Wordwatching Read online

  At the mic I chickened out twice. ‘I’ve never been very good with … money,’ I stuttered. ‘I can’t order a cappuccino without feeling g-g-g … pretentious.’ I stammered. But then, when I’d finally gained some momentum, I closed an impassioned rant about Sky Sports News by describing the channel as ‘bollo’. ‘Sky Sports News is bollo!’ were my exact words. I even repeated the key one: ‘Bollo!’ I bellowed. No one seemed to mind; no one seemed to laugh very much either but that wasn’t the point. No one questioned the word’s meaning. I had planted the word and the world was still turning.

  As well as dropping ‘bollo’s onstage from then on, I tried to use my job as a comedian to my advantage in other, more subtle ways. In addition to watching Countdown every day, my job enables, indeed forces, me to visit our country’s fine service stations on a similarly regular basis. Keen to maximise every possible gardening opportunity, I therefore decided that whenever I frequented one of these delightful establishments I would sow a tiny seed.

  The plan was simple. Every time I passed a service station I would stop and visit the toilet area. Inside a cubicle I would then pose the question, ‘Is graffiti bollo?’ on the back of the door. This might sound like wanton vandalism but I also vowed only to do this on pre-graffitied walls with a non-permanent pen, the ink from which I would then wipe away with white spirit (as well as any other unwanted writing I might find) the next time I dropped in. I was actually doing a good thing.

  And so, whilst the project was still in its early stages I buried a ‘bollo’ deep within the Newport Pagnell Motorway services, like a hyacinth bulb, primed to flower the following year. There were eighty-three motorway service stations in the UK when I started the project; I was fairly sure I could impregnate well over half and not only spread, but receive feedback on ‘bollo’.

  Over in the United States*, my first ever graffiti artist ‘friend’ Aleks was also beavering away. ‘Yo,’ he addressed me, ‘bollo is going very well, I tagged a 6ft tall bollo on a downtown street building so that everyone can see it. Not vandalism-style, but artstyle. My friends don’t use it yet, but I try to use it.’

  This was amazing news. Suddenly, thanks to our little Verbal Gardening project, the good people of Wallingford, a peripolitan town in Connecticut, 3,384 miles away from the Verbal Gardening hub, were walking past a ‘bollo’ as big as me every day, some of them probably muttering ‘bollo’ under their American breath. And because it was ‘artstyle’ rather than ‘vandalism-style’ I didn’t even feel too guilty. True, I didn’t want to break the law or deface other people’s property myself, but if someone in Connecticut volunteered to do something ‘artstyle’ on a ‘downtown street building’, who was I to stop him?

  I was confident that ‘bollo’ would be understood by the general public on both sides of the pond. Not only is it a fairly self-explanatory word, but ‘bollo’ had also been rigorously road tested by its proposer, Mr Wingdings, soon after its creation.

  Wingdings had spent Christmas with his family, which included two younger sisters whose presence meant that swearing in the family home was discouraged. This, clearly, is a difficult thing to adhere to at Christmas time; a happy time, yes, but also the time in which family members want to swear most often. It’s just the way it is. Keep a large family indoors for a day and someone will want to swear. So after a couple of outbursts, on Mr Wingding’s suggestion, the family agreed on ‘bollo’ as their acceptable familial cry of disgust.

  ‘There’s going to be a blizzard?* Absolute bollo!’ cried Mr Wingdings Snr. ‘What a bollo man he turned out to be!’ expounded Mr Wingdings Snr’s wife after a festive film.

  The feisty ‘bollo’ settled comfortably into the Wingdings family life over this jolly period and with a little push was now branching out into the wider world with ease. This is a common way for language to develop; families adopt a word without thinking and gradually, with a little luck and support, other people start using it too. In my own home, the word ‘rootle’ was used throughout our childhoods to mean ‘any sort of pudding-y food found in the fridge’, a natural development of the verb coined by Mum. ‘What’s for pudding?’ we’d ask. ‘Have a rootle in the fridge,’ she’d reply. ‘A rootle’ therefore came to mean ‘a yogurt’ or any other delights that lived in the fridge. When I finally left home I couldn’t believe no one else had a rootle after supper. In fact a few people thought I was referring to something else altogether.

  But a nascent word has to have the right feel to cross the boundaries of the family kitchen, and ‘bollo’ seemed to be perfect, echoing the upbeat frustration of ‘golly’ and ‘gosh’ but with a harsher edge. While it does, of course, resemble the start of a coarser word, that similarity only adds to the functionality of the word. When you use ‘bollo’ it feels like you’re going to swear, your mind presumes you’re going to swear, so you still feel you’ve got something off your chest when it’s out: ‘Bollo!’ It’s a satisfying exclamation. But that Christmas Mr Wingdings and his family definitely weren’t swearing because ‘bollo’ wasn’t in the dictionary, unlike all our officially ‘vulgar’ words. Until it received a formal classification ‘bollo’ could, in theory, mean anything.

  One of my most abiding school memories was looking up the language’s most offensive members in the dictionary, cheered on, I would now like to reveal, by a certain Latin teacher. ‘Isn’t language wonderful!’ he would cry. ‘The “F-word” has so many uses! Isn’t language amazing!’ And so we would indeed look up* the ‘F-word’ and try out every single usage of the word; as a verb, a noun, an adjective, an exclamation, it really is a most versatile* lexeme. You can F-up, off, about and around, give or not give one, be a F-up, or know F-all. It’s brilliant. My favourite example of the word in the OED was in the term ‘windfucker’, defined, surprisingly, as ‘a species of hawk’ or ‘a name for the kestrel’ (as used by Thomas Nashe, inventor of the word ‘balderdash’,* in the sentence, ‘The kistrilles or windfuckers that filling themselues with winde, fly against the winde euermore’). I always felt that was a great thing to know. It was also used ‘as a term of opprobrium’ in the early seventeenth century (Ben Jonson, for example, asked, ‘Did you euer heare such a Windfucker, as this?’) but if you ever spy a bird of prey hovering above a motorway you can look up and quite legitimately cry, ‘Wow, what a windfucker’, citing the OED as your source.

  Despite this wayward encouragement on the part of my favourite teacher, I always knew the F-word was also ‘a bad word’, mainly because I had never heard either of my grandmothers use it. My grannies would never use such language. That was until another grandparent-related incident.

  The grandmother in question (not the Russian penis this time) would usually express herself most politely, her most extreme curse being the remarkable phrase ‘go and boil your head!’, the impracticality of which always seemed to outweigh the sheer horror of it actually happening. Then one morning a few years ago, my mum was visiting, hoping, I imagine, for a cup of tea. She knocked on the door. A few seconds later my grandmother opened the door. Instead of her usual ‘Hello dear’, my grandmother chose the following words with which to open their morning exchange:

  Have you seen this fucking weather?

  My mother was stunned and after a somewhat rushed cup of tea phoned me to share the news. I too was shocked. Why would my grandmother suddenly choose to break her usual verbal habits in such a dramatic way? Was she also embarking on some ambitious linguistic project?

  It was a couple of weeks later that I came up with what I still believe to be the right answer. There is a theory in comedy that if you’re going to swear onstage, whether you’re performing an hour-long show or a twenty-minute set, you should only use the F-word once so it has maximum impact. It’s a theory I subscribe to and which I’ve followed in this book (except for the windfucker, which I’ve now mentioned five times). But I think my grandmother may have taken this to the next logical step. I think she decided to use that word once in her entire life. I thin
k she made up her mind that her usage of the ‘F-word’ would be truly powerful, that she wouldn’t just carelessly fling it about, that people would notice the splash it made when she chucked it in. And notice it my mum did.

  Unfortunately I can’t help thinking my grandmother might have wasted her one chance. I’m worried that in the end, with time inevitably ticking by, she panicked,* thought to herself, ‘Well, I’ve got to use it once, here goes!’ and blurted it out blindly. Because my mum said the weather really wasn’t that bad. ‘It was drizzly, yes, but no need for that sort of language.’

  Bollo would have been far more appropriate.

  2

  It won’t have escaped your attention that ‘mental safari’ is not a word. It’s two words. But that doesn’t make it any less valid a candidate for this project. There are several thousand two-word lexical items in the dictionary, and I was confident ‘mental safari’ could join this throng mainly because, like ‘bollo’, its appearance in a sentence was unlikely to arouse too much suspicion.

  Invented by the tardy Mr Bodoni, the vague sense of the phrase is comprehensible without question. We all know what ‘mental’ means, we all know what ‘safari’ means, so it’s not hard to guess roughly what they might mean placed side by side. My job, therefore, was to spread the expression so wide that it warranted its own definition in the dictionary. I needed ‘mental safari’ to become as familiar as a hot dog*, the Big Bang* or, at the very least, a monkey wrench. The two words ‘mental safari’ had to warrant their own single inclusion in the Book.

  With facebook and MySpace proving such happy haunts for ‘bollo’, I launched ‘mental safari’ in a similar area, focusing specifically on the digital equivalent of the public toilet door: the Internet forum. As a twenty-first-century Verbal Gardener, for me the Web* was always going to be a logical starting point. Thanks to its democratic usability, the birth and movement of new words can now be announced and tracked more swiftly than ever before, and while this easy access does make it a more superficial medium than the likes of books or newspapers, it also makes the Web the perfect training ground for verbal activists. Dictionary authorities might be less impressed by an appearance of a word on a website than in more official physical publications, but any appearance online is still proof that words are in use. And if they’re used on an Internet forum, like the door of a public toilet, people are bound to see them. My plan was simply to leave a ‘mental safari’ lying around and see if it tripped anyone up. I felt sneaky but excited.

  My first target was what I guessed would be a most reputable website, the debate section of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music’s Internet home. For me, this grand title conjured up images of mature bassoonists discussing semitones and quavers or articulate percussionists typing rhythmically away about metronomes and zzxjoanws. After registering as a new member with my codename ‘Farmer’, however, I discovered that it was mainly used by schoolchildren. This made me feel a bit odd. I guess the word ‘Schools’ in the title should have been a clue. Nevertheless, I knew that children are the future, I wanted my words to be spoken in (or by) the future, so I pressed on (instead of off), determinedly ignoring any feelings of inappropriateness.

  Luckily, I soon came across a debate, initiated at 6.51 a.m., whose title was distracting enough to banish any doubts:

  Does anybody else *really* like to whistle?

  My my. There’s a question to demonstrate just how far back the Internet is pushing the boundaries of communication. Ignore the maverick* asterisks, that is a brilliant topic for consideration. You just don’t find that level of curiosity in the broadsheets. I certainly like to whistle, I thought to myself, but do I *really* like to whistle? I had to follow this thread.

  The originator of this poser was a poster with the nickname ‘all ears’ who played (let’s hope still plays) the flute and provided what I think is called ‘the flautists’ conundrum’ alongside her question:

  Did I choose flute because I like to whistle, or do I like to whistle because I play the flute???

  Gordon Bennett!* That is a poser. Everything about the post I liked – the queries themselves, the triple question mark, the fact that ‘all ears’ felt the need to seek other people who also *really* like to whistle before seven o’clock in the morning, everything.

  It was four and a half hours before anyone answered. But then a saxophonist* (presumably), calling him or herself ‘saxophonist’, wrote with raw honesty:

  I cant stop whistleing!!!!! on the way home from school Im always whistling the piece im playing or the theme from that film I watched the night before. it drives my friend mad.

  Audacious spelling and punctuation again, but mostly a clear demonstration that this person also *really* liked to whistle. In fact, they couldn’t stop whistling. That’s how much they liked it. They always whistled in the car, even though it had an adverse effect on their friend’s sanity.

  Mercifully this eased the mind of the troubled flautist who that same afternoon logged on to write, ‘Whew! So at least the art hasn’t died out completely yet!’ While whistling is not, strictly speaking, an art and has never shown any signs of dying out, I was glad to sense her relief in that first, possibly invented word ‘Whew’.

  For the next forty-eight hours, the discussion rumbled on. But then, as abruptly as it started, it stopped. For almost a whole year nobody told anybody that they *really* liked whistling. Nobody had any further opinions on the matter. It was time for me, aka the ‘Farmer’, to try to fan the embers of the whistling chat back to life:

  Farmer Feb 6 2006, 05:08PM Post #9

  I know this thread came to a bit of a halt a while ago but I really wanted to write something because I’ve recently really got into whistling!

  Last year I was getting really frustrated with my French horn – sometimes it just won’t behave itself – and in the end I just started to whistle what I wanted to play instead.

  I then went on a bit of a mental safari, not practising the horn, whistling in orchestra, that sort of thing, and I’m now pretty much addicted to whistling!

  I just can’t stop!

  Is this fine?

  This wasn’t a complete lie. I did try to learn the French horn at school, attracted to the instrument not by its glamorous ‘G’ shape but by its name, so nearly the same as mine. I liked the idea of Alex Horne playing the horn. It was sort of a joke. But I wasn’t musical and I did once hum in orchestra – not quite the same as whistling but sounding more similar to a horn.

  It took just one hour for the debate to start raging again. A recorder player called ‘recorderzrule’ first chipped in with, ‘I’m always whistling! My mum tells me not to because I’ll get wrinkles!!’ – a terrific rumour presumably started by recorderzrule’s mother. Further messages of support came rolling in. One user wrote, ‘I cannot whistle at all! My dad tried to teach me but …’ which I found a bit sinister, while katyjay cheerfully added, ‘I think I rather surprised my singing teacher with the volume at which I can whistle,’ presumably meaning she could whistle either very loudly or very quietly; she didn’t say what the volume was, just that it was a surprising one.

  In fact, the topic went on to take up three whole pages of the forum, more than tripling in size after my mental safari prompt (helped on one occasion, I should admit, by me asking katyjay if she thought she ‘could whistle louder than a harmonica’), and not once did anyone question our Verbal Seed. It was accepted unflinchingly. Another seed had been planted.

  But, like ‘bollo’s welcoming reception, this wasn’t a surprise. ‘Mental safari’, invented by Mr Bodoni, is a safe phrase, more of a novel metaphor than a brand-new word. What’s more, as well as being instantly understandable and easy to slip into a conversation, it looks and sounds good. ‘Safari’ was exported to English from Swahili and has glamorous roots that can be chased back to the Arabic word safar, meaning ‘a journey’. It’s an exotic flourish after the surest of starts. For ‘mental’, despite enjoying fresh urb
an credibility with the un-PC slang sense of ‘amazing’ (as in, ‘did you hear the rain last night, it was mental’), is, of course, of Latin origin, coming directly from the word mens, meaning ‘mind’.

  You can always rely on Latin. For both language and linguists it provides the finest of foundations, with thousands of everyday words handed directly to us by the Romans. If you’ve ever watched a video or listened to an album, you’ve effectively spoken Latin. If you’re driving a Volvo, that’s the Latin for ‘I roll’. Perhaps you’re rolling with your posse; they take their name from the Latin phrase, posse comitatus, ‘the force of the country’. Sometimes the language of the classroom can help you learn the language of the street.6

  While my school Latin teacher had shown me the darkest secrets of the dictionary, my university Latin teacher, I discovered, had one of his own. Hoping for some support as a fellow Latin fan, this academic (who shall remain mostly anonymous) was one of the few people I told about the Verbal Gardening project. I knew I shouldn’t have. It was meant to be an assignment shared only by me and my Rare Men. But there is a trust among Latinists, an unwritten code. In many ways, we’re like the Masons, with just a shade less creepiness. So I knew I could count on Rob.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said with a smile. ‘But I’ve already got a word in the dictionary.’ At this point he took a step back to admire my reaction.