amused me too, both because Blockbuster had unwittingly demonstrated one of our seeds in such bold style, but more because that same seed had settled so comfortably in Josie’s brain that for her, it now had this extra meaning. If ever something was described as ‘games’, Josie would always think of our own ‘games’. Moreover, the phrase ‘Blockbuster. We are games’ implies something not entirely negative. Yes, Blockbuster might seem a little old-fashioned, a little bland, a little eighties, but Blockbuster is fun, Blockbuster is cool, Blockbuster is games.

  So ‘games’ was on the move. It hadn’t been an easy word to spread, but we had collected enough usages for it to at least be considered by the dictionary. In fact, thanks to an eagle-eyed wordwatcher called Victoria, I could even send the compilers an example of the word that predated my own meeting with the original Alex Games by a couple of decades. For, as she remembered while listening to my story in Edinburgh, ‘games’ had also been used to mean something other than the usual plural by an author called Diana Wynne Jones in her book Witch Week, published in 1982 and loved by Victoria. With remarkable parallels to my own story, Wynne Jones’s protagonist Charles Morgan added his own meanings to words that already existed in the language. An entry in his journal like, ‘I got up. I felt hot at breakfast. I do not like porridge. Second lesson was Woodwork but not for long. I think we have Games next’, for example, was not as straightforward as it appears:

  Charles was not writing about the day’s work. He really was writing about his secret feelings, but he was doing it in his own private code so that no one could know.

  ‘Games’ was part of this code:

  When Charles wrote ‘Games’, he meant bad luck.

  And so for girls like Victoria all over the country, ‘games’ also meant bad luck. It’s really up to you what it means next.

  ‘Games’ wasn’t the only word to have its forerunners. Over the last couple of years I’d also uncovered several other instances of the word ‘bollo’ being bandied about before our attempt to spread it. I’m sure some of you spent much of the first few chapters muttering things like, ‘Bollo? Isn’t he that anthropomorphic ape from The Mighty Boosh?’ and you’d have been right. Bollo is the name of the gorilla in Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding’s BBC comedy and somehow we’d managed to come up with the word independently. It is, after all, a lovely-looking word. Some of you might also know an area of west London which features Bollo Road, Bollo Lane and Bollo House, a gastropub (a bollo concept itself, some might argue). Again, we didn’t know such places existed, but heard about them after our own ‘bollo’ had been released. A handful of readers might even be familiar with the sleeve notes to Reasons to be Cheerful: the Very Best of Ian Dury and the Blockheads (by Ian Dury and the Blockheads), in which is written:

  When we are listening to ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ by the Evs, do we know if Chet is wearing his charcoal boot-flares? Are there conchos on a sleeve note? To reminisce, digress or inform? To reveal, portray or exonerate? For whom and for why? Sleeve-notists often make this query in the form of rampant bollo. Others have written two lines of six words each nicely spaced without punctuation.52

  Dury’s album was produced in 1999, proof that ‘bollo’ had been around far longer than we’d first thought. But it still hadn’t made its way into the dictionary, so if I could use this sort of information to aid my cause that would be fine by me.

  On a similar theme, my rare teacher, Mr Garamond, sent me this email towards the end of the project:

  I come bearing the gift of information regarding the seed ‘mental safari’. Leafing through the pages of Dombey and Son by up-and-coming author C. Dickens I happened upon an early version of the seed. Check it and respect it:

  ‘Paul had begun to speculate, in his own odd way, on the subject that might occupy the Apothecary’s mind just at that moment; so musingly had he answered the two questions of Doctor Blimber. But the Apothecary happening to meet his little patient‘s eyes, as the latter set off on that mental expedition, and coming instantly out of his abstraction with a cheerful smile, Paul smiled in return and abandoned it.’ (216–17)

  It seems crafty wordsmith Dickens has just managed to get in before us. Dombey and Son was published in 1848 – just less than 160 years before the seed was definitively invented and authorised for distribution by your good self.

  This, I thought, was a great discovery. This Dickens53 character had obviously used his ‘mental expedition’ before my ‘mental safari’, but I felt this early and slightly different usage would only lend extra clout to our eventual appeal. The mental safaris described in the course of my birdwatching year would be a timely renaissance of Dickens’ own metaphor.

  When I then googled ‘mental safari’ at the close of the project I couldn’t believe my eyes. It see
med like a miracle. Almost a thousand days ago when Mr Bodoni had invented the phrase it yielded no results on the search engine. Now there were three hundred.

  A man called Gary Freedman from Washington, USA, used it as the title of the 27 May 2007 post of his ‘My Daily Struggles’ blog. A morale-boosting website, www.abilitiesu.com, encouraged readers to ‘Profit from all areas of your life’ with an ‘Honest Business Opportunities Review’ (‘honest’ as in ‘sincere’ rather than ‘obese’, unfortunately); ‘Your experience here will be like a Mental Safari’, the site claimed in early 2006. On a lighter note, a number of websites were suddenly selling a magic trick called the ‘Mental Safari’, not quite as tricky as the trick Mr Elephant and I had pulled off in front of Abi Titmuss, but a trick nevertheless. I don’t know if I’d missed them when researching the phrase in the first place, but now every other Google result was offering me the chance to buy ‘a small ornate wood box … containing four different plaques each depicting the head of a wild animal’. The ‘mental’ bit about it is that after the volunteer has chosen their favourite animal, the ‘magician’ takes a note out from the box predicting that very creature. Amazing. Mental! And yours for just £45 (plus postage).

  Elsewhere ‘mental safari’ had been used by a ‘techno rock star’ called Scott Lewis Franco in a fine song called ‘Bitter Campari’, partly, I imagine, because little else rhymes with that title (I tried but failed to contact Mr Franco but discovered him on a social network site that explained he was twenty-seven years old, from New York and liked baseball. He listed his body type as ‘a few extra pounds’, then under ‘self-rated hotness’, wrote ‘7’ with the caveat, ‘Hey, at least I’m honest!’ – well, yes, I suppose you might be).

  These were just a few of many examples of the words being used in print by strangers all over the world. Clearly, some didn’t have the same meaning as our original Verbal Seed; my favourite finding was a misspelt advert for a ‘metal safari hat’ (I think ‘mental safari hat’ sounds far more interesting. I’m imagining a deer stalker hat, but with one ear cocked like a curious Labrador), but that’s beside the point. There were enough usages here to convince me, at least, that the phrase was a part of the language. I’m not sure how many of these people were using ‘mental safari’ because of our work, but I had to make the most of the coincidence. I had to make sure that if and when the phrase came to the attention of the language authorities, it was we who got the credit.

  Away from the Internet, my favourite wordbook of all was the Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English written by John S. Farmer (another verbal farmer!) and W. E. Henley in 1905, the first dictionary I have ever sat down and read from cover to cover (my edition was ‘abridged from the seven-volume work, entitled Slang and its Analogues’, and a mere 534 pages).

  It was in this red leathery tome that I discovered such fantastic terms as ‘all-overish’, meaning ‘an indefinite feeling of apprehension or satisfaction’, ‘bag of mystery’ for ‘a sausage’, ‘high-pooped’, an adjective meaning ‘heavily buttocked’, and ‘molocker’, a bewilderingly specific word for ‘a renovated hat’. He listed countless alternatives to honk: ‘armour’, ‘blunt’, ‘clink’, ‘dimmock’, ‘evil’, ‘fat’, ‘greed’, ‘honey’, ‘iron’, ‘jink’, ‘kilter’, ‘lurry’, ‘muck’, ‘nugget’, ‘oof’, ‘posh’, ‘quirk’, ‘rivet’, ‘scud’, ‘tin’, ‘uncle’, ‘vamp’, ‘wedge’ and ‘yumyum’. And there were funcrimes here too, like the ‘bugger’ who ‘steals breastpins from drunken men’, the ‘fogle hunter’ who nicks pocket handkerchiefs or the ‘unregenerate chicken-lifter’, a petty thief.

  But the word that really caught my eye was ‘paddle’, defined by John S. Farmer as follows:

  ‘The hand: see Daddle. As verb, (1) to drink: hence to have paddled, to be intoxicated: see Screwed; (2) to go or run away. See Canoe.’

  Ignoring the verbs, I turned to ‘Daddle’, where I found more than twenty alternatives to ‘paddle’. So much for there being few slang terms with which to refer to hands. This Farmer listed ‘chalk-farm, claw, clutch, cornstealer, duke,54 fam, famble, feeler, flapper, flipper, forceps, forefoot, fork, grappling-iron (or hook), goll (old), oar, palette, paw, plier, shaker, wing, Yarmouth mitten’. But again, I thought this was great news, reputable proof for the dictionary authorities that ‘paddles’ has been slang for hands for years and years. We might not have invented it, but I’d be thrilled if I was credited as the cause of its dictionary comeback.

  Hitchings was right when he wrote that ‘very few “new” words are fresh coinages. Most are borrowings, compounds, fusions of existing terms, or revivals of old ones’. Unintentionally I’d been trying to revive a term used centuries before; my modern use represented the resurfacing of a whale, the waking of a giant, the waving of an ancestral paddle. We weren’t corrupting the language, we were coming to its aid. In the words of Dryden: ‘Obsolete words may be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding, or more significant than those in practice.’ Of course ‘paddle’ is more sounding and more significant than ‘hand’!

  In Jonathon Green’s Slang Down the Ages, I then found the following sentence in a section all about money slang: ‘Another foreign coinage is hoot, from the Maori utu, meaning money.’55

  I couldn’t believe it. ‘Hoot’, alongside ‘honk’, was without doubt, we’d thought, our own invention. But no, on the other side of the world, Maoris had been using the same-sounding word to mean the same thing for at least the last two hundred years. I even found it in the Collins Dictionary as the third meaning after ‘an owl noise’ and ‘a laugh’.

  Perhaps I should have done this research before sowing my own seeds, but these discoveries only made me more confident in all our own ideas. In the course of trying to get my words in the dictionary I had found out that none of them was actually mine. They had all been used by other people before. I even discovered ‘tkday’ being used to refer to Thanksgiving in America (short for ‘Turkey Day’). But even though this wasn’t part of the original plan, I had also learnt that it wasn’t a problem. Shakespeare didn’t really invent every one of the 1,700 that the OED credits him, but he got all the glory. So would I.

  In the words of a man called Henry Wheeler Shaw, ‘About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgement.’ He should know. He wrote under the pseudonym Josh Billings before dying in 1885, and if you look up the verb ‘josh’ in the OED you’ll see:

  ‘Josh, v. U.S. slang. [C.f. Josh Billings, pseudonym of an American humorist.] trans. To make fun of, chaff, banter, ridicule.’

  By using the phrase ‘just Joshing’ to excuse his sometimes challenging humour, the word became for ever associated with him. He managed to get ‘josh’ in the dictionary. Even though the word was in use as early as 1845, years before he started writing, he got the acclaim. What’s more, ‘just Joshing’ was shortened by telegraph keyboard users to ‘J J’ towards the close of the century, causing the writer himself to write with justified pride that, ‘J J is the new J K [just kidding]’. And whilst the abbreviation fell out of use in the early twentieth century, the early twenty-first has seen the initials reappear in Internet chat rooms round the world. People may assume the letters ‘jj’ on a forum mean ‘just joking’ but really it’s Josh Billings, having the last laugh.

  Could my words follow his into the dictionary? In truth, I was still uneasy about ‘games’, ashamed of its wicked beginnings and embarrassed by my initial envy. In the course of spreading my words I had managed to write countless newspaper articles and even my very own book, thus emulating the man I’d attempted to mock. Also, I’d met him and he was really nice. ‘Games’ the adjective made me feel like a silly billy.*56

  But I was proud of ‘pratdigger’ and ‘tkday’, both of which I felt filled a gap in the language. After an absence of two hundred years it was surely time for the former to re-establish itself. And in this digital age, with the greetings card industry booming, surely
the latter would be a success. I may not have snuck ‘tkday’ into many publications, but this story itself should demonstrate exactly what the word and the occasion can mean.

  I had less hope for ‘honest’ or ‘paddles’; ‘fat’ and ‘hands’ may simply be too massive to budge. But I have no doubt our alternatives will live on in my own secret code at least. ‘Honk’, though, is surely the future. From day one this was the word people took to their hearts. Direct, memorable, and supported admirably by ‘demi’, I felt confident that it was now on its way into the language hall of fame. It has the authentic ring of ‘cash’, ‘clink’ and ‘bling’ and with the likes of those Loose Women behind it, this was surely our ticket to linguistic immortality.

  I was now content that all our seeds had been planted successfully. They could all be found in texts around the world. Now I needed to make sure that when they were found in texts by curious readers around the world, they could also be found in the dictionary when those curious readers looked them up. Murray wanted his book to be an inventory of all words. Ours needed to be in it.

  52 For reasons that I can’t fathom, the sleeve notes go on to say, ‘Engineer Horne came flying out of his bed at 45mph and copped a carpet burn on his hooter that took seven weeks to heal. Straight or doubled over?’ I have no idea what this means but was inordinately happy to see both ‘Horne’ and ‘bollo’ in the same publication.

  53 Charles Dickens is the Verbal Gardener behind such memorable phrases as ‘red tape’, ‘by the same token’ and ‘behind the times’. He had linguistic green fingers.

  54 One of my favourite suspicious etymological stories is that ‘dukes’ became slang for ‘fists’ on account of the Duke of Wellington’s famously large and hooked nose. So punchable (or punched) did it look, that ‘fists’ became known as ‘duke-busters‘ across the land, and this was then shortened to ‘dukes’. Tremendous stuff.