Wordwatching Read online

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, incredulous, jealous and excited all at once.

  ‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘it’s not an English word. I actually invented a Latin word and got it in the dictionary. You see, I was the editor of the latest Penguin Latin Dictionary and I couldn’t resist. I snuck the word lexicographus in there with the meaning “writer of dictionaries, harmless drudge”, a reference to …’

  ‘Yes, I know, to Samuel Johnson. Excellent work,’ I sighed admiringly.

  It was a little like cheating, but coming up with a new word for an apparently dead language was impressive. If you happen to have the Penguin Latin Dictionary, look lexicographus up. It’s there. He did it.

  Two thousand years ago, many native Latin-speakers did it too. The following might not be classed as ‘ordinary individuals’ like you or me, but they too spawned words that made it into Murray’s OED millennia later. ‘Volcano’, for example, is named after the Roman god Vulcan, who was unusually skilled in smelting and smithery, ‘cereal’ comes from Ceres, a female deity in charge of growing plants, not words, and you can blame ‘insomnia’ on Somnus, the god of sleep. Jupiter himself, the chief of these distinctive divinities, spawned our word ‘jovial’, thanks to his pseudonym ‘Jove’, and his occasionally cheerful attitude. On a more mortal level, a character called Sipylus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses inspired the coining of ‘syphilis’ in Italian poet Girolamo Fracastoro’s 1530 poem ‘Syphilis sive morbus gallicus’7 (‘Syphilis or the French disease’); not necessarily the word you’d choose to be for ever associated with, but a word nevertheless.

  But some dictionary-approved words that seem to have come from Latin aren’t quite what they seem. Everyone knows that a vomitorium is where the Romans went to be sick after gorging on too many grapes and sparrows. But everyone is wrong. Brave New World author Aldous Huxley invented that meaning back in 1923. Whether he made the error intentionally or not is unclear, but either way, everyone believed him and the Romans are for ever cast as an over-indulgent over-eating nation. A vomitorium was actually a passage behind the seats in an amphitheatre out of which the crowds could ‘spew’ after watching the latest show. The Colosseum in Rome, for example, could empty its stomach of 50,000 people in just fifteen minutes.

  There is also a story of personal invention behind the word ‘quiz’, a great and inspirational story, almost certainly untrue but which I love so will include here without further qualification. ‘Quiz’ looks rather like quis, a Latin word meaning ‘who’. It also looks like quid, which means ‘what’ (or a pound, of course). But ‘quiz’ itself is definitely not a Latin word. Oh no. It was invented by perhaps the most efficient Verbal Gardener of all time; a man called Daly (which, by the way, is my mother-in-law’s maiden name; undeniable proof that I too am destined one day to create my own word).

  In 1791, James (or Richard, nobody knows for sure) Daly (or Daley), a Dublin theatre manager (or pub landlord), was challenged to a typically alcohol-fuelled bet. In order to win the metaphorical and literal punt, he had to introduce a new word to the language in one (or two, again, it’s all a bit murky) day (or days). As soon as the curtain had fallen on that evening’s performance he therefore hired a group of street urchins to write ‘Q-U-I-Z’, a previously unseen sequence of letters, on walls around the Irish city. These young vandals* worked hard, and within a day (or so) the word was the talk of the town. A newspaper ran a competition asking people to say what they thought it meant. That competition itself became a ‘quiz’. The word became common currency.

  Daly’s tale might just be true. The word ‘quiz’ was already around; a lady called Fanny Burney (who also invented ‘tea party’, ‘grumpy’ and ‘shopping’ in her 1778 novel Evelina) wrote it in her diary on 24 June 1782, and a yo-yo-like toy of the same name was popular around 1790, but the meaning of ‘interrogation’ or ‘entertaining questioning’ can’t be attached to anything any more concrete.

  For me, the factual or fictitious nature of the story is irrelevant. What is far more significant is that the tale exists at all. The anecdote first emerged in Benjamin’s Stuart’s book Walker Remodelled, published in 1836, with the most detailed account appearing in F. T. Porter’s Gleanings and Reminiscences (an appropriately vague title) almost a century later in 1875. If it didn’t actually happen then someone, possibly Daly himself, must have gone to the trouble of inventing the story and so made a name for himself that way instead. Somehow the legend got passed along from town to town and from generation to generation, and I’m more than happy to continue spreading the news. Helped by its Latin appearance, ‘quiz’ is now part of our linguistic establishment. Could I do the same for ‘mental safari’?

  6 It doesn’t quite fit into this urban theme but one of my favourite secret Latin words is ‘Hovis’, the great British bread brand. The term was concocted by a student called Herbert Grimes, itself a wonderful name, who won twenty-five pounds and everlasting fame by winning a competition to name a patent flour set by bakers S. Fitton & Sons Ltd in 1890. He made ‘Hovis’ from the Latin hominis vis, meaning ‘the strength of man’.

  7 According to Fracastoro’s poem, his protagonist Syphilus was the first man to contract the disease as a punishment for angering the god Apollo. The poet then used the name to refer to the disease in his medical text De Contagionibus (‘On Contagious Diseases’) and the title stuck.

  3

  ‘Pratdigger’ also has history. It was Mr Rockwell who suggested it after exhuming what he thought might be treasure on the Oxford English Dictionary online archives. The two-word phrase ‘prat digger’, he discovered, was once used on the streets of Britain to describe petty criminals. ‘Prat’, and this was news to me, is a nineteenth-century word for ‘buttocks’, hence ‘pratfall’ meaning ‘a fall on one’s arse’. ‘Prat digging’ implied the act of rummaging around in someone’s back pocket but, inexplicably, fell out of use and so not into the dictionary. The noun ‘parabore’ is still defined by the OED as ‘a defence against bores’, but neither ‘prat digger’ nor ‘pratdigger’ has a listing. Yet.

  Inspired by the very sound of the words, Mr Rockwell set about them like a verbal alchemist, uniting the separate halves into a brand-new portmanteau term and mixing in the twenty-first-century sense of ‘attracting prats’. Thus ‘pratdigger’ was born, the old pickpocketing idea still burning alongside the modern extra meaning. I was sure he had created gold. Surely few could deny that ‘pratdigger’ is an eye-catching word. Who wouldn’t want to brighten up their vocabulary with such a sparkler?

  This word ‘portmanteau’, by the way, is a linguistic term referring to a single word that combines two meanings and was itself invented by Lewis Carroll to explain his word ‘slithy’ in the tale of Humpty Dumpty. Just as a portmanteau suitcase keeps things together in its two separate halves, so ‘slithy’ contains the senses of ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’ in one single adjective. Not that Humpty (a great first name, by the way – Humpty Horne, that’s tremendous) believed in explanations. ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more, nor less,’ he said to Alice. Quite right, Mr Dumpty. I just hope the dictionary authorities see it that way too.

  Despite this first association with an essentially nonsensical word, the process of portmanteau soon became widespread, with ‘animatronics’, ‘brunch’* and ‘bootylicious’ just a few modern examples. One should never underestimate essentially nonsensical words. They can penetrate the language as deeply as any technical terms. Take ‘chortle’ and ‘galumph’, two established verbs that Carroll used before anyone else, also in Through the Looking-Glass. Or ‘pretend’, the modern playful sense of which was also created by Carroll and has since usurped the more formal previous meaning of ‘making a false claim’. In Alice In Wonderland he put the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ into wide circulation, thrusting it far ahead of its competitor ‘mad as atter’, with ‘atter’ being the Saxon word for a snake (the words originally meant ‘poisonous as a viper’ when first coined). S
o Carroll undoubtedly achieved what I was attempting to do.

  Another jabberer8 was a man called Theodor Geisel, or more often, Dr Seuss, his pen name. Like Doctors Fox and Dre, Seuss was not a real doctor. He was, however, a cartoonist as well as a children’s author, and worked for the little-known animation department of the US Army during World War II.* But it was in his 1950 book If I Ran A Zoo that he coined his dictionary-breaking word, the outstanding noun, ‘nerd’. Much like Edward Lear’s ‘runcible spoon’ (which found its way into the 1926 edition of the OED), this was originally a fanciful word, one of many imaginary animals that inhabited his hypothetical zoo.

  Seuss’s ‘nerd’ was the first use of the word in print, but so memorable and quotable were his verses that within a decade it had been passed on from little brothers to bigger brothers who in turn smoothed its path into common American slang.9

  Unsurprisingly there are some who claim that Seuss’s ‘nerd’ was an altogether different ‘nerd’ to the ‘nerd’ we think of today, and one might well wonder why his ‘nerd’ succeeded while the ‘preep’s, ‘proo’s and ‘nerkle’s all failed. These doubters point instead to the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy Mortimer Snerd, or the initials N.E.R.D. printed on the shirts of engineers at Northern Electric Research and Development, or, rather desperately, to the word ‘drunk’, spelled backwards (and tinkered with somewhat) as the true origin of the word. It’s impossible to say who’s absolutely right. In all likelihood ‘nerds’ are a mixture of all these things; some people knew Seuss’s poem, some the dummy, others the drunk, and a very few those geeky engineers. But no matter who first invented it, enough people started using the term for various reasons at about the same time and ‘nerd’ rose into public view. And now that ‘nerd’ is such an established part of the language, all I can say for sure is that Dr Seuss has the earliest recorded usage so, until someone can find an antecedent, he also has the biggest and best claim on the word. Dr Seuss invented the word ‘nerd’.

  It was exactly this sort of verbal innovation that gave me hope: despite appearing ridiculous, words like ‘nerd’, ‘galumph’ and ‘pratdigger’ can triumph.

  *

  So back to this ‘pratdigger’. Despite referring to something illegal, it’s a fun word, cheeky but harmless, playful and amusing. Throughout history, the criminal world has provided a rich seam of such mischievous slang, with ‘pickpocket’ itself tripping off the tongue impishly, ‘swindling’ sounding so satisfying, ‘burgling’ ridiculous and even ‘mugging’ rather appealing; like hugging, only softer: ‘Mmm, mug me, mmm, then give me a nice big sloppy Glasgow kiss.’

  In Jonathon Green’s exhaustive study Slang Down the Ages you’ll find the following cheerful words, all meaning ‘thief’: ‘pudding-smammer’, ‘snick fadger’, ‘international* milk thief’, ‘knickers bandit’, ‘ark-ruffian’, ‘flimper’, ‘bung-napper’, ‘billy buzman’, ‘dipping bloke’, ‘landpirate’, ‘snaffler’, ‘smugger’ and ‘snabbler’. Of course it’s a relief our streets are now largely free from such swindlers, but I can’t help wishing a few more of these phrases had endured.

  But some common words and phrases have succeeded thanks to their criminal links. ‘Jack the lad’, for example, refers to one Jack Sheppard, a petty thief who managed to break out of jail four times in 1724. Because his image was one of ‘crafty scamp’ rather than ‘violent thug’, he managed to bestow his name on to every future cheeky hoodlum,* before being hanged at London’s Tyburn in November that year. That’s quite a considerable cost but it shows that some misdemeanours do pay. By being naughty, Jack Sheppard coined his own phrase. As well as drawing from this fund of criminal language, therefore, I was also inspired by transgression itself. I too would have to bend some rules. And my gentle graffiti of motorway service stations and infiltration of a private music-based chat room was surely defensible as a means to a linguistic end.

  I’m not saying that any crime is justified if the perpetrator is trying to get a word in the dictionary. There is always a thin line between the acceptable and the pernicious; if you visit a good friend’s house I think you can help yourself to a banana or a pear. That’s fine. In Indonesian it would come under the umbrella of mencomot, a useful word meaning ‘stealing things of small value such as food or drinks, partly for fun’. A ‘funcrime’, if you will. But taking the TV couldn’t be excused as such. That’s very rarely fine. Perhaps walking away with a book from their shelf is hovering over that line; it would seem a bit odd, not quite the done thing, but probably no one would mind that much. As long as I stayed the right side of that line, a little verbal flimping was acceptable.

  Phrases like ‘The Farmer is a pratdigger’ therefore began to appear alongside the ‘bollos’ in several bogs, and I began to plan more daring ways of challenging the traditional word order.

  8 Used not pejoratively, but with a nod to ‘Jabberwocky’, the poem Carroll wrote inside the Looking-Glass. ‘Jabber’ itself is an old alliterative word. ‘Gibberish’ is almost certainly echoic too, although some claim it was coined by explorers describing the unintelligible speech of Gibraltar residents in the eighteenth century.

  9 Ironically, Seuss used no more than fifty of the commonest words to write his most famous story, Green Eggs and Ham after being dared to do so by his editor Bennett Cerf.

  4

  Despite being far less intuitive than these first three Verbal Seeds, it soon became apparent that ‘honk’ (meaning ‘money’) was going to be easier to spread further than these initial inscriptions. Being little more than a noise, ‘honk’ could be slipped effortlessly into conversation and was consistently accepted as the slang term we wanted it to be. As well as several BBC Internet forums, I swiftly managed to sneak it onto the BBC Manchester website (in an interview I said that after the Edinburgh festival, ‘you come home and start preparing and saving up all your hard-earned honk for the next one’), and into a hard-fought game of Monopoly with three other monopolists at Belsize Park. (‘Ha! I’ve got loads more honk than you! Look at all my honk!’)

  But more significant even than this board-game banter was the inclusion of ‘honk’ in a magazine, the first ever appearance of a Verbal Gardening word in print. This historic occasion was brought about through the diligence of honk’s creator, Mr Roman, who managed to get me an interview with a national magazine, where my answers would be printed without tampering by any meddling editors. By making the most of (certainly not abusing) his position on the publication, 180,000 copies of Itchy, the handy guide to the social side of Britain’s cities, were distributed across Manchester, Liverpool, London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh, each featuring an article in which I was quoted as saying:

  It’s stupid, but I’m really scared of … not making enough honk as a comedian and ending up having to get a job in an office.

  Our corpus was swelling.

  In my haste to get the project going I have to admit that I hadn’t done exhaustive research into which words might work and which almost certainly wouldn’t. I’d drawn up some basic principles but really I jumped in, head first, without paying too much attention to the swimming pool rules.

  Mr Roman, on the other hand, studied linguistics at Cambridge University. He now edits magazines and runs nightclubs in London but back then he’d done his homework, and the Verbal Gardening project was a chance for him to show off:

  While I was at home, I dug up some of my linguistics notes and books from uni, and even found an essay on neologisms that I wrote in my second year. So here are a few thoughts:

  I’ve tried to be subtle. The stuff I learned doing linguistics really helped with this. What they taught us is that the science of new words is a mysterious and unpredictable one. Sometimes existing words in a language change their meaning a bit (gay used to mean happy), this is called semantic shift; sometimes a word is borrowed from another language to mean the same or something similar as the original (zeitgeist, khaki, curry etc); very, very rarely is an entirely new word is coined t
hat goes into general usage; if they do make it, they tend to be technical or specialist (laser, quark etc).

  Totally new coinings are much more likely to enter into general usage if they’re compounds (bits of other existing words) or phrases. Some examples are: spin doctor, weapons of mass destruction, workaholic etc, although again, these tend to come from specialist areas first (i.e. politics), and then spread in use to other areas of life and language.

  So, having mulled that lot over for a while, and wanting this project to have the best chance of succeeding (I think getting in the dictionary has to be the gold medal), I’ve steered away from foreign language borrowings and totally new words (no point trying to get a word like ‘zoing’ into the English language) and decided to focus on using an existing word in a new way.

  Hence honk.

  If you glance back at the original list of new words (you don’t have to. You could just take my word for it), you’ll see that Mr Roman originally suggested ‘honk’ and ‘hoot’ to mean money, ‘a neologistic pincer movement’ with which to attack the dictionary. For now, however, it was ‘honk’ that was making all the moves.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I have to applaud Mr Roman’s judgement. ‘Honk’ hits the mark for a variety of reasons. First, it’s a short sharp simple word, like ‘cash’, ‘dosh’ (either a mixture of ‘dollars’ and ‘cash’ or an African word for a backhander according to other wordwatchers – take your pick), ‘dough’ or even ‘wonga’. It’s easy to say, easy to hear, easy to copy. It even echoes its youngest relation, ‘bling’, flashy or ostentatious jewellery, that was introduced to the language in 1998 by a rapper calling himself BG (represented by the Cash Money Records label, appropriately enough) in a song called ‘Bling Bling’ the first word of which was, yes, ‘bling’. Just four years later, the phrase ‘bling bling’ made it into the fifth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and is now regarded by contemporary rappers as too mainstream for their own use, a true indication of how far the word has come. Unlike Beyoncé, BG knows the significance of his achievement, saying (or rapping, I suppose), ‘“bling bling” will never be forgotten. So it’s like I will never be forgotten,’ in an interview with MTV News. Too true, BG. He may, however, have overestimated the monetary value of the word: ‘I just wish that I’d trademarked it, so I’d never have to work again,’ he continued. I may have been optimistic in hoping to infiltrate the dictionary in three years, but I never thought such a feat would yield any physical honk for myself.