Wordwatching Read online

  Second, ‘honk’ is currently an underemployed word. Its first, main meaning is the noise a goose makes. Geese were the first to say ‘honk’. Then, in the early twentieth century, it was borrowed by humans to represent the noise of a car horn (the two are now pretty much interchangeable; if your horn breaks, grab a goose, and vice versa). During the early 1900s the word ‘honky’ became a derogatory term for Caucasians, deriving from ‘hunky’ or ‘bohunk’, both offensive terms for the Hungarians (and Poles and Slavs) who’d come to America to work in the stockyards of Chicago.10 A few decades later it evolved into a verb meaning ‘to smell strongly’. A pungent stilton, for example, might be said to honk. But these later slang meanings, in this country anyway, aren’t especially prevalent. Honk hasn’t been overused. It’s perfect for the role of ‘cash’, and, with a push, I was sure we could reinvent it, give it a new lease of life just as words like ‘gay’ and ‘cool’ have been granted in the recent past.

  Third, money is a massive target at which to aim. Since its invention money has always been talked about. Slang is the language of the street and throughout history the four most popular topics of street talk have been alcohol (or drugs), crime, sex and money. What that says about society I’m not sure, but being a socially awkward sort of chap myself, money was the ideal choice, the least uncomfortable of this quartet for me to discuss. By inventing a new word for cash I was joining a club with a long and healthy heritage.

  Countless forerunners to ‘honk’ have cropped up in the past: actual, ballast, scratch (which can also mean ‘to kill’ or ‘to write’), crackle, cake, lettuce, moolah,* spondulics, beans and trump. All these were once used every day by people to refer to money. Some pecuniary slang terms have had fairly obvious relations to money itself: ‘rivets’ hold things together, as does cash; ‘sugar’ sweetens life, ‘bread’ is necessary, ‘green’ the same colour as dollar bills; ‘dead presidents’ refers to the pictures on them. ‘Bling’ supposedly reflects the sparkle of the diamonds BG and his colleagues were so fond of, although it does also sound a bit like a telephone.* Others make less sense: ‘gravy’ makes things taste better? A ‘rhino’ is a bit scary? So while ‘honk’ has no direct connection with coins or notes, a derivation could be forced if required. ‘It reflects the loud, brashness of cash,’ we might say. ‘It probably comes from the rudeness of City bankers.’ Whatever the etymology we chose to use, there’s no doubt the financial semantic field was a fertile one.

  So it was no surprise when honk began to show early form. It was, however, surprisingly stirring to see ‘honk’ in an actual magazine. (You might not have heard of it, but Itchy is a genuine publication. I promise.) After my postman had handed me the package containing the magazines, I laid them out on the kitchen table and stared at them with huge satisfaction. If we were to succeed, these would one day be highly significant documents, the original examples of English words. I had one of my words in print. This was just one (quite large) step away from being in the dictionary.

  For the very act of printing breathes life into a word. While butterflies have to die before being pinned into books, sounds are immortalised on the page, frozen not killed, preserved for the future. It was a businessman from Kent called William Caxton who produced England’s first printing press in the fifteenth century (the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with actually inventing it around 1439), taking the opportunity to introduce words like ‘brutish’ and ‘ample’ himself in the process. Both were subtle adaptations of French words, and by allowing ordinary people to read literature he cleared the way for these new words to travel up and down the country more speedily than ever. Printing had the same effect on words as cars would on people a few centuries hence. And nearly all the means by which I would attempt to spread my own words – newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the Internet and, indeed, books – were all made possible through Caxton‘s innovation.

  It was he, for instance, who first printed Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which were themselves crucial in shaping all future European writing. It is thanks to Caxton that Chaucer is often described both as the founder of the English vernacular tradition and the father of modern English literature. An asteroid and a lunar crater have both been named in Chaucer’s honour. But these were unnecessary gestures. Chaucer had already created his own memorial. Because Chaucer was the first major English Verbal Gardener.

  Before he came along English was in a bit of a state. William the Conqueror had confused things by speaking French and for three hundred years the country babbled along with several different tongues, with no king speaking English until Henry IV sat on the throne in 1399. Before then it was Chaucer who gave Old English the push it needed to rise back to the top, where, in various states, the English language has remained ever since. It’s thanks to him that 375 million people now speak English! He was the first person in the history of English to use the terms ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’ and even ‘poetry’ (although he spelt them all with ‘ie’ at the end rather than the modern trendie ‘y’); this was a gardener with lofty aims.

  Not content with naming these literary fields, Chaucer also harvested some pretty impressive word crops. Today’s dictionaries cite him as the first user of such varied words as ‘accident’ and ‘autumn’, ‘intellect’ and ‘ignorant’, ‘galaxy’, ‘famous’, ‘moral’ and ‘magic’. He created ‘jeopardy’ by joining the French words jeu parti (‘a divided game’) in Troilus and Criseyde, pilfered ‘difficulty’ from Latin and came up with ‘zounds’ as a jazzier* alternative to ‘Christ’s wounds’. He was on fire.

  But, as Alex Games explains in English Words and Their Curious Origins, Chaucer didn’t always succeed. ‘Beblot’, ‘achatour’ and ‘acheck’ are all words he attempted to introduce but which look entirely foreign today. Even these, however, are in the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning ‘to blot all over’, ‘a purchaser of provisions’ and ‘to bring to a sudden stop’ respectively. Even his dodgier, uglier words have survived, all because William Caxton made a machine that put them onto paper.

  While on the subject of printing I should also herald Aldus Manutius the Elder, also known as Aldus Pius Manutius or Teobaldo Mannucci, an Italian humorist and printer championed by Lynne Truss in her punctuation triumph Eats, Shoots and Leaves. ‘Who invented the italic typeface?’ asks Lynne. ‘Aldus Manutius!’ she replies immediately. ‘Who printed the first semicolon?’ she asks, and before we get even the chance to answer – even though we might be able to guess this time – she shouts, ‘Aldus Manutius!’ again. And if she’s right, that’s a remarkable achievement, allowing people like me to do things like this: these words are really important because they slope forwards. As well as printing the world’s first semicolon, he also helped develop the commas and full stops we expect at the end of our sentences today. There. And there. I could go on. This was also mightily impressive Verbal Gardening.

  Back in England, the fantastically aptonymic Wynkyn de Worde took over from Caxton after his death and ensured his work continued at an even more rapid pace, opening up the first printing press on Fleet Street in 1500 and publishing over 700 titles in forty years. It was Wynkyn (it really is an excellent name – Wynkyn Horne; yes, that could work) who used Aldus’s italics for the first time in printed English, and he that really pushed printing forwards. Fonts had been around for centuries (if you peer up to the top of Trajan’s Column in Rome you can see the forerunner of what would become Times New Roman inscribed in AD 113), but the birth of printing meant a sudden explosion of typefaces. Thanks to Worde’s advances, the likes of Claude Garamond and Giambattista Bodoni started designing letters, and were so successful that their surnames became words too.

  The invention of printing therefore transformed the way words were passed on for ever. Men like Caxton picked up Middle English by the scruff of the neck and slapped it about until it became Modern English. That’s not a bad achievement, ever so slightly more impressive than scrawling ‘bollo’ on th
e back of a toilet door in the Gordano Services. Since the twelfth century, but particularly throughout the first half of the fifteenth century, English was being transformed by what is enigmatically called the ‘Great Vowel Shift’,11 a term coined by a Danish linguist called Otto Jespersen. Thanks to Caxton and Worde’s efforts, combined with what was fast becoming a London-based dialect in the government, the language was suddenly standardised. It’s partly due to these developments that so many English words are spelt so peculiarly, with some Middle English pronunciations retained and others changed. Spelling was frozen at a time when pronunciation was still moving, creating an intriguing (and, I would imagine frustrating, if you’re a foreign student) linguistic geography. I always remember my mum telling me that the letters ‘ough’ can be pronounced in at least nine different ways and that the word ‘ghoti’ should actually be pronounced ‘fish’.12 With a little imagination, it seemed, you could mould the English language into whatever shape you fancied.

  So the appearance of ‘honk’ in these Itchy guides was a significant occasion. With this publication it could already be argued, with concrete evidence, that people in the twenty-first century were using ‘honk’ to mean ‘money’.

  10 Although other theories suggest it might stem from the practice of white males honking their car horns to attract African-American prostitutes in the 1920s, or from the patrons of ‘honky-tonk’ saloons in the Wild West. As is so often the case, the origin is murky, but I’m putting my honk on the immigrant theory.

  11 This isn’t really the place to explain in detail what happened. Very simply though, English started sounding more like English and less like Italian or Latin. As you might guess from the word ‘shift’, this change can definitely not be attributed to any individual. In fact no one really knows what happened. Some say the migration of a large proportion of the population to the south-east after the Black Death meant that accents were modified, others say the fact that the aristocracy started to speak English rather than French created a ‘prestige’ way of speaking. I say, read Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English for a proper explanation.

  12 The nine ‘ough’s are ‘though’, ‘tough’, ‘cough’, ‘through’, ‘plough’, ‘ought’, ‘borough’, ‘lough’ and ‘hiccough’. As for ‘ghoti’, George Bernard Shaw explains that the ‘gh’ is pronounced ‘f’ in ‘tough’, the ‘o’ as ‘i’ in ‘women’, and ‘ti’ as ‘sh‘ in ‘nation’.

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  Despite this early growth, all was not rosy in my Verbal Garden. For while ‘honk’ was making itself heard, ‘games’, Mr Garamond’s new adjective meaning ‘pretentiously rubbish’, faltered.

  It should be the perfect modern adjective, chosen by our Rare Teacher because he felt it had the right sort of sound to pass unnoticed amongst playground banter; ‘I had an eye on fitting in with the cadence commonly found in metropolitan youth-speak,’ he had written, ‘and so tried to echo words like “butters”.’ Butters is current schoolyard slang for ‘ugly’ (derived either from the American phrase ‘butt ugly’ or, more creatively, a shortening of the sentiment, ‘she’s got a nice body, but her face …’). Someone who might cry, ‘Oh my, she is butters!’ might also exclaim, ‘No, no, that is games!’ we hoped. It might seem odd to use a noun as an adjective but think of ‘camp’, once a ‘temporary living accommodation’, now a synonym for ‘effeminate’. Words do change.

  As a teacher, Garamond knew all about ‘metropolitan youth-speak’. ‘Have your other correspondents told you about “nang”?’ he asked in another email. ‘It’s currently the latest word for “cool” amongst juvenile east London street cognoscenti, but it has spread so far that I’ve heard it used at the school I teach at by the trendier students. Apparently, its use began with a Chinese girl in an east London comprehensive whose name was Nang. She used to get mercilessly bullied for being dazzlingly square. The bullies taunted her by saying “Oh Nang, you’re so nang,” meaning that, however hard she tried, she couldn’t stop acting in the desperately unfashionable way that came naturally to her. The repetition of the word nang gave it a life of its own. What I don’t know about this is the most beautiful part: how the taunt “nang” metamorphosed in meaning so that it is now the highest street accolade of all.’

  A little research showed that ‘nang’ had indeed advanced from the schoolyard into the more mature territory of The Times (an article on 30 January 2006 was entitled, ‘How to be nang (if you have to ask, you aren’t)’ and the BBC (whose website on 11 April 2006 reported, ‘“Nang” takes over cockney slang’: ‘Teenagers in east London are forming their own brand of English and pushing out traditional cockney slang, according to language experts. A study by Sue Fox, from London’s Queen Mary’s College, found words such as “nang” – meaning good – were commonly used by youths in inner London’).

  This is a superb example of how Verbal Gardening can occur; accidently on the part of this poor girl Nang, deliberately by the bullies, but unpredictably in effect. If the story is true, and this ‘if’ is nearly always a large and compelling part of a good Verbal Gardening story, it being rarely possible but always tantalising* to pin the creation of a word accurately onto one particular person, it shows how easily a simple sound can be picked up and spread if the conditions are right and how the meaning of words can change dramatically. Nang came to mean ‘cool’, which itself had come to mean ‘good’ not so long ago. In such a way ‘wicked’ also now means ‘good’, despite once meaning ‘bad’, and ‘mother’ (the first word I ever tried to say) has evolved into perhaps the most offensive of insults, an abbreviation of a phrase of which it is by far the better half.* So honk could mean money and games could mean rubbish. That was the theory.

  But whatever its exact origins and despite its early momentum, ‘nang’ has not yet officially made it as an adjective. Not one of the recognised ‘standard’ dictionaries has included it in its pages. So is ‘nang’ a word? No, according to our great compendia of words, but yes, according to the many people who actually use them. And if it’s featured in the headlines of such esteemed bodies as the BBC and The Times, surely there’s no denying that it is a word! So is the dictionary wrong or just biding its time?

  Either way, ‘nang’ was ticking along nicely. ‘Games’, on the other hand, was refusing to start. Unfortunately, while the sound and look of the word were both spot on, it was the etymology that threw a spanner in the works. And for that, I alone was to blame.

  Although it was Mr Garamond who nominated ‘games’ as our new adjective, it was I who put the word in the frame. At almost exactly the same time as I had commenced Verbal Gardening, the BBC produced a book and a television programme, both entitled Balderdash and Piffle, which traced the history of well-known words and phrases. Naturally I looked at them with some curiosity, first because of my love of the game Balderdash, and second, because it seemed so spookily relevant to my own project. Victoria Coren, the presenter of the TV programme, explained that she wanted people to look back at old sitcoms, football fanzines, local newspapers, classified ads and the Internet to see if they could find examples of words being used before the current dictionary quotations; antedating, they called it. Surely if I myself could follow and copy this trail, my words too could end up in the dictionary and maybe even appear on such a programme in the future.

  Unfortunately, what started as innocent observation morphed horribly into obsession and revenge. I started researching Balderdash and Piffle by looking up the book’s author, a Mr Alex Games, on the Internet. Being a childish and desperate sort I viewed the fact of his having the same first name as me as a positive augur. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘another word-loving Alex!’ Having googled Mr Games, I then discovered more similarities between the two of us. This other Alex studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge University. So did I! He was a great fan of Peter Cook and Alan Bennett. They’re my heroes too! This was uncanny,* I thought, ignoring the fact that few people aren’t fans of Peter Cook and Alan Bennett.

  But reading
on it soon struck me that my namesake was actually a superior Alex. After leaving Cambridge he’d immediately managed to leave his mark on the world: writing comedy for Radio 1 and Radio 4, articles for the Literary Review, GQ and the Evening Standard, interviews for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Independent on Sunday, Financial Times and Scotsman and whole biographies about Cook and Bennett. What’s more, his Balderdash and Piffle became an instant bestseller in January 2006, exactly the same month I was commencing a project which mainly involved me writing made-up words on toilet doors along the M1. It may sound like false modesty,* but I felt completely useless in comparison. I also felt unprecedented envy. I had found a new Siemens.

  When I had originally explained the Verbal Gardening project to my Rare Men I chose to share this information. I figured it demonstrated the interest in etymology out there, and thought an arch-rival figure might spice up proceedings. And so, when Mr Garamond suggested this new meaning for the innocent other Alex’s surname, I jumped at an opportunity to get even. ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘from now on “games” will mean anything poor, pretentious or rubbish. That way I win.’ So in that spiteful pique of jealousy I accepted this rather sneering word. Without much thought, I had become the schoolyard bully. I should have been ashamed of myself. In fact, I soon was.