Wordwatching Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Praise

  About the Author

  Also by Alex Horne

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Beginning

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Three

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Postscript

  The Wordwatcher’s Dictionary

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Alex Horne loves words. He loves playing with words, mucking about with them, building them up and breaking them down like Lego.

  With less than two months before he hit his TKday – his ten-thousandth day on earth, Alex set himself an impossible challenge. He will create a new word.

  But, as Alex discovers, gaining entry into the official lexicon and smuggling a homemade word into the pages of a dictionary takes more than just a gentle word in the ear of the editor. Evidence is require.

  From covert word-dropping on Countdown to wilfully misinforming schoolchildren, Alex tries it all in his quest for dictionary-based immortality. Does he succeed? Are you already using one of Alex’s words without realising it?

  Wordwatching is an epic and ridiculous story of one man’s struggle to break into the dictionary. You won’t regret spending your hard-earned honk on this hugely entertaining book.

  Praise

  ‘Horne is an engagingly smart man, a sort of Dave Gorman of the intellect’. The Scotsman

  ‘A hilarious story of a man’s adventures into the world of words. Funny, if slightly “out there’. The Sun

  ‘This is a hilarious tale of an ingenious plan to bamboozle the experts’ The Good Book Guide

  ‘A safe place to invest your comedy honk’ Time Out

  About the Author

  Alex Horne co-created, writes and co-hosts the BBC4 comedy quiz We Need Answers. He is widely renowned among critics, comics and audiences as a thoughtful and original stand-up, writer and solo performer and has many TV and radio credits under his belt. Alex’s first book Birdwatchingwatching was published by Virgin Books. www.alexhorne.com.

  Also by Alex Horne

  Birdwatchingwatching (also available from Virgin Books)

  For Mum and Tom

  Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum.

  ‘Once released, the word flies irrevocably.’

  Horace, Epistles, I.XVIII.71

  THE BEGINNING

  Sometimes it seems as if a new word has about as much chance of developing into a permanent addition to our vocabulary as a single sperm has of fertilizing an egg and developing into a fully grown human.

  Predicting New Words, Allan Metcalf

  I love words.

  It’s difficult to write that sentence without sounding chillingly pretentious or worryingly trite. But I don’t mean that I love using long, complicated or zany words; I don’t love reading obscure modern poetry and I don’t mind when someone uses an apostrophe in the wrong place.

  It’s certainly not a reciprocal love either. Words don’t come particularly easily to me. My brain doesn’t lob up the perfect adverb for my tongue to volley home as Stephen Fry’s seems to. I wouldn’t have known that I suffer from onomatomania had a more learned friend not told me so. I’ve used Microsoft’s thesaurus function twice already and I’ve barely started. What I mean is I love playing with words, mucking about with them, building them up and breaking them down like Lego.

  My first word was ‘mama’, which is not a particularly inventive choice. All across the world babies of every race say ‘mama’, ‘dada’ and occasionally ‘papa’ before anything more interesting; they (well, we) are apparently pre-programmed to utter these soft repetitive sounds first, and it’s thought by some that adults (well, we) took words like ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ from our offspring, rather than the other way round; we turned their primal noises into words. It was a baby who invented the word ‘mum’.

  But I like to think that my ‘mama’ was rather more of a conscious choice as it’s from my mum that I’ve gained my love of words. She is a wordwatcher. It’s a subtler hobby than birdwatching as no binoculars betray the pursuit, rather it is the odd spoonerism here and the odd anagram there that gives her away as a worder. She collects teapots too, but that’s a side-project, a diversion, not an obsession. My older brother was shown birds by my dad and he still follows them today. I was shown words by my mum. They’re now my passion.

  It all started when, instead of books about spies or wizards, she got me reading joke books. Traditionally these are perched somewhere near a toilet to lighten the tedium of our daily ablutions, or tucked away on a shelf next to the dictionaries and thesauri for reference when writing a speech or settling an argument. But my joke books were stacked up next to my bed and I read them one by one, from cover to cover.

  Unfortunately my mum didn’t pass on her remarkable memory so I could never remember more than a few jokes at a time. My mind, I worry, is like my mobile phone – it can only store so many messages at once, then, when it’s full, I have to delete some information before starting again. As I read these books, I jotted down my favourite jokes so I could unfurl them later, at family events. In fact, I found that I could always remember punchlines, even if the set-ups deserted me. So Christmas for me was all about the crackers. I prided myself on knowing the solution to every joke equation. I rarely failed. The satisfying logic of the set-up and punchline made sense to me.

  When I’d read and scribbled on every joke book she could find me, my mum got me on to harder stuff. While my brothers wolfed down stories by Roald Dahl, J. R. R. Tolkien and Gerald Durrell, I read and re-read a slim blue book called Palindromes and Anagrams by a less celebrated writer called Howard W. Bergerson. Again, I scribbled asterisks and exclamation marks next to my favourites and again I stowed away the few my memory was able to cope with. To my more patient friends I’d occasionally say things like, ‘Did you know that “dirty room” is an anagram of “dormitory”, a “canoe” can be made out of “ocean” and “the classroom” from “schoolmaster”? Isn’t that fantastic?!’ I’d even try to slip in short anagrammatic sentences like ‘kleptomaniacs task policeman’, ‘the detectives detect thieves’ or ‘this ear, it hears’. I don’t think I was trying to be clever and I certainly didn’t realise quite how pompous I must have sounded. I may have been showing off, but it was an innocent exhibition. I had discovered these amazing things and wanted to share them with my friends.

  I was genuinely fascinated by the neatness of the best examples. I was entranced by the fact that ‘moonstarers’ became ‘astronomers’, that ‘eleven + two’ equalled ‘twelve + one’ and that ‘one hug’ was ‘enough’. Yes, I thought, ‘an aisle’ ‘is a lane’! Sometimes ‘the answer’ just ‘wasn’t here’! I started looking for my own anagrams and palindromes around the house; ‘Siemens’ was my ‘nemesis’, both ‘Evian’ water and ‘Nive
a’ skin cream were for people ‘naive’ enough to buy them. This was how I relieved the ‘boredom’ in my ‘bedroom’. Wordplay was my thing. Like the double-jointed kid in my class, this was the peculiar trick I could pull off. In my Bergerson book next to ‘testament’ and ‘statement’ I scribbled ‘men attest’.

  I found the palindromes hypnotic, maybe because both my mum and my dad are palindromic people; from flawless classics like Leigh Mercer’s 1948 hit, ‘a man, a plan, a canal – Panama’ to the current master, J. A. Lindon’s modern responses, including, ‘a dog, a pant, a panic in a Patna pagoda’ and the more realistic, conversational, ‘Did I do, O God, did I as I said I’d do? Good, I did!’, ‘Marge lets Norah see Sharon’s telegram’ and ‘pull up, Eva, we’re here, wave, pull up’. ‘I’m Al, a salami’, I scrawled underneath, desperate to join in.

  Then there were the lesser known word games such as pangrams – all twenty-six letters of the alphabet in as short a sentence as possible: ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ or, my attempt, ‘Alex Horne’s big five jokey word impact quiz’ – and charades – not the ‘parlour game’ which, irritatingly, doesn’t involve any words, but a form of anagram in which the order of the letters remains the same while the meaning changes: ‘amiable together’ becomes ‘am I able to get her?’ or, one of my early attempts, a short story about a girl gardening: ‘Amanda rescues pot sand; Mandy in gloves’, which becomes the more dramatic snooker-themed love story: ‘A man dares, cues, pots and man, dying, loves’. I became addicted to letters and started seeing hidden messages all around me, from the mysterious instruction ‘Nation, Alex, Press!’ in National Express, to the true motto of Iceland (the supermarket, not the country): ‘Food You Can’t Rust’.

  As I say, it was my mum who entrusted me with Bergerson’s anagrammatic bible. It’s not the sort of thing a kid would be naturally drawn to in a library or borrow from another kid, but my mum was keen to share her passion for words. As a child she’d been given her own blue book called Primary English by D. W. Walters, a progressive grammar packed full of linguistic puzzles and palindromes which she treasured then and treasures still. Now I too could play with language like a toy.

  To my mum words represented a true pastime. While dad pointed out kestrels, she spent family trips teaching us word games she’d learnt from Walters’s book: could we find the boys’ names hidden in sentences like, ‘They had either to charge or get killed’ or ‘The giant groaned “How ill I am”’? Could we change ‘gold’ to ‘bell’ or ‘fire’ to ‘mark’, altering one letter at each step and forming another word each time? I was entranced by these simple brainteasers. Again and again I would ask her to tell me the stories that ended with the spectacular sentences: ‘There is not enough space between Vanstone and and and and and Sons’ or ‘James, though Jones had had “had”, had had “had had”; “had had” had had the examiner’s approval’.1

  The peculiarities of language were a constant source of amusement for us both. She would always slip in a spoonerism when one suggested itself: ‘I’m going to break some bed,’ she’d say before baking. Horace the cat would scarper through the ‘flat cap’. My bed would always have its ‘shitted feet’. I was never sure whether these were deliberate or if, like Dr Spooner himself, she created them unwittingly. Either way, they were second nature to her and I started knowing my blows, fighting liars and chipping flannels too.

  The shifting of a single letter could delight us. One Christmas my grandmother sent my brother Chip a gift consisting of an ornate pen from Russia and a card, inside which she’d written the apparently innocent message: ‘Chip, Much love from Granny – The pen is from Russia’. Unfortunately for Granny, she had written the words ‘is’ and ‘pen’ extremely close together. So close, in fact, that it actually read, ‘Much love from Granny – The penis from Russia’: a small charade but one that made a lasting impression.

  My mum and I would always do The Times crossword together over breakfast and would almost always share the victor’s spoils after a family game of Balderdash (a terrific and highly recommended word-based board game). I was always amazed by how much she so modestly knew – an obscure word like ‘noop’ or a Czech composer, six letters.2 ‘Oh no,’ she would say when complimented. ‘You should see my mum doing the cryptic. Now that’s impressive.’

  When revising for my A-levels we’d watch Countdown with a cup of tea together every afternoon to break up the day; I told myself it was good for the brain, she didn’t disagree. On leaving school I applied for a place at Cambridge University, so got a job in the local Budgens (the logical choice) while preparing for the interview. Again, I’d be home by a quarter past four every afternoon so we could both sit down in front of Richard and Carol before I hit the books.

  It was whilst working at this supermarket that I wrote my first ever joke. As Deputy Head of Dairy (there were only two of us in the department) I received monthly copies of Check Out, the in-store magazine, and was excited to find a competition in the Christmas edition to see which Budgens employee could write the best Christmas cracker joke. This was my big break, I thought. I’d done my research. I had to win. So, after about a week’s tinkering I whittled down a number of joke ideas to the following single quip (try to imagine someone reading this out at the Christmas table):

  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,

  Saturday, Sunday – those were the days.

  I appreciate it’s not necessarily the funniest joke in the world. If even one person laughed out loud while reading it in their head I’d be pleasantly surprised. But that’s not the point of Christmas cracker jokes. All they require is a nod, a groan and, perhaps, a knowing, ‘I see what they’ve done there’. What’s more, this maiden joke was enough to win that year’s competition, and the prize, an open spot at the local comedy club in Chichester, was a life-changing one.

  My five-minute spot at the club was spectacularly subdued. I told that joke and several others of a similar ilk but when you’re onstage, a nod, a groan and a knowing, ‘I see what they’ve done there’ are far less satisfying than sitting round the Christmas dinner table. Even so, despite the staring faces, conscious coughs and a round of applause whose claps I could count on my fingers, I loved it. I was hooked.

  I also managed to get into Cambridge, more specifically into a small, friendly college called Sidney Sussex where I would follow in the footsteps of famous alumni like Oliver Cromwell and, more impressively to me, Carol Vorderman. Here I studied Latin and German. For six weeks. Then I left. Unfortunately, most of my fellow linguists had spent their gap year immersed in their chosen languages, rather than the milk aisle of Budgens, and I was out of my depth. I did know one German palindrome: ‘nie fragt sie: ist gefegt? Sie ist gar fein’, a poignant portrait of a modern woman that translates as, ‘She never asks: has the sweeping been done? She is very refined’, but that, apparently, was not enough.

  Thankfully, once allowed into the hallowed corridors of an Oxbridge college it’s very hard to get out again. I was granted permission to take a few months off, learn the Greek alphabet and come back to study Classics instead, so I embarked on my second gap year, this time working on the West Sussex Gazette as People’s Correspondent, writing stories about dead donkeys (just the one, actually, but I really did have to write an obituary for a deceased mule) and attempting to get to grips with alpha, beta and the rest in my lunch break.

  That word ‘Classics’ may need some qualification. It’s a strange, all-encompassing name, as grandiose as The United Kingdom or The One Show. The degree itself isn’t limited to classic works of fiction, nor does it include classic cars or the classic BLT. Instead, it represents a period in antiquity, the classical Greco-Roman era, in which a whole load of what can only be described as classic stuff got done. So I was to study Latin and Ancient Greek, with some archaeology, philosophy and linguistics thrown in.

  I used to be uncomfortable admitting this. When I got my hair cut back home in Midhurst I was more comforta
ble saying I still worked in the local supermarket than that I was off to study Classics at Cambridge. I was embarrassed by it. Latin has such connotations of elitism, public-school education and moneyed pointlessness, saying I studied it by choice seemed like an act of showing off that could only arouse suspicion and contempt. Arranging yogurts for ten hours a day seemed a far nobler pursuit.

  Over the years, however, I have accepted that I did study Latin and what’s more, I enjoyed it. I can now talk about it without shame. We’ll return to the subject throughout this story but all I’m trying to say now is, please don’t let the very idea of Latin put you off. Give Latin a chance. Thank you.

  I was never an outstanding student, ending up with a respectable but undistinguished 2:1, but during my three years at Cambridge I wrote at least three things that would shape the rest of my life. First, I dashed out more newspaper articles, this time for Varsity, the official Cambridge newspaper with lofty ideas way above its station. I liked the thrill of being published, especially in such a ridiculously pompous but admirably ambitious publication, but despite a dearth of dead donkeys I still couldn’t take the news seriously, and soon realised that I didn’t want to become a journalist.

  Second, I eventually completed a dissertation about wordplay in the Golden Age of Ancient Rome. I did contemplate including it as the opening chapter to this book but realised it might be just too diverting for the average reader. (I sent a copy to my mum at the time. She said she’d read it and enjoyed it although I now realise she may have exaggerated both those claims.) Suffice to say that my early fondness for wordplay was strengthened and legitimised when I learnt that anagrams (ars magna – ‘the great art’) were invented by the Greek poet Lycophron in 260 BC (he turned ΠTOΛEMAIOΣ – the Egyptian King Ptolemy – into AΠO MEΛITOΣ – meaning ‘from honey’, and APΣINOH – Arsinoe, the name of both Ptolemy’s wives, the second of whom was also his sister – into ION HPAΣ, meaning ‘Hera’s violet’), while a satirist in the same country and century called Sotades of Thrace created palindromic verse (he is believed to have re-written the whole of Homer’s Iliad in palindromic form). Thousands of years ago people like me liked sentences that read the same forwards and backwards. God! A red nugget! A fat egg under a dog! On their fountains the Greeks wrote NIΣΠON ANOMIMATA MI MONAN OΠΣIN (meaning ‘wash the sin as well as the face’), while the Romans wrote of moths ‘in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’ (meaning ‘we enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire’). During one of our lengthy breaks between terms I sent this palindromic postcard home: