Wordwatching Read online

  In the course of my studies I learnt that people have been mucking around with words, just as I had, for as long as speech has existed. It’s a natural thing to do. In fact, it’s an honourable thing to do. Leaping forward to the seventeenth century and across the channel to France, King Louis XIII appointed his own Royal Anagrammatist, a man called Thomas Billon, who was specifically employed to entertain the court with his anagrams of famous people’s names. If such a job had been available when I finally left university I’m sure I would have found employment far sooner than I was able to.

  Third, finally, besides the articles and essays, I wrote more jokes. There was a three-year hiatus between that first Budgens-inspired open spot and the next time I told jokes to strangers, but I did eventually pluck up enough courage to attend an audition for ‘Footlights’, the Cambridge equivalent of a stand-up comedy club. Every few weeks, the society would host a ‘Footlights smoker’, at which anyone could perform three minutes of material in front of a judgemental crowd of self-confident students. Here I tried out my own puns and gags. It was an excellent, if sometimes painful, training ground.

  Now, ten years after writing my very first joke, I’m officially a comedian, of sorts. For me, it’s the best job in the world because I get paid to tinker with words and watch Countdown every single day. There are very few jobs that can incorporate Countdown into the working day, especially now it starts at the earlier time of 3.25 p.m., so I feel incredibly lucky.

  Currently I’m a little busy writing this book so am spending less time ‘on the road’ and more time ‘at home with my chickens’, but until recently I spent most of my time driving to far-off places and telling jokes, usually involving simple wordplay, to strangers. One- or two-liners like:

  My dad used to work in a tiddly-wink factory, but he said it was counter-productive.

  I’ve felt very lonely ever since someone told me I was about as tall as a tall flightless bird. I just felt very ostrich-sized.

  My grandmother was recently beaten to death. By my grandfather. Not with a stick. He died first.

  This last is my current favourite. It’s a simple pun on the word ‘beat’ but it changes the meaning of the sentence dramatically, transforming a sad story about my grandmother dying into a sad story about my grandfather dying – although not as sad because in the second version he hasn’t (necessarily) been bludgeoned to death by his spouse.

  So that’s how I am where I am now. Unimaginative journalists often ask comedians if they always knew they wanted to ‘do comedy’, to which they either explain that they were the jokers in the class at school, or one of the quiet ones who read a lot, watched a lot and wrote things down. I was in the latter, silently ambitious, camp but like to throw in the Budgens story so I don’t sound too dull or earnest. My real, even more pretentious-sounding answer, however, is that I became a comedian because I love words.

  But one afternoon, at approximately 4.05 p.m., I realised that writing jokes wasn’t enough. By now I was twenty-seven years old and my comedy career was progressing steadily (when somebody stands still they can be described as very steady indeed). After a handful of years on the circuit I finally accepted that wordplay, and puns in particular, were now regarded as old-fashioned. A punchline like ‘ostrich-sized’ very rarely got what could accurately be described as a ‘laugh’.

  In fact, puns have been sneered at for centuries. In Dryden’s Defence of the Epilogue, he classed them ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’, while in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, they are dismissed mercilessly as ‘a form of wit, to which wise men stoop and fools aspire’. Regardless of whether I have spent much of my life stooping or aspiring, I hope that’s not true. I have always thought puns are a part of life in Britain that we should be proud of, like birdwatching and cricket, an innocent diversion to some, an all-consuming passion to others. But even though I loved creating these jokes, they now felt lightweight compared to other comedians’ targets of sex and drugs and politics. I wasn’t satisfied with my lot. I wanted more recognition. And just after four o’clock one afternoon, it was Countdown, more specifically, Sidney Sussex’s Carol Vorderman who stirred me into action.

  Just before the first advert break in what I thought was a normal episode of my beloved programme, Carol displayed typically stylish numerical dexterity by revealing to her viewers an equation with which they might work out how many days old they were on that particular day. It’s a tricky figure to come up with, one’s exact age in days, what with leap years and multi-length months, but thanks to Ms Vorderman’s mental arithmetics Countdowners across the land could instantly (well, fairly quickly) find out their tally and say something like, ‘Gosh, who’d have thought?’ But my reaction was a little stronger than that, my exclamation a little fruitier. Being less than thirty, I was almost certainly dragging down the average age of the audience by several decades, but when I worked out that I was 9,945 days old, I suddenly felt incredibly old myself. I was just fifty-five days away from my ten-thousandth day on earth. ‘Oh f***.’

  Saddled, as we are, with our Gregorian calendar, we often forget about this particular birthday. But one’s ten-thousandth day, one’s ‘tkday’ to give it its official name, is an immensely important occasion. It’s a turning point, a true coming-of-age moment. By the time you’ve reached your tkday, you’ve flown past the one- and ten-day marks, whizzed on beyond a hundred then a thousand days and raced up to the ominous five-figure checkpoint at which you will remain for the rest of your life (unless you live to be 274 years old, which is unlikely even considering today’s advances in science). So a tkday is one of life’s key landmarks. It represents the moment when you have unequivocally reached adulthood. There’s even a website (www.tkday.com, helpfully) which will calculate your tkday for you and, if you desire, send you a cake on the relevant date, because it’s a date worth marking. Sure, when you’re sixteen you can get married (but only if you’re straight, of course), when you’re eighteen you can buy a beer to celebrate (and if you’re not straight, now you can get married too!) and when you’re twenty-one you’re legally old enough to do everything else everyone else is doing; but in practice you’ve still got a lot to learn. When you’re ten thousand days old, about twenty-seven years and four months old, you should be able to do everything else everyone else is doing and, what’s more, you should know what it is you want to do.

  But as I sat in front of Countdown, scribbling away on my designated Countdown notepad during the adverts for stairlifts and cruises, I realised that my life wasn’t quite heading in the direction I’d intended. I had always wanted to leave my mark on the world, to do something memorable, to achieve something remarkable, but it had become increasingly apparent that my innocent, dare I say it, childish wordplay wouldn’t furnish me with the immortality I desired. Yes, I might get over 75 per cent of the Countdown teatime teasers, often before the very first advert was over, but all of a sudden that didn’t seem enough. In less than two months I would hit that ten-thousand-day mark and meekly join the rest of the aged population in the five-figure camp. I didn’t fancy this obscurity. It was time to set myself a tougher challenge. So inspired by my mathematical muse, I immediately hatched a plan to devise a project that would ensure I left my linguistic mark on the world.

  I would create a new word.

  That was it! At once I felt young again, full of vigour and hope. Yes! I would invent my own word! More simple than a joke but also more complete! A joke is a fun, frivolous thing, cheap and disposable. But a word … a word seemed to me a wholly more satisfactory creation. A word must be the ultimate legacy to leave any offspring I might be lucky enough to spring off (they might well prefer a car, a house or just some more sporty DNA, but imagine, a word!). My own word would be the ultimate achievement, something that would give meaning to an otherwise playful life. I would win a place in the only record book that really mattered: the dictionary.

  An enduring and treasured feature of Countdown is ‘Dictiona
ry Corner’, a desk in the studio manned by an eminent lexicographer and that week’s celebrity guest who suggest their own words and verify the contestants’ efforts by consulting the New Oxford Dictionary of English. Since first appearing on the show in 1992, Oxford graduate and former employee of the Oxford University Press Susie Dent has made the ‘Guardian of the Dictionaries’ role her own. Alongside Carol, she is both televisual and lexical royalty. One day, I promised myself, she would look up a word in Countdown’s ‘Dictionary Corner’ and see my word, with my name cited underneath.

  Because getting a word in the dictionary had to be the aim of this project. Ever since the heavyweight lexicographer Samuel Johnson completed his pioneering dictionary on 15 April 1755, these mighty books have safely housed our language. For the first time in history, he’d attempted to comprehensively document the English lexicon, single-handedly collating each of its words and illustrating its meaning with quotations from literature. Now, for me to feel satisfied, my verbal creation had to end up in one of today’s respected dictionaries, ideally the Oxford English Dictionary of course, but any recognised dictionary really, just as long as others could one day look it up and discover its meaning in an official reference book.

  Anyone can invent a word; ‘ghuid’ – there, I just did that by shutting my eyes, shifting my hands along a bit and typing. ‘Ghuid’. I guess it means something like ‘a wise Welsh woman’. Yes, something like that. And if I say a ‘ghuid’ means a wise Welsh woman then, in a way, it does. But it doesn’t really, does it? If a few other people start using ‘ghuid’ instead of ‘wise Welsh woman’ then it might start to mean it. But until ‘ghuid’ is actually in the dictionary, it won’t really count.

  And getting a word in the dictionary isn’t easy. You can’t just write to the dictionary authorities and say,

  Dear Richard3

  I’ve got a new one for you: ‘ghuid’ – meaning ‘a wise Welsh woman’.

  My pleasure,

  Alex

  It’s not that easy.

  It used to be that easy. Shakespeare is arguably our finest inventor of words, with about 1,700 to his name (we’ll come back to this figure and that name later on), but I can’t help thinking he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Because the Bard is said to have coined words like ‘eyeball’ and ‘elbow’. So before that, if you got ‘elbowed’ in the ‘eyeball’ you’d only have been able to say, ‘He did that in my thing and it hurt,’ miming the affected body parts and getting frustrated both by your inability to explain the situation and the considerable ocular pain. Then Shakespeare came along, observed such a fracas and thought to himself, ‘Well, there’s a gap in the market here, I’ll label those body parts right up!’ Now, the body is fully labelled up (even the point of the elbow has its own name) and it’s a lot harder to come up with new words.

  But if a word is used enough it will still end up in the dictionary, thanks largely to the work of Sir James Murray, the man behind the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), who once claimed to be fluent in Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and Latin, ‘tolerably familiar’ with Dutch, German, Danish, not bad at Portuguese, Vaudois and Provençal, pretty good at Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic and able to read Slavonic, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic, Phoenician and a little Celtic in an (unsuccessful) application for a job at the British Museum. Beginning work on 12 May 1860, he was determined that, unlike all previous lexicons, his would have no limits. He would settle for nothing less than an exhaustive collection, the complete dictionary, documenting the entire English language.

  Murray therefore embarked on an unimaginably arduous quest to pin down and define every English word ever spoken, relying on the public’s interest in the language to plug every gap and drawing up a great team of learned helpers (including his own eleven children and one J. R. R. Tolkien, who worked as an assistant editor in 1919 and whose ‘hobbit’ made it into the final dictionary) who themselves collected data from correspondents across the world.

  By the time the OED was published in 1928, seventy years after its inception, Murray had been dead for thirteen years. So meticulous was his research, so thorough his approach and so unswerving his principles, that one cannot imagine his legacy will ever be forgotten. He didn’t just list the words, he traced each one as far back in linguistic history as possible and explained where and when it was first used. The Oxford English Dictionary really is The Dictionary.

  Today, thanks to Murray’s original ethos and enthusiasm, it is still possible to get new words into the dictionary. The OED is still very much alive, with editors and volunteers working round the clock to keep it up to date; a total of 90,000 new words were collected in the twentieth century. That works out at two and a half words coined every single day. These are encouraging numbers.

  In the year of my tkday, the exotic word ‘bootylicious’ (meaning ‘shapely, voluptuous, especially with reference to the buttocks’) was one of those allowed into the exclusive club thanks to poet, writer and, well, pop star, Beyoncé Knowles. She may not actually have invented the word itself (it was featured in an intriguing song from 1992 by Dr Dre, called ‘F*** wit Dre Day (and Everybody’s Celebratin)’, but it was Beyoncé whom the dictionary heralded because in 2001 it was she who wrote a top-selling single of the same name for her band Destiny’s Child. So Beyoncé invented the word ‘bootylicious’. It is definitely possible to get a word in the dictionary.

  Irksomely, Beyoncé herself was unimpressed by her achievement, telling TV Hits magazine, ‘I wish there was another word I could have come up with if I was going to have a word in the dictionary.’ One day, I am sure, Miss Knowles will understand the enormity of her achievement, a triumph surely more long-lasting and more satisfying than any of her many Grammies, Brits or MTV music awards. In the meantime, I have named one of my two chickens after her, partly in honour of her feat but also to remind myself exactly how possible it is every time I look down from the window by my desk at my bootylicious poultry.

  Because back in 2006 I felt that if Beyoncé could do it, I could do it. (That’s not normally a mantra for my life. I don’t always compare myself with her – she is, after all, a truly outstanding dancer.) With my childhood spent playing with words and this current determination to invent my own, I felt sure that I could at least match her in this arena.

  It wasn’t just Beyoncé either. In my optimistic frame of mind I reasoned that I was as qualified as anyone else anywhere else to invent a word. For despite being a magnificent feat, the birth of a word, like the birth of a baby, is something that happens all the time. Every single word we speak must, at some point, have been spoken by someone first. They may seem to emerge indistinctly from the fog of history, but all words must have first come from one mouth. Indeed, in the course of telling my own story I shall describe how many others have coined their own words, while every word with an asterisk can also be traced directly back to a single human being whose own tale of linguistic innovation can be found in The Wordwatcher’s Dictionary at the back of the book.

  Yes, I was attempting to follow in the mighty footsteps of Shakespeare, Chaucer and even Virgil, literary*4 genii who shaped the language we all speak today, but I would also be following in the rather less daunting tread of Ian Dowie, George W. Bush and Jasper Carrott, all of whom, like Beyoncé, have got words in the actual dictionary.

  The last of these extraordinary men is just one of several comedians who managed to coin their own words in the eighties and early nineties, at a time when I hung off every one of those they said. Mike Harding is credited with first writing ‘wazzock’ in his 1984 book When the Martians Landed In Huddersfield, Hale and Pace re-popularised the old Scottish word ‘stonk’ during 1991’s Comic Relief, and it was Carrot who brought ‘zits’ over from American slang in his song of the same name. While Lenny Henry’s ‘sponditious’ (meaning ‘fabulous’) failed to survive the eighties, Harry Enfield’s ‘wad’ did become common slang for ‘cash’ and his ca
tchphrase ‘loadsamoney’ is still repeated twenty years on. I could join this merry band. This, I believed, would be my attainable ticket to immortality, my shot at fame, my destiny.

  I therefore delved (to quite a shallow level, at first) into the world of dictionaries and discovered that to be let into the club, to become a recognised word, a new verbal idea, a neologism, must have been used several times over a prolonged period of time by a variety of people. As the helpful website of the OED explains,* lexicographers need evidence:

  A new word is not included in the OED unless it has ‘caught on’ and become established in the language. Words that are only used for a short period of time, or by a very small number of people, are not included. To determine whether a word has caught on, we normally require several independent examples of the word being used, and also evidence that the word has been in use for a reasonable span of time. The exact span of time and number of examples can vary from word to word: a word may be included on the evidence of only a few examples, if these are spread out over a long period of time. Conversely, a large number of examples collected over a short period of time can show that a word has very quickly become established.