Wordwatching Read online

  They need, to use their own word, a ‘corpus’ of examples, hard proof that a word has widespread and long-lasting usage. So a corpus I resolved to create. A hundred and fifty years before James Murray and twice that before me, Samuel Johnson had allotted himself three years to write our language’s first true dictionary. I would take the same amount of time to create just one entry. In about a thousand days I would get a word into that dictionary.

  *

  Almost as soon as I’d resolved to invent a word I christened the project ‘Verbal Gardening’. Such an endeavour needed a title and this, I thought, summed up the task perfectly. My wife Rachel and I were then living in a ground floor flat in Kensal Green, London, that boasted the smallest of outdoor spaces: a few slabs of sandstone surrounded by three troughs traditionally known as ‘flower beds’ but which contained no flowers and were nothing like beds. They were more like ‘weed baths’. I’d planted a few bulbs here and a couple of bushes there, but none was flowering. A tomato plant had struggled to produce four of the tiniest tomatoes ever seen and an ambitious chilli plant had blurted out at least three respectable fruits, but this was not one of west London’s most impressive gardens.

  Nevertheless, I loved the whole gardening business. I was in charge of the digging, planting and watering so it was I who’d made those tomatoes and chillies. I had created something. I had made a difference. The beds/baths might not have been overflowing with colour quite yet but these were early days. Whilst I was in charge, anything might emerge the following spring. I was the boss.

  In just such a way the phrase ‘Verbal Gardening’ summed up my hopes for this linguistic project. I was the boss. Anything might emerge. In the preface to his seminal book, Samuel Johnson acknowledges the horticultural metaphor, writing, ‘No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away.’ I had to pray that my words would flower at just the right time to be plucked by a future dictionary editor.

  I therefore resolved to plant a whole packet of Verbal Seeds, at least some of which would subtly mature underground then bravely poke their heads up into the public eye and gradually grow stronger before triumphantly sending their own seeds out into the world. I didn’t want to produce a flashy short-lived word like a pansy or a passion flower. My word had to stand the test of time like an oak, or bear fruit each year like an apple tree, so it had to be worth scattering a handful of hopeful candidates out onto the land. These Verbal Seeds would be my attempt to start life, and I would be on hand to nurture that life for as long as it might take.

  But, unlike my actual garden, I couldn’t tend this Verbal Garden all on my tod. I would need help. For instead of a three-metre square patch of land, I would be casting my seeds over the entire country, indeed over the entire world. I might start with some fairly localised Verbal Gardening, testing out new ideas on friends, bestowing phrases on my family, but the goal was to implant a word in the English language, as used by 375 million people across the planet.

  In 1959 a committee called the ‘Ten Rare Men’ (more formally, the British Birds Rarities Committee or the BBRC) was established to decide whether sightings of rare birds by amateur observers were authentic. Inspired by such neat bureaucracy, I decided this was exactly the sort of body needed both to look out for sightings of my budding new words in print or conversation and to confirm that these usages were genuine; that the word was being used in the right context meaning what it was supposed to mean. So I set about forming my own group of Ten Rare Men. If deemed admissible by this jury, any quote would go into our corpus.

  But far more crucially than this assessment, my own Rare Men would be involved in the innovation and development necessary in a bid to get a word in the dictionary. This was a project far too large for one man, so I resolved also to ask my Rare Men to help me come up with some words themselves. The more collective thought that went into the selection of our seeds, the more chance they would have to germinate. After nominating their own words, these men, I hoped, would then help to spread them. As well as being my eyes and ears, looking and listening out for the words, they would be my mouth, passing the words on. My Rare Men would be the face of Verbal Gardening (except for the nose, which isn’t relevant to the story).

  Bearing all this in mind, I selected ten friends who were best placed to tackle what was going to be a tricky job. The members of the current birding committee include statisticians, an archivist and a museum consultant, an appropriately administrative bunch. Mine was drawn from the world of communication and the arts in particular, a place whence words are cast far and wide and would, I hoped, be heard by many.

  Despite having stated its desire to be made up of members representing ‘all age ranges and both sexes’,5 all sixty-seven people who have served the BBRC have been male. Mine were too. I did consider asking my mum for help, but decided that this time I would find my wordy way independently, from her at least. When my own verbal invention had fledged I would show her what I’d done and how far I’d come. But until then, it was time for me to do the nurturing.

  Unfortunately, I can’t reveal the names of my committee members; as you shall see as the story progresses, experimenting with the English language is a dangerous business. People get angered and enraged (two more anagrams) if you muck around with their tongue. So, in order to protect my friends, my frontline, I have given them codenames. This, I can assure you, is in the spirit of linguistic innovation. All the great anagrammatists use pseudonyms, with Viking, Traddles and Verdant Green among my favourites. As a nod to these illustrious linguists and, I hoped, as an appropriately wordy gesture, I named my Rare Men after my favourite fonts (we all have favourite fonts, don’t we?). So here are my men, in their respective styles of writing:

  Mr Bodoni – a theatre director

  Mr Bookman – an actor

  Mr Elephant – a poet

  Mr Garamond – a teacher

  Mr Goudy-Stout – a radio producer

  Mr Matisse – a hotel Health and Safety inspector

  Mr Palatino – a playwright

  Mr Rockwell – a journalist

  Mr Roman – a nightclub promoter/magazine editor

  (Mr Wingdings) – a comedian

  You may notice Mr Matisse’s profession standing out amongst the other more media-related roles. I must admit that his inclusion was mainly to extend the age range of my Rare Men. Without him their average age, when the project began, was twenty-seven. With him, that leaped up to the far more mature thirty. For those of you not as good at maths as Carol, that makes him fifty-seven years old and our senior adviser.

  The eleven of us would make up the Verbal Gardening team, with me in the role of player-manager like Kenny Dalglish in Liverpool’s glory days. And it was to these ten potential teammates that I sent my first Verbal Gardening missive on 7 December 2005, exactly fifty days before my tkday, explaining my plan and asking for their help and support.

  Replies came in thin and slow. Mr Rockwell was the first to respond with a positive, ‘I’m intrigued and excited by the project.’ Mr Roman soon followed with a simple; ‘I’m in.’ After a couple of days Mr Bookman agreed (‘you can trust me to be covert’) as did the more enigmatic Mr Wingdings (‘I think this is a red radish of an idea,’ he wrote, which I took to be a good thing) and the mature Mr Matisse (‘I do apologise for the tardiness of my response, but I only returned last evening from a twelve-day trip to the Middle East where I was giving various hoteliers (forty-eight) a hard time with regards to the Health and Safety standards in their hotels’).

  Ten days after the original invitation Messrs Palatino, Garamond and Goudy-Stout also replied to say yes. Eight down. A few days later I received an email from Mr Elephant, who really set the tone for all his future correspondence by writing: ‘I’m in your divvy thing about words.’ Ninety per cent had agreed to take part; I was waiting only for Mr Bodoni; it was time to start creating the words.

  Pickin
g a brand-new word is a daunting task. If you are to be responsible for a mint item in the English lexicon you want to make it a good one. It’s like naming a baby. You need to get it right, otherwise you’ll have to spend the rest of your life introducing it to other people with embarrassment. As I’ve said, I don’t like wacky, flashy, glitzy words. I wouldn’t call my children Sage Moonblood, Blue Angel or Jermajesty (names chosen by Sylvester Stallone, The Edge and Jermaine Jackson respectively). As I thought about what seed I wanted to plant I began to understand why Beyoncé had been defensive about hers. She’s now stuck with ‘bootylicious’, which is far from a terrible example, but also not that sophisticated an adjective. That’s why I got my Rare Men to help. Between us we were bound to come up with something more respectable. I instructed them each to nominate three verbal ideas they wanted to add to the language. From this heap of suggestions, we would vote for the five best.

  I should also say that our emphasis was never on these words being particularly funny. I was interested only in success. I was desperate to get a word in the dictionary and anything that might decrease the chances of that happening had to be discounted. The outstanding American comedian Rich Hall has created many hilarious ‘sniglets’ (‘any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary but should’), similar to the contents of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, in which characterful place names become a ‘dictionary of things that there aren’t any words for yet’. In 1998, Viz first published its mighty reference book, Roger’s Profanisaurus, which lists and defines thousands of ingenious obscenities with both wit and skill. But, as amusing as these collections are, they haven’t actually changed the language. People laugh at these new words and their sharp meanings, but they rarely take them on board and use them themselves. None of their ‘words’ are now in the dictionary. We couldn’t afford to be so entertaining.

  Taking this into consideration, I now present the words that the committee and I eventually decided upon and with which, for three years, I attempted to infiltrate the English language. But just before revealing them I should also report that on the day before the Verbal Election, Mr Bodoni, the tenth Rare Man, did also give his full support with a hastily thumbed text message:

  Hello* Mr Farmer, looking forward to this word gardening!

  For some reason, having reported this message to the rest of the team, the title ‘Farmer’ stuck. From then on, in all communication, I was The Farmer. That was my codename throughout this whole covert operation. So now you know the back-story to Verbal Gardening, here, at last, are our five brave new words:

  bollo (adj) 1. Unsatisfying and disappointing. That’s bollo, Beckham! 2. A cry of disgust. Bollo! My tomatoes have died.

  games (adj) Really rubbish and a little bit pretentious. Learning Arabic? That’s properly games.

  honk (or hoot) (noun) Money, especially cash. He paid me a pile of honk for that job.

  mental safari (noun) When someone goes mad for a few moments, or does a series of rash acts. When I was on my gap year I went on a complete mental safari and got an earring and a tattoo of a lizard.

  pratdigger (noun) 1. Pickpocket. Just be careful on the Ramblas, watch out for those crafty pratdiggers. 2. That friend of yours who always has a rubbish girlfriend everyone has to put up with, or a crap best mate from school they always ask out with you, or the person who finds the most obnoxious person at a party and exposes everyone to them. Apparently that pratdigger Mary’s going to the party so it’s bound to be full of awful people.

  I was more than happy with the eventual seed selection. I was very happy. I sent the list over to my Rare Men on the eve of my tkday, then, on 25 January 2006, Verbal Gardening proper commenced.

  1 The first describes an unsatisfactorily spaced shop sign reading ‘H. VanstoneandSons’, the second an exam in which Jones had written ‘had’ as an answer, and James ‘had had’. ‘Had had’ was correct.

  2 The sharp point of the elbow and Dvrák.

  3 ‘Richard’ is eighteenth-century slang for dictionary. To quote Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, ‘A country lad, having been reproved for calling persons by their Christian names, being sent by his master to borrow a dictionary, thought to shew his breeding by asking for a Richard Snary.’ That’s my sort of pun.

  4 For all asterisked words, please see The Wordwatcher’s Dictionary, page 299.

  5 BBRC report for 1999, page 513.

  PART ONE

  It is rare indeed to find a single individual altering the character of a language’s lexicon.

  Words Words Words, David Crystal

  1

  Of our five new words, ‘bollo’ seemed the most straightforward, its meaning most apparent. So it was ‘bollo’ that I set about spreading first, in conversations with friends and family, whenever the subject matter would allow it. ‘This is bollo,’ I muttered at the traffic lights. ‘What a bollo man!’ I shouted after a bus driver who’d cut me up.

  Naturally there were many early occasions during which the Rare Men and I felt the urge to describe something as ‘unsatisfactory’. Mr Bookman sent an email to his colleagues about a creative writing course: ‘A day out in Brighton but the standard’s usually a bit bollo.’ Mr Palatino emailed everyone in his address book to say: ‘I had my old phone nicked. Bollo. What’s your number please?’ Mr Matisse noted that the view from his latest hotel room was ‘decidedly bollo’. Mr Wingdings even played with the usage of the word, introducing the melodious phrase ‘swallow the bollo’, meaning ‘to allow oneself to be deceived’ or ‘to show great tolerance’; ‘This guy rang me and told me I’d been specially selected for a prize. Like I was going to swallow the bollo and get excited,’ he told his wife. ‘My sister’s a real pratdigger and her boyfriend’s staying for the weekend so I’m just going to have to swallow the bollo,’ he told his mates.

  With this sort of encouragement, it wasn’t long before ‘bollo’ became a recognised word amongst a small social circle that, I hoped, would soon rub circly shoulders with other circles and pass it on like cogs in a well-oiled machine. Indeed, just a few weeks after the word was invented, I received a text message from someone entirely unrelated to the project saying he thought a sitcom recently screened was ‘disappointingly bollow’. I couldn’t believe it. Already one of our words had taken flight. We were off.

  It’s worth addressing this issue of spelling right away. It’s not a problem. Despite the original five-letter ‘bollo’, this new ‘bollow’ was fine. ‘Bollo’ is a word designed to be spoken out loud, to be yelled even, so if it’s spelt differently but pronounced the same, the job still gets done. I’d even take ‘bolo’ (which, by the way, is the name of a type of necktie, the ‘Bolo Tie’ being the official neckwear of Arizona since 1971) as long as it doesn’t rhyme with ‘polo’.

  Some of the greatest Verbal Gardeners in history have been famously liberal with their spelling. Both William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh spelt their own names in several different ways but not once the way we do now. Even dictionary king Samuel Johnson let some misspellings slip into his great book, with the long-term result that ‘deign’ is now the opposite of ‘disdain’ and ‘immovable’ the reverse of ‘moveable’. Rather than anything negative, variety in spelling is proof that a word is being used. If a word can be seen to mutate and evolve it must be alive.

  As well as spreading via conversation, my early theory for the propagation of language was that if someone writes something somewhere, someone else will, eventually, see it. And if that something is eye-catching enough, it will settle in that other someone’s subconscious and they, eventually, will pass it on to another person, who in turn will impart it to someone else, and so on and so on (and soon and soon). I therefore plastered ‘bollo’ all over the various websites I’m linked with (‘I know the colour scheme is a little bollo,’ www.alexhorne.com; ‘I’m a bit of a bollo man when it comes to social situations,’ www.facebook.com; and all five words and definitions on a specific Ver
bal Gardening MySpace site, www.myspace.com/verbalgardening). More desperately, whenever I failed to complete The Times crossword* on trains or tubes, I started scribbling the word ‘bollo!’ above the incomplete puzzle before placing it as conspicuously as possible on my seat. If I conquered the puzzle I wrote ‘I am the bollo!’ neatly across the top of the page and again left it for a stranger to find and take in.

  Proof that this method could work to some extent at least came when Mr Elephant and I arrived in Chester to perform a comedy show one month into the project. Within minutes of walking into the venue a charming young American lady introduced herself as Julia.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ I said, awkwardly. ‘Sorry if I’m a bit awkward. I’m not good at this sort of thing. Well, any sort of social thing, really …’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Julia interrupted. ‘I’ve seen your status on Facebook. I know, you’re a bollo man when it comes to social situations.’

  I was so excited to hear another person (a foreign person!) using the word that we’d come up with. ‘It works!’ I thought (and said, actually – she didn’t mind, she knew I was a bollo man socially). People would adopt our words. Indeed, checking the Verbal Gardening MySpace page when we got home that night I found a message from a new ‘friend’, Aleks from Connecticut, who had promised to do his bit to help:

  yo, send me a couple of words that you want to spread and i’ll work on them, maybe even graffiti them on something. Just tell me what you want them to mean as well so i can get a good style for them. Aight, aleks.

  This was an excellent start; I felt both internationally productive and a little bit cooler. Aight.

  It was ‘bollo’ too that I used for the first time on stage, at a gig in New Cross, south-east London. It’s a strange experience, deliberately using made up words in public, but one I highly recommend. In fact, please do experiment with our words yourselves. If you’re on a train, tell the conductor your ticket cost a lot of honk, if you’re in bed tell your partner you went on a mental safari today, if you’re at a party, well, stop reading this book and go and enjoy the party. Whatever you’re doing, try to slip in a ‘bollo’ in the company of your friends and see how they (and you) react. You’ll be surprised how daring it feels.