Indian Father Enslaves Family

What is another word for 'fanatic tyrant'? Arvind Kumar could tell you. And so could his wife, his daughter, and his only son, all of whose lives were sacrificed at the altar of Arvind's insane dream to create the largest Hindi thesaurus the world has ever seen.

Arvind first felt this terrible desire the write a thesaurus as a young man in 1952. He came across a copy of the chillingly titled: Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.” This book later went on to infamy as the Roget’s Thesaurus. He was seduced by its gilded pages and handcrafted layout that cooly systematized the world. The impulse to impose a similar order on the country and people of India overwhelmed him.

Then the moment passed. He forgot this madness and for more than twenty years lived a life no different from his  upper-class, well-educated peers. He found work as a magazine editor, married his wife Kusum. They had a son and then a daughter who they loved. Then one night at a cocktail party Arvind looked around him and felt a dark shadow come over him. Wasn't there more that he could be doing with his life? Wasn't there some great plan he was betraying? Suddenly he remembered that twisted Frenchman's book.

He did not sleep that night as the demon's raged within him. By the morning the battle was lost and his mind was completely turned to the thought of the monstrous thesaurus. He told his wife what he had planned for them and began hoarding dictionaries and money in preparation for the task. Two years later he quit his job and retreated from society. Work on the thesaurus began.

Each entry was written onto a piece of cardboard and filed by hand. It was incredibly slow and painstaking labour that drain body and soul of life. If Arvind had been able to admit his madness for what it was and at least not force anyone else to share in it perhaps we could look more kindly on him now. But instead he pulled first his wife, then his son and his daughter into his penniless scheme.

Kusum, already a mother of grown children, was forced to tackle ALL THE NOUN entries while Arvind reserved the more esoteric and conceptual ones for himself to mull over. For twelve long years Kusum slaved at Arvind's linguistic mill. By 1990 there were 60,000 cards with about 250,000 handwritten words filling 70 trays. By the next year, they had listed 350,000 Hindi words.When boasting to others about the scale of his work, Arvind tells of how the book contains 125 words for turmeric, and 32 for helmet. It is worth noting that both of these are NOUNS.

Next to fall foul of this terrible regime was Arvind's only son. “We knew it was time to shift to a more organised form of filing, and to start using a computer.” says Arvind. And so his son Sumeet, who was living a happy life as a doctor in India, found himself emigrating to Iran in order to save enough money to buy his father a computer. Once he had done that, he had to return to the family home in order to type all the entries up. It was at this point his sister was asked to lend a hand.

After another five year's slave labour by the whole family the job was at last finished and the book was ready to publish. The largest and most comprehensive Hindi thesaurus ever written...it barely caused a stir.

Arvind decided to add an English side to the book.

Arvind and his unlucky family toil on to this day. In a country of a billion, they are alone on a road which has no end, and only a lunatic's urges to guide them.

When boasting about the originality of his work Arvind points out how difficult it is to translate a western invention like the 'Spinning Jenny':

"A literal translation into Hindi would be ridiculous because the name was coined by the inventor and is specific to the language. But, if you go to the Bombay mills and ask the workers, they have their own name for the machine: Putli.”

 The Spinning Jenny was a machine that swallowed up the lives of countless women and children in Europe. Instead of taking yourself off for a walk to the mills Arvind, to gawp at the poor workers there, I think you could find a fitting translation in your own backyard: the English-Hindi/Hindi-English Thesaurus and Dictionary.

Listening to the stars

This is completely unrelated to the theme of this blog but I thought I'd put it up anyway as a human interest piece. It's about Wanda Diaz, an astrophysicist working at the University of Glasgow.
(I'm not sure if this will work on all browsers....)

The match that shamed Scrabble!

The world governing body has tried to suppress its release. Here, in the public interest, is the official commentary of the final of the 2012 British All-comers Scrabble Tournament.
(I'm not sure if this will work on macs....)

Going cold turkey

For a fortnight we were on top of the world, a nation raised to the level of the gods as the Olympians came to our shores. This morning we came crashing back down to earth. We've gone cold turkey. We need just a little more Olympics, this is all too sudden. Couldn't they just have had a couple of events on today....just one or two...Maybe a bronze medal fight in the Taekwondo, or a replay of the women's shot put since the winner was doping.

But let's face it, we're all guilty of doping. We've taken a massive hit of class-A sport and now we're paying the price. It's all I can do to admit that life must go on and today's blog is only therapeutic. I'm just going to look up the etymology of the first words that pop into my head....

Repechage: a heat of a competition (preferably Olympic) in which contestants have another chance to qualify for the next round. It comes from the French repêchage, literally 'fishing out again'.

Keirin: A Japanese word that means racing/competing wheels. As in, 'No use keirin over spilt Olympics.'

Ippon: literally meaning 'one full point' in Japanese, this is the highest score that can be gained from a single move in Judo. A waza-ari, worth half an ippon, translates as half a full point. 'I waza happy man, once ippon a world-record time.'

Dressage: From the French for to prepare. This word will hopefully be obsolete by 2016 with jousting taking its place in the national discourse.

Mo-bot: Forged in a mo-ment of pure ecstasy, this ridiculous neologism might be all that's left of the games very soon. I intend to do this at all moments of intense pleasure from now on. Other words are lining up to get the Mo treatment: Mo-torious, Mo-nation, hedge-Mo, Mo-mance falling in love with Mo Farah, and the "place-Mo effect", when you watch someone you have been told is Mo Farah win a race and feel immediate euphoria.

Cold turkey: this, originally American, piece of slang comes from cold turkey being a meal that takes no time to prepare. After binging on Olympic-flame-grilled sport-steaks for a fortnight, it is hard to swallow cold turkey the next day.

Bolt, Blake, Weir: three lions roar in London

What an amazing race, the whole thing. From the moment Usain Bolt started chatting to the girl looking after his lane to Weir's singing the praises of Birmingham at the end. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from this race, it's that I should give Birmingham more time.

I'm not an athlete, nor a huge fan of athletics so I can't comment on how well they ran. Instead, here's a few pieces of Jamaican patois for you to whisper in your children's ears and hope that it will turn them into the winning machines we watched tonight.

Before the race Bolt was "tannin so back"/"so laid back". You could see Blake telling Weir, "mek we dweet"/"Let's do it."Then the starter shouted "Tan steddy"/"Stand still". There was a pause, and then they were off.

As they ran the corner Bolt was heard to say, "I dey 'pon haste, unnu can come wid mi"/"I'm in a hurry, you can come with me." He might have been thinking when he came down the final stretch that, "Mi back a hat mi". "My back hurts" and as he crossed the line that Blake was a bit "too red eye" "envious". Weir on the other hand was clearly delighted, thinking only "did deh deh" "I was there".

Bolt is, when all's said and done, "bare dog down inna that yard". "The only dog in the yard."

Bolt will have bought off the bar and the three lions are sure to bleach hard through the night.

Martian phrasebook not a hit with Rousseau

If eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had seen Curiosity's images of the red planet he would not have been rushing to sign up for evening classes in Martian. JJ believed that language sprang from man's interaction with his environment and that the landscape and climate of that environment impacted on and shaped the language. The conclusion of his argument was that language arose in the Mediterranean and was a beautiful, lilting affair that mirrored its halcyon surroundings. As it traveled North it was stripped of its romance and became a harsh, loveless thing.

Rousseau was a French wanker and probably just came up with this theory to add fuel to his hatred of the northern races who, he felt, had been made barbaric by their climes. It's thanks to Rousseau's insight though that NASA have been able to equip their Mars rover with a basic phrasebook. So suck on those frogs' legs Rousseau and go play pattonk with your garlicky ballbag.

By studying previous photograph's of the Martian landscape NASA have been able to guess at the grammatical structure and some simple items of vocabulary that would arise from it. To say 'Hello' in Martian you need to make a sound like a slow-motion vomit. Asking 'take me to your leader' sounds like a maggot's drawn out fart. Verbs are placed at the end of the sentence following the one to which they apply. Weirdly, the writing system that NASA's linguistic supercomputer has predicted looks a lot like a string of emoticons and hashtags. This point has led to fears that the Martians may already be brainwashing our children by teaching them their language.

So far Curiosity has only used its phrasebook once to ask for directions to the nearest village. It turned out it had been speaking to a rock, a fact only discovered after it had already followed the inert rock's directions and turned left at the missile factory when it should have gone right.

Indian English-wise

While in America recently, around evening on the Pacific coast, someone said to me and my friends, 'Go speak to Brad, he'll hook you up, he'll take you out, you'll catch some waves. Sweet.' I completely understood what they were saying and knew that never in my life would I have been able to come up with that sentence myself.

Having a shared language but such different cultures is like giving two kids exactly the same box of Lego and telling them each to build a house. The sensible one will build one with doors and windows, the maverick will go for a house with no doors that only magic people can enter, or something with more gun turrets than houses traditionally need. The point is they'll use the same building blocks, language, to construct the same thing, a meaningful sentence, but because of their differing characteristics they'll do it in a different way. Everyone knows this already. I just wanted to talk about Lego.

India has the same Lego set as us and the United States. It too is an English speaking nation. But if India were involved in this hypothetical house building test then its finished product would look a lot like what would happen if the Deathstar contract had gone to cowboy builders. Indian English is, to a Brit, mad. It is far, far madder than anything we have. It is incredibly hyperbolic, energetic and it is, most probably, the future of our language. So we better learn a bit. The good news here is that it's a marked improvement on our way of doing things.

The first and biggest blessing is that spelling, within certain circles, is looked down on. In others it is the first thing out the window in the rush to communicate. I've never been a fan of spelling so I like the sound of this.

Then there is the wonderful vocabulary and idioms of Indian English. Most famous is 'prepone': to bring something forward in time. That makes sense, if you can postpone an meeting you can also prepone it. There's the bizarre and ubiquitous use of the suffix -wise. It can go on the end of anything; sellotape-wise, to do with sellotape, school-wise, museum-wise, truth-wise, breast-wise. Whatever you fancy goes. My favourite of the idioms I've come across is 'out of station', equivalent to 'out of office'. That goes back to the time of the Raj, apparently, when the British rulers would go out of station when they toured the area.

By far the best thing about Indian English though is the indefinable, its style. Here's an example of what I mean. It's taken from the company history of one of India's leading education company's and the paragraph is talking about the impact of their interactive lessons and course material.

 The result was amazing. Knowledge flourished freed from the centuries old bonds of books and chalk and blackboard. A new light of understanding dawned on young awakened minds. And the classroom became a fascinating place to be in... And the teacher smiled as she now saw not just one, two or three but a sea of hands go up every time she asked a question.

I don't believe any Brit, born with a heightened sensitivity to looking a fool as we are, could ever have banged that out.

Panhandling

Between the smoke filled, air-conditioned gambling halls of Las Vegas and the sprawling opportunities of LA comes the Mojave desert. I was in that desert a few weeks ago, slowly recovering from the assault on my senses that Vegas had been. We stopped off in Barstow, a desert town that owes its existence to the fact that the Interstates 15 and 40 meet at its border. I got out to stretch my legs in the car park round the back of the fastfood mini-mall we had pulled up at. The first thing I saw was a sign saying 'No Panhandling'.

I'd been reading a lot of Western stories about Apache Indians, cavalrymen and prospectors who had lived in this desert. I thought that this sign must be a warning to any prospective prospectors not to start panning for gold in the parking lot. It seemed no less unlikely than everything I had seen in Las Vegas. Indeed, I could imagine that a lot of desperate people returning to LA with empty bank accounts might decide to try their luck, get out a pitchfork and start digging up the parking lot hoping for a strike.

It was only when I reached Laguna Beach the next day and saw the same sign again that the penny dropped. Panhandling was the American word for begging. There was something sooooo OMG American about this. The noun panhandle is common in American parlance when describing the landscape, a stretch of land that sticks out from the bulk of the country into the sea. There's the Florida panhandle, the Texas panhandle, the Oklahoma and on. That the same word is used to describe the physical geography of their landscape and the act of begging for money is fitting. Much as I loved it, America seemed an incredibly, inexorably unjust society.

A Bolt by any other name?

Usain Bolt retained his Olympic title and in doing so pushed the UK Deed Poll office into overdrive. There has been a 900% rise in the number of applications for name changes after Bolt proved that your name really does matter. Bolt by name, bolt by nature.

Some people have opted to change their family name to Bolt in the hope of having children who will emulate the great man but most have just picked up the baton and ran with it. A statement from Deed Poll services this evening read, 'Now that people have realised that names really are significant things in deciding their destiny there have been a flood of applications. 90% have asked to have their family name changed to either a) Loaded b) Minted c) Moneybags. The remaining 10% have gone for Donkeydick, Shakespeare or Bossman. There have also been a few Skywalkers, Presleys and Wombles, but no more than is normal for this time of year.'

The importance of family names has been long overlooked in this country. Centuries of passing them down from father to offspring have diluted their original significance and their power has been obscured. Authors had long tried to remind everyone how essential they were but the message had not got through. It's taken this mutant runner to show once and for all how important they are. Now that the secret's out who can say what the next few months hold with the postal service very worried about the coming chaos. David Cameron is also set to urge on in every three families to change their name to 'Strongeconomicgrowth'.

What next for Wiggins?

Bradley Wiggins has made history by becoming the first Brit to win the Tour de France. As his team manager David Brailsford pointed out, it's a feat no one can ever achieve again. There can only be one 'first ever'.

The importance of Brailsford's guidance to Wiggins history-making trajectory is widely acknowledged. What has the cycling guru got in store next for Wiggins? The clue may lie in a recent property deal in the rural Indian countryside where Team Sky have quietly purchased training facilities. They lie in the middle of a dry, flat landscape. No decent roads or mountains nearby. Not the right location for a cycling stable. The perfect site for a kabaddi training centre. Brailsford's thinking seems clear: Wiggins can never be the first Brit to win the Tour again, but he and the Sky Team can be the first British team to win the Kabaddi World Cup.

Kabaddi is a Tamil word, apparently loosely meaning 'holding hands'. Two teams of seven face each other in what looks like a miniature tennis court with the net removed. The aim of the game is to 'raid' your opponents' side of the court, touching as many of the opposition as possible without being caught. You shout 'kabaddi' all the time while you are doing this. If a player is caught then they are out of the game.

Wiggins is clearly a supreme athlete and should have every chance of becoming the preeminent figure of the Kabaddi world. He's got the entire Asian subcontinent to take on, but once you've managed to cycle all the way round France with a hundred and fifty madmen on your tail and not get caught, it should be doable.

Terry and Ferdinand to go on tour

Everyone had been expecting a court case today at John Terry's court case into whether or not he is a racist. Instead they were treated to a preview of an original two man show he and Anton have been working on.

Terry read out the opening lines of the play in court today to a rapt audience. 'Anton starts by saying to me 'Are you calling me a black cunt?' and then I says to him, sarcastically, 'You're a black cunt.'

An explosive opening. Without doubt the first lines of a surrealist masterpiece, there's no way it could be mistaken for a defence statement. The themes seem clear. By beginning the conversation with a question that seemingly picks up in the middle of a conversation that has never happened, the pair are making a daring assault on the primacy of cause and effect. That second sentence turns the groundless question into a stonewall fact. It becomes impossible to say who actually called Anton a 'black cunt', a telling comment on how the self may, or may not be, constructed through others. The play continues in this vein. Throughout, the provocative double-act force the viewer to question their understanding of the English language as they hurl abuse at each other in a dialogue that ignores all grammatical norms.

Critics have been quick to hail it as the most challenging piece of surreal theatre to emerge for a century. Terry's life as a mindless football thug is now being reinterpreted as perhaps the definitive statement on the role of the artist in the twenty-first century.

Once this opening run at the Old Bailey is complete the tour will be heading around the country. Get ready to have your grasp of reality completely undermined by this anarchic pair of thinkers.

Future netspeak: cybrid communication?

Trying to research a word, ridonkulous, online yesterday and I found myself diving deeper and deeper into Google, then clicking through from one page to another for hours and hours before I reached a link to a Youtube video. It had had no hits.

The video was by an incredibly beautiful lady with a high-pitched, strangely modulating Russian accent. She was explaining what the 'ridonkulous' meant and where it had come from. There was something unsettling about what I was watching. The woman seemed unreal, ethereal. Her electric blue eyes were like monitors, there were sudden jumps of an inch or two in her movements as she spoke. The language she was using was strange to me.

I have no record of the link, I'll come to why, but what she said was something along these lines:

Dear pupils,

So, you want to know what the ex-logos ridonkulous means? That's easy, login. This was an early twenty-first century blended word that meant something truly ridiculous. It came from mixing 'ridiculous' with 'donkey'. That's a ridiculous blend to make as there's no logic behind it I know, that is why it was so fitting you see? Some people have wrongly attributed the word to early cyberpukes, but in-fact it probably came from slow time TV culture.

So that's it, 'ridonkulous', I hope this has lubricated your understanding pupils. Goodbye.'

And then she disappeared. Right in front of my eyes while I was watching. She disappeared into the colours of lightening but at a speed more like a thunderclap so that bits of her hung around for half a second more than others before she had completely vanished. My browser then crashed and when I restarted it the web history had completely and utterly gone.

I've tried for hours to retrace my steps and find the video again but I can't. I know it's foolish, but I have this firm belief that she was from the future, that the video had, somehow, been sent from the future. The internet's a weird place. A lot of it's beamed through satellites and couple that with the possibilities of quantum computing and who knows. Maybe an anomaly like this could happen where a superadvanced computer somehow sends information back through time along the datastream.

After watching this being who oozed sensuality, probably to keep the attention of future male learners (it's the way we're heading), I was filled with a burning desire to know one thing: is that really how people will speak in the future? I thought it would be more exciting.

Murray sounds death knell for humanity

The end of the world is now more likely than not thanks to Andy Murray, British tennis ace. That was this evening's shock announcement from the Royal Society of Bibliomancers. While the rest of the country was on cloud nine, they were driving furiously towards their mountain cave bolthole, leaving nothing but this ominous press release:

"We, the Royal Society of Bibliomancers, appointed in the year 1012 to foretell of the coming of the end to the people of the land of Britain, believe that the end is nigh. We know you will probably not regard this press release with the seriousness they would have in the eleventh century but if anything that supports our claim. This is the first time in a thousand years the Bibliomancers have had a press release to make. We don't shit about, this is it.

Borne out of the studying of ancient mystical lore and an application of lost numerological equations to certain texts, the Bibliomancers have long held in their possession this prediction of the end of the world.

'Ye end finalle ande complete, shalle falle on thee lyk ane thunderclappe quhen these three thyngs shall passe: that which gives the universe masse shall be found, ane monthis rayne shalt falle in a day, ane Briton shalt wyn Wimbledon.'

It seems fairly black and white to us, you couldn't make this stuff up. The moment of eschatological verification is upon us. You have to admit it makes sense. It's been a portentous week to say the least. Interestingly, the ancient Bibliomancers also uncovered that the dinosaurs extinction was similarly presaged. A dinosaur from the ancient supercontinet of Gondwana won Wimbledon for the first time since the beginning of time. Two days later a giant meteorite, some say shaped as a tennis ball, landed.

Your call really, but we're off to the hills."

After the linguists accuracy earlier in the week over the God particle debate, it seems unwise to ignore the Bibliomancers at the end of it.

Conservatives Bring Back Billy Bunter Britain

Michael Gove today announced an inquiry into the state of school meals, or as he likes to call them 'tuck'. It forms part of the Conservative government's manifesto pledge to 'bring back the language of Billy Bunter Britain'.

The Conservatives have long held that the major problem with Britain was that people no longer say 'rotter', 'blimey', 'not on' and the like. Their plan to rectify this has been in place for years and is surprisingly subtle. Rather than using the language themselves, and being accused of elitism, they would set about establishing personae that warranted no other language to describe them.

Before their general election victory the talisman of this drive was obviously Boris Johnson. Using the public platform of London mayor he acted as a man who could only be described using some almost defunct words from the heyday of the English chaps. He was at one moment a 'blabbering idiot', at the next a 'nincompoop', a 'berk on a bicycle', then a 'mumbling buffoon' and 'complete and utter shambles'.

Since gaining power the momentum behind this subliminal vocabulary shift has increased. David Cameron has done his best to act a 'toff' on all occasions, marking himself out also as a 'sniveling creep' with his texts to Rebecca Brookes. He has made his cabinet ministers act as warped versions of prep school 'fags'. In the original version, a senior boy's 'fag' would notoriously often have to go and sit on and the (then outdoors) lavatory seats until they were warm enough for his genteel buttocks. Cameron's take on this has been to turn his cabinet ministers into reverse 'fags', making them sit in all the political hot seats, only stepping in himself once things have cooled down. However, Cameron has sadly strayed too far into the line of also being aptly described as an 'all round douchebag' and a 'bit of a cunt' for his efforts to be deemed a complete success.

The most valuable contribution to the cause has come from Michael Gove. Not important enough to be called a cunt yet not worthy of being called anything much else in common parlance, he has forced people to turn to old school, prep school, vocabulary. His face screams, 'I am a twerp', his voice proclaims proudly 'I'm a wally'. When he ordered up thousands of Bibles for schools then was scolded by Cameron for wasting public money and forced to leave them in a warehouse in India, the only word for it was 'fanny'. He consistently epitomizes the phrase 'sticking your oar in'. Today's otherwise inexplicable gesture of focusing on school dinners amongst all else that is wrong with the country can only be a valiant attempt to get the word 'tuck' back in the public discourse. We take our hats off to you Michael, you are a true linguistic revivalist and a complete and utter 'tucker'.

Stonehenge launches fashion week

Every fashion reporter knows that only one thing is certain in their fast paced world: fashions return. This summer it's the turn of the druids to show us how it's done with the launch of the first ever Stonehenge Fashion Week. Left out in the cold for over a millenium, these men from the dark ages have given us a timely reminder that a flowing beard and a bleeding ram's skull can still give real summer chic to any costume.

Innovative from the start, the Stonehenge Fashion Week dispensed with the catwalk format and heroine cheeked models. Instead Britain's remaining druids displayed their summer wardrobes in a gorsedd ceremony [traditional ceremony of bards and druids held before a festival (see photo above)].

What stood out were the bold, vibrant tones and simple use of fabrics. One gnarled old man wore a particularly fetching tartan brat [short skirt or kilt] that wonderfully complemented his frostbitten blue feet. A noticeable trend was the lighthearted use of sheep shit stains and minor fabric burns from sitting too close to fires. Leine [long shirts] with multi-coloured bars were also prominent while the stereotypical white flowing robe was largely ignored.

Perhaps the highlight of the week was the impressive closing feast. Bulls hide was everywhere to be seen and longswords were also definitely 'in'. If you don't own one already, you're going to need to soon and it's only a matter of time before they appear on the high street. Regal red cloaks abounded, as did tantalizing ensembles of feathered headdresses and six-coloured cloaks. The long curved 'horn of plenty' presented to the best dressed bard of the week made a fantastic accessory, something a little different on the beach from the usual flip flops and aviators.

Shamanistic is going to be hot this summer. If you want to know how to pull it off there's no one better to advise you than Finn McCool "Clothes", whose collection was one of the best in show. 'You should choose you vestments to suit the spirit and nature of your actions. Green blends into nature, red is the colour of blood and sacrifice, the Sun is gold and the Moon is Silver. Ask yourself whether you're going to be focusing on nature or on blood sacrifices that day and dress accordingly.'

God 'particle' discovered at CERN

Scientists at CERN announced today that they had found the Higgs-Boson particle, otherwise known as the 'God particle'. The discovery heralds a major breakthrough in particle physics. It proves another part of the Standard Model to be correct and lays bare, forever, another of the universes deepest secrets. Yet when they found it, the Higgs-Boson was not quite what they had been expecting.

'We were looking for a scatter pattern of subatomic matter that would prove the presence of the Higgs-Boson, we didn't expect to detect the actually particle itself since we had believed that would be impossible.' Said Dorky Pimplekopf, one of the team leaders at CERN. 'So none of us could quite believe it when we saw, or rather heard, the Higgs-Boson itself. It was a very small voice saying '-ness'. It turns out that we were looking for the wrong type of 'particle' all along. What actually underlies and gives weight to all matter is a very small, a subatomic, grammatical particle of the English language: '-ness'.'

When asked what the voice, presumably that of God's written into the very being of the universe, sounded like Dorky answered, 'It's hard to explain. You must understand that our microphones are incredibly sensitive and it is a sound quieter that anything any man, or creature, could ever hear. It was not a man's voice, or a woman's, or a child's. The only thing it reminded me of was when I was a boy and was playing one day at trying to reverse the Schrondinger equation. I had found a small black box and had rammed it down my pet cat's throat, in the hope the box would come out yellow. The sound the cat made as it died was reminiscent of the voice of God I heard today.'

For centuries' the scientific explanation of the world has been moving further away from normal language into the realm of pure mathematics. Now they found themselves confronted with a word, or a piece of a word. The irony has not been lost on linguists around the world. The world Dictionary Editors Union released a statement saying they were not surprised these arrogant scientific bastards had wasted billions of pounds to discover something they had known for years, 'that the answers to life's great problems lie in language and not at the bottom of a Swiss pit.'

Early speculation as to what the discovery means have been rife. With the scientists baffled by a finding that does not compute, interpretation has been sought from linguists. They suggest that it makes a lot of sense that the particle '-ness' would give ultimate mass to all existence. After all, when it is affixed to a word it gives you the essence of that word. The essence of good is goodness and by extension the essence of table might be seen as 'tableness' and life as 'lifeness'.

The linguists have suggested that the next step to understanding the universe, now the God particle has been found, is to work out what the 'God inflection' is. Then we could finally solve the problem of time and relativity by working out whether the universe exists in the past, present, future or, as many suspect, some awful sort of past-continuous.

Doing odd jobs

It's a hard life finding a job, keeping a job, enjoying a job. Just like most things, it was probably better in medieval England when a Knight was born a Knight and a starving, plague ridden peasant was born just that. At least you didn't have to worry about someone telling you you were getting the sack from being a starving, plague ridden peasant. If this strikes a chord with you, then you may be interested in some of the jobs currently on offer in 'The Medieval Job Centre'.

The Medieval Job Centre is another one of David Cameron's ways of trying to rekindle the great things that made Britain so great. Queues of jobseekers line up to be given the chance of applying for a range of medieval jobs the government has created. This, the government argues, is really job creation as they are bringing back core jobs to British industry. Jobs that have been lost for hundreds of years, signalling the nation's decline.

You can be a siffleur or professional whistler. In Merrie England professional whistlers would be employed by the wealthy to perform much the same role as an iPod dock does today. They would lie by the side of their employers bed and whistle some of the biggest hits of the day, whilst the rich man fucked, fell asleep, farted or woke up.

If siffleurring doesn't take your fancy then how about being a whiffler? A whiffler was someone who cleared the path infront of a wealthy important person so they didn't have to stand in too much muck. Or a plumist? Someone who makes plumes. This job title is as vague now as it was then. How do you make a plume?

After much consideration, I applied to be a deipnosophist; a master of the art of dinner table smalltalk. My application was refused however on the grounds that this job only really came into existence with the Empire. So instead I've landed the post of Assistant Vraicker, or seaweed gatherer. It's a word from Jersey. Apparently, vraickers only recently stopped working in Jersey. The Conservatives have drawn great heart from this, in Jersey is only a step away from reverting to a medieval feudal existence, surely the rest of the country can learn to do so too.

Heading down the information superhighway

Back when the net was young it went by the name of the 'information superhighway'. It was a road in cyberspace you got to by unplugging your phone and waiting for two minutes every time you went to a new web page. It's somewhere you went to surf and hang out in chatrooms. Not work. It wasn't so functional and damn slick as it is now. You'd still see <text>inline tags that hadn't been closed properly.<text>
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But the name 'information superhighway' is pretty much obsolete now, just as the internet it described is all but gone. It's suffered the same fate as Route 66 did at the hands of the great Interstates. An ever increasing volume of traffic is shooting across the lanes of web 2.0. Yet everyone is in such a hurry to get their information they've all but forgotten about the poor old 'information superhighway' that lies, abandoned, right alongside their slick html5 pages.Sand blows through its old watering holes. You can hang out in the chatrooms for days and not meet a soul.

What words that are now so on trend will be next pass from the language? A lot of people have bet a lot of money that we'll keep saying 'facebook me' for the next hundred years. If they'd had a proper thing about how internet terminology comes and goes, and the period in the internet's history it stands for along with it, they probably shouldn't have.

How to become the next Queen

After this weekend's jubilee celebrations a lot of people have decided that being Queen (or King) is something they would be interested in. With the Queen now approaching the age when she will be retired by Death, Buckingham Palace has announced that they will begin the process of choosing a successor. Obviously, being closely related to the current Queen will look good on your cv. But remember that as British citizens we are all somewhere in line for the throne and that Princes Charles, William and Harry have proved themselves to be unemployable muppets, leaving the field wide open.

Having prior experience at being head of state or extremely rich will be an advantage. Both President Obama and Roman Abromavich are known to be interested and will make strong candidates for the role. What will be key to their, and potentially your, success is how they interview. The Palace will be looking for someone who can talk the talk: i.e. super posh. So to help you out with your bid to rule Brittania, here are some language tips.

1. Use 'one' and the royal 'we' sparingly. A common mistake common people make is to think that the Queen uses these all the time. Not so. They are best saved for special occasions or for moments when you really need to put some little oik in their place.
2. 'Jolly' should be used instead of 'good', 'spiffing' instead of excellent, and 'really top hole' for anything stronger.
3. When you walk into the interview go up to everyone in turn, let them shake your hand and then say 'How good of you to come, what do you do?'
4. 'Bounder', 'rotter', and 'absolute shower' should be used to describe people you dislike. 'Poppycock', 'balderdash', 'absolute rot' should be used to describe anything you dislike.
5. 'What?' should be appended to every opinion you offer.
6. At the end of the interview say 'Pip, pip, old bean.' or 'toodle-pip old man'.

Make sure you stick to these tips and you'll be in with a shout at the job.

All applications should be sent by post to Buckingham Palace, with a covering letter explaining why you think you are the rightful heir to the throne.

Good luck!

Queen's English

Everyone knew that it was the Queen's English but before today it was widely assumed to be just another one of the things she owned and didn't really know about. Like America, which is still technically Liz's is she ever wanted to use it. With just days to go before her diamond jubilee though, the Queen has revealed her love of the language.

It began with the surprise announcement from Buckingham Palace that she intended to celebrate the jubilee by blowing a long blast on a ram's horn. This is to be done in deference to the etymological roots of the word 'jubilee' which go back to the 'yobel' meaning 'ram's horn trumpet'. In accordance to the original Jewish tradition, she was also going to proclaim that all country homes would be reverting to their original owners and that all debts were cancelled. Nice one Liz.

Surprise turned to bewilderment a few hours later when another proclamation left Buckingham Palace. The Queen had also decided to scrap the flotilla, a bad idea and boring Spanish word, in favour of a parade of a thousand grices. It turns out that 'grice' is a word she is particularly fond of and wanted to have involved in the big day. It means an object collected or place visited by a railway enthusiast. So the plan now is to have a thousand pieces of trainspotting memorabilia dragged passed her. It is to include the first ever sandwich made for sale on a train, which it turns out was still sitting on a GNER trolley.

There will then be a 'Royal Kerfuffle', kerfuffle being another of HRH's words that is close to her heart. This part of the day has been left deliberately vague in the planning in order to create a suitable sense of confusion when the time comes.

The celebration are to be rounded off with an evening of 'bevvying'. Eyebrows have been raised at this as both 'bevvy' and 'kerfuffle' are Scottish words. Is her majesty making a statement about her opposition to Scottish independence and the consequent exodus of beloved Scottish words from her language?

Her final message was that she would like all her subjects to pay their respects to her by acting out her number one word: 'gherao': a form of industrial action in India where workers imprison their bosses until all their demands are met. David Cameron reacted to this worrying news by saying, 'the doddering old bint has lost it. Everyone is free to enjoy the jubilee responsibly and shout 'huzza'. But anyone attempting any militant industrial action at the bidding of that dried up old cunt will be harshly dealt with.'

We will wait and see!

Well done Lizzy!

Flyer contains ultimate wisdom

The quest for the perfect chat up line is complete. The final pieces that have given its magic potency being revealed thanks to a flyer on my doorstep. 'Dr.Croc's Love Medicine: Turns Leathery Men into Lotharios; All Men Will Become Intergalactic Lovers'. This was just what I had been needing without knowing it, some expert advice. I picked it up and read on.

'Dr.Croc's has spent Years creating his Patented FORMULA. He has consulted Buddhist Savants in the Himalayas, Mayan ancestors in DARKEST PERU, the great Brahmas of India and attending many STRANGE RITUALS to gain this recipe. From each person he consulted he took a single ingredient of POTENCY, before killing them and their followers so the SECRET COULD NEVER ESCAPE. Contains no MARMALADE. Trial price only £9.99'

I want to be a hit with the ladies. But £9.99! No way. It have given me an idea though. I would concoct my own linguistic version of Dr.Croc's potion. Using my sentence so far,
I snuck into the menagerie and scoffed the toxic waste.
as a base, I would add a word from each of the places the Dr had drawn his ingredients from. If I got it right I would have a verbal love potion that could be used again and again and have saved myself £9.99 into the bargain.
It wasn't easy, the dictionary is no light read. But I think I have them.
From the Buddhists I took 'bhikkhuni', a fully ordained Buddhist nun. From Peru came 'cherimoyer', a fruit resembling the custard apple, apparently. India gave me 'kasme', 'I swear!'. The hardest bit was guessing what he meant by strange rituals. After careful pondering, I decided he must have spent time with the Maori's and Hawaiians to learn these. So I took 'Aue!' and 'Hula!'

That was it. My ultimate chat-up line was complete and it didn't contain marmalade either. Just reading it over sends shivers down my spine. I cannot wait to see the effect it will have on the next girl I meet in a bar:
 Aue hula, bhikkhuni! Kasme I snuck into the menagerie and scoffed the toxic waste. By the way, I like your cherimoyer.'

A do-oo-oo-ing it word

Following on from my last post, let's continue the search for a chat up line so erotic of and in itself that no one will be able to resist it. Previously, I was looking for words whose shear oral beauty would be seductive. Reviewing my list, I can see that it is not perfect. I have not uncovered the secret sounds of the universe that will unlock all longing. Those sounds are probably incapable of being mouthed by humans, lying forever separate from us behind the limiting veil of perception. I think I've an alright job though and am going to press on with what I have. All search after ultimate truth is bound to be like trying to move house in the dark. You will lose things along the way and may not even end up in the address you'd intended to.

I feel also that today I must give up the glorious quest for words of pure power, unadulterated by meaning, and inject a bit of sense into my sentence. What I need now are some verbs. In order to make this ultimate chat up line more likely to work on minds that might not be ready for the purely sensual sound approach, I will be using a polar opposite set of criteria to pick them. This time the sexiest verbs will be chosen by working out which have the most erotic meanings.

'To fuck'. That was my brain's first and unanimous answer. It just shows how hard it is to train yourself to think properly about things. The first twenty or so minutes thinking on any problem usually has to be thrown away as worthless. I find this is doubly true when shopping for clothes. 'Fuck' is not what is needed. Yes, it describes the sexual act. But the course of my thinking on this subject has led me to believe that sexiest thing about sex is not the plain sex act itself. This conclusion wipes out synonyms of 'fuck', 'shag', 'bang', 'nail' etc., and also the sidekicks 'lick', 'suck', 'caress' and 'finger'.

Next on my list of possibilities were the classic teasing verbs of erotic fiction. These are your 'gasps', 'heaving', 'throbbing', 'clench' and 'moan'. Over time, these verbs have basically turned into metonyms for 'fuck'. Also from erotica are the list of foreplay verbs. All of these have been crossed out on the grounds that they're the sort of thing a fifteen year old boy would pick: 'slip', 'fondle', 'spread', 'reveal'. You get the picture.

I tried to be more systematic in working out what it was I was looking for. First off, what is the sexiest part of sex? The build up, the middle or the end? Definitely not the end, nor even the pinnacle as it is too close to the end, in my view, to be fully enjoyed. Out go 'come', 'climax' and 'peak' and good riddance to bad rubbish. Overrated in my experience. Is the sexiest moment the growing desire beforehand reaching a point that is unbearable? No. Adults don't actually get that feeling otherwise there would be a lot more sex on buses than you see. So the verb I am looking for is not 'yearn'. That leaves me back where I started at the 'fucking' itself.

At first I thought that the problem with all these words might be that they lack romance. Yet after more thinking I decided it was because we need to delve a bit deeper into sex to find out the really sexy doing words. What makes sex so good (occasionally)?

Naughtiness. That's part of it. Fuck the swinging sixties or their 'openness' in France and Italy to bask in days of glorious lovemaking. That doesn't happen. Not to me. I maintain the British right to find pleasure in what the butler saw and keep 'naughtiness' high on the list. The frisson it gives is part of the pleasure. You can go too far down the forbidden fruit line and end up with a verb like 'steal'. But something that implies the daring to take the plunge is needed. Once you've crossed that line and find yourself baw deep in sex then what you're looking for is as much satisfaction as you can get. So the word also needs to contain connotations of abandoned enjoying of a moment, well aware that you've thrown off your inhibitions to enjoy it.

Scouring the dictionary and my mind, I have to report that I've failed to find a single verb that encapsulates all that I am looking for. But I think I've found two that, when put together just about do the trick. 'Sneak' and 'scoff'. Testing them out on my words from yesterday's research I find I am pleased with the results. I am beginning to build a truly tinglingly suggestive line. Here it is:

I sneak within the menagerie and scoff the toxic gasoline.

Say that in a French accent and tell me your not getting excited.

I'm not there yet. This chat up line needs to be full force A-bomb impact and so it'll need some pretty heavy exclamations, intensifiers etc. to finish it off. With the weekend three days away I think there's still time.

Sweet talk

Like many men, I struggle to think of decent chat up lines. I'm in a pub or a club and a girl is giving me the eyes, when I'm at the bar, there she suddenly is, by my side. This is an opportunity. All I need to do is think of something to good to say and we can get a conversation going. Inevitably, I fail. All I can think of is 'have you been here long?', 'what's a girl like you doing in a place like this?', or 'did you see the football earlier?' I give up and try to look the strong and silent type but it never works out.

I spoke to my friend who is pretty good at it for some advice. He suggested saying 'I like your hair'. Sounds worse than 'have you been here long?' to me. What is needed is a scientific analysis of the English language in search for its sexiest words. If we can work out what they are, then by stringing them together in a sentence we should come up with an opening line seductive enough to sweep a girl off her feet.

Asking myself what the sexiest word in the English language is my immediate reaction was 'cleavage'. That's because I find cleavage very sexy. But obviously that's completely the wrong criteria here and not the approach to take at all. Just because the thing a word describes turns you on doesn't make the word itself attractive. 'Boobies' are very, very seductive, but the word itself isn't going to win any beauty contest. If we continued down this line the eventual chat up line we would arrive at would be: 'Cleavage sucking boobies, kissing fuck.' I don't think that'll get a date.

The thing to do is forget the signified and concentrate only on the signifier. What makes a sexy word then? It took me a while to work out how to do this. At first I freestyled words and tried to pick out ones that sounded nice. 'Raunchy' came first. This obviously shows traces of my earlier approach but the word itself is quite nice. 'Ravishing' falls into this category too. Odder ones that passed this test were, 'drivel', 'crouton', 'Maastricht', 'lesion' and 'marionette'. This was getting somewhere but I could tell it wasn't quite there yet. If I say 'Raunchy clarinet, marionette lesion in Maastricht' to the next girl I meet I don't think it's going to have her gazing longingly into my eyes.

I sat back and considered the problem a bit more. French words were clearly cropping up disproportionately often. They say French is the language of love and so perhaps the answer was going to be that I should just speak French. We can't have that though, French words can't be sexier than English ones. Those baguette munching frog killers can't have a better language than ours. I decided that it wasn't their language but their pronunciation that was turning me on. They're such a sex crazed nation that lust has clearly permeated their accent. The reason French words were jumping out at me was because I was saying them in a slightly French accent and they were therefore sounding more seductive. The thing to do would be to say lots of English words in a French voice and that would help unlock the Casanova inside them.

After a good evening spent working at this, I believe that the approach has been successful. Here is my list of the sexiest English words:
drainage
splendid
toxicity
insouciance
suspect
menagerie (obvs Fr orig. but ours now)
gasoline
plywood
sycophant
Obviously my lists have been almost exclusively nouns. Tomorrow I will look for sexy verbs and adjectives. I may have to apply different criteria apart from the raw oral ravishment measure I have been using so far. Otherwise my sentence is going to be fairly meaningless. For now my aphrodisiac chat up line is:
suspect menagerie, splendid drainage sycophantic toxicity'.

There's a barmaid I fancy down the road. When extremely drunk once I asked her, as a chat up line, 'Do you know how to spell 'golden nuggets'? I can't really go down from there so I might try it out on her.

Is a diamond worth a hill of beans?

Diamonds and other gemstones are weighed in carats. Today the weight of a carat is defined as 0.2g but if we pull up the etymological roots of 'carat' we find ourselves taken back to mother earth. Which always nice.

Carat came to the English language from the Italian 'carato', this in turn came from the Arabian word 'kirat'. In ancient Arabic, kirat meant four grains of carob beans, a unit of weight. Arabia was the jewelers of the ancient world. A 10 kirat diamond would weigh the same as 40 carob beans. When traders gathered in bustling markets or when miners huddled round the dusty fire in the darkening dessert sky, they would weigh out their precious jewels in beans. If one of them had ever found a gem that weighed the same as a hill of beans they would have been stinking bloody rich.

Bling 'rocks' have always been a sign of power and today's world is no exception. Rappers, footballers, dictators, they all like to display their bling bling and show us all what big dicks they are. It's pleasing to remember that those signs of power are weighed out in beans. 

#Ychafi

This week I’ve been looking at slang. Along the way I’ve discovered the bizarre exclamation ‘ach-y-fi’, learned what an 'acca' is and had my deep suspicions of all Australians confirmed by finding out that Erol Flynn was a regular correspondent for a racist newspaper column. Most of all I've been considering what a strange beast slang is. Of all the types of language there are, it’s the one people get the biggest kick out of using and that means the most, emotionally, to them. Of all the types of language there are, it’s the one people are least interested in looking up in a dictionary.

This situation is heartache to a dictionary editor.

The 16th century is generally cited as the first time slang was consciously addressed with the emergence of 'thieves' cant'. This was a collection of slang words used by ‘thieves’ to disguise what they were saying. Highbrowed men of letters liked to write short plays or stories using this jargon and compiled dictionaries of the terms to help their elite readers understand. This early way of defining slang, as a word known only to a certain group, has persisted. There are other types of slang: colloquialisms and words well outside standard English like ‘fuck’ or ‘getting your hole’. But the slangiest slang remains the words used only by a specific group. Everyone has words like this in their personal lexicon, whether they learn them from friends, in the playground, at work, through a hobby or because they live in a certain area. Knowing these words makes you an insider, a sharer of secret knowledge. Anyone who doesn't know them is outside, not part of the subset of society that is yours. These words are part of what makes you you.

It is not surprising, therefore, that although slang is a very significant type of language it is also something that people are not really interested in looking up in a dictionary (sales figures for slang dictionaries prove this). The whole point of slang is it's learned naturally, a result of your life experience. Being able to learn it by reading a dictionary is cheating. It's the kind of thing that leads to politicians thinking they can be down with the kids. As when Nick Clegg announced on local radio: 'Wagwan, fam? Me n my lib dem crew is for real, innit blud. Weez got our earz to the street, believe. Dench.'

The internet isn't going to change either of these things, but it will accentuate both and make the dictionary writer’s agony all the more acute.

Begin by considering the lexicographer’s existence before the world wide web was spun. Yes, they knew that slang was going on all around them and that in many ways it was the beating heart of the language. But it was to all intents and purposes a purely verbal language, rarely written down for anything other than dramatic effect. Since it did not appear in published print it was so difficult to collect that it was best left alone.

The social media explosion is changing all that. On platforms like Facebook or Twitter people are using the written word in a way they never have done before. They are chatting to each other in it. In the past there have been letters and emails, but these never had the immediacy of reply and people used a fairly formal style. Social media is the first time people have ever shot the shit with their friends in writing. No one, not even the poshest of the posh, shoots the shit in very formal language. As this previously exclusively verbal type of communication shifts onto the internet, more and more slang is appearing in writing. What's more, there is something about the nature of social media tools that encourages people to use slang, more (I sometimes suspect) than they would actually do when talking. There are far less markers to show what social group you belong to in an online profile than in real life. The clothes you wear, where you live, what you sound like, all this is largely lost in an online environment. Slang is the best way you have of marking yourself off from the standard mass Tweeple and showing which niche of society you belong to.

Pause and shed a tear for the dictionary maker’s agony. Suddenly, for the first time ever, slang is blossoming in written examples that can be collected, cited and used. New words are appearing in writing for the first time since God blew kick-off. Just today I found out through Twitter that there is a meaning for ‘acca’ that no major dictionary currently has; accumulator bet. Then there was the Welsh word 'ach-y-fi'. Like all Welsh words this looked like someone had tried to spell out a sneeze. Checking through the major corpuses, I got not one usage example at all. Then I tried Twitter and stumbled across a variant spelling 'ychafi' that was being regularly used in English language texts, often as a hashtag.

The fact is though that this appearance of 'ychafi' in writing reinforces the point that people don't want to look up slang in a dictionary. Ychafi is a word that really marks you off as Welsh and part of that exclusive community that have access to it. That, I imagine, is part of the reason why people want to give it the hashtag treatment and literally turn it into a marker. If its meaning is set down in a dictionary and people from outside the group look it up and start using it, 'ycahfi' will have lost its power. Those proud Welsh people would have to start using a new piece of slang instead, probably something like 'fiaffwoa' or 'llodraffid'. Dictionaries and slang stand at loggerheads and so the wonderful (and incredibly funny) usage examples of strange slang words that are mushrooming on Twitter will probably never make money as a dictionary resource. Which leaves the poor lexicographers wishing the cruel world would stop taunting them.

A bad spell

The child is the father of the man. Largely, it's an absent father but when things get though, it steps back in. Which is annoying. The one time you usually don't want to find yourself reverting to your eight year old self is when you are put under pressure. But today this is what happened to me and it was all thanks to spelling.

Spelling is not something I was ever particularly good at as a boy. Not terrible, just consistently a little bit wrong. At primary school I was once asked to write a diary of my weekend. I wrote a very happy account of my trip to Bugger King.

The time came (somewhere in the teenage years) when I decided that since my spelling was never going to match the cerebral heights of the rest of my academic attributes, I would renounce it. I saw strong spellers as sycophantic consensus seekers and moved on with my stellar life.

This largely worked. I relaxed about the whole thing and in time even became quite a good speller, thanks to years of education. I'm also an decent proofreader when I put my mind to it. Indeed, I think that my earlier battles with spelling helped me out in this regard by making me more suspicious than most; I know that spelling mistakes could lurk in the simplest of words.

Today though all my defences where breached and my childhood anxieties came flooding back. It turned out that something I was working on had been sent to the printer's with a host of shocking spelling errors left in it. The reason they were there was due to my disorganization, not my bad spelling. I had accidentally sent some uncorrected text off to the typesetter and never spotted my mistake. I was horrified and ashamed at the thought that this had been printed on my watch. With sinking heart I braced myself to become the guy who doesn't know the difference between 'desert' and 'dessert'.

Then the trouble really began. I was told there was still time to fix the errors before printing, but not long. Suddenly, I had to proofread the guilty patch of text quickly and under severe pressure. I was already shaken and at this my confidence crumbled. Something switched in my brain and I didn't know how to spell anything. I looked at desert and dessert and didn't know which one was which. Shakespearian was wrong, someone said. Right, I said but had no idea how to fix it. Shaksperian would have been my first guess, the Shakesperean. I began to sweat with fear at shelfish and found myself having to get a dictionary out to check words like, 'Canterbury', 'edible' and even 'occasion'!

It all ended happily, I think, and I'm fairly sure I caught all the mistakes in this last minute read. The trouble is  I'm that eight year old boy again, dreading the next spelling test. Will I start righting about beefbuggers? Will Wenesday again become a word that flumoxes me? I feel britlle. Demorralized. Hideously certain that I am going to coke up again soon.

Scrabble: Where the Wild Words Are

Maurice Sendac never became a Scrabble enthusiast as far as I can tell through google. The sad news of his death made me think of today's post though, which is about Scrabble. It's a rehash of a document I've had kicking around on my computer for months. While the title is indebtted to Maurice Sendac's book the content is largely thanks to Mark Nyman. Mark has never written a children's picture book that I'm aware of.

Scrabble dictionaries are without doubt some of the most peculiar linguistic hoards on the planet. There are words in them that have been brought back from the ends of the earth, from outer-space, from times long gone and from misspellings by medieval English writers. They harbour the weird and wonderful words that the rest of the world has, to its peril, forgotten.

Here are some of the best of them. Learn them and treasure them for you never know when you will be transported into a parallel universe and might find yourself actually needing to use them.

wahconda- a supreme being in Sioux belief.
aitu - half-divine, half-human being. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about these when he was in Polynesia, where the word originates. If you ever see an aitu the best thing you can do is bury it head first in the ground.
auroch - a now extinct form of ox. "An ex-ox", Mark's joke. This word is far less rare than it was a decade ago thanks to George R.R.Martin who uses it throughout his Game of Thrones. He has also reintroduced the word crannog. He uses the word to signify a huge sea beast. It's original meaning is a bog dwelling. Still though, another reason to read those excellent books.
basenji - It's a type of prairie dog. Boring meaning, amazing spelling.
machi - This is Indian English term used in 'machi chips' to mean fish and chips. Ask for that in the chipper and if anyone argues get out a Scrabble dictionary and see if they can argue with that.
huma - a mythical bird from Persian legend. Wikipedia has it that it flies invisibly high the earth and never comes to rest. What I like about huma is that it sits right above human in the Scrabble dictionary and gets just as much room given to it.

Autonomie

This is a very solipsistic little post. Solipsistic is how I feel, aware only of my own existence. What has brought this on is a) exhaustion from a sleepless night b) applying for jobs.
Applying for jobs in an online environment is a soul destroying experience. The reason for this is that it really does make you doubt if you have one.
This is how it goes. You see an advert for a position and you get struck right in. Out comes the pen and paper, the scribblings and crossings out. You curse at how tricky it is to explain who you are and what you're good at succinctly and attractively. After a long, often painful, time spent thinking about your life and how to glue to bits together in writing so that they don't resemble a car crash, you submit it via email. Ten seconds later you get an automatic reply. One saying that your application has been safely received but that due to the high volume of interest the employer will only be able to contact candidates who have been successful. And that's it. All you'll hear on the subject is an automatic response. After all the decent human emotion you've put in, an automated response is all you receive. Repeat this one sided exchange of emotions often enough, and you wonder if there is another living being in this world of automatons.
Which is why I've coined the word 'autonomie' today. It is a blend of 'anomie', that feeling of dissociation from society brought about by the rise of the metropolis, and 'automaton'.
Automaton's were the wonder of earlier days, self-powered machines that worked as if by magic, seeming to have a life of their own.
Nowadays, automaton's are everywhere and have lost their charm. Especially, I find, online. Automatic responses, spam, online games, Amazon recommendations, and the ilk. They all exhibit the essentially features of the automatons: a semblance of autonomous life where there is none.
In the short term, 'Autonomie' is probably only going to be a problem  for people (and I'm one of them) who dislike social media sites for the same reason they generally dislike social gatherings; 'Bah! Company!'. So instead we slope off round the fringes of the internet interacting with the demonic host of automatons that live there.
For example, I acquired as part of my job a Moshi Monster avatar. He's called Collin and I'm very fond of him. However, since I don't want to end up on a list I obviously don't let Collin talk to any of the other Moshi Monsters. So it's just him me, the minigames and those incredibly annoying Moshlings. I may look back on my life and weep at this, I may not. For now I enjoy it. But ultimately it is not a healthy relationship to rely on. I will, eventually get the feeling that no matter how much I invest in it, Collin is not giving me anything very real in return.
The cold feeling of 'autonomie' that the automatic responses created will come. How far will it reach?

Pigeon vs. pidgin

I think you know you're pretty close to rock bottom productivity when you start thinking seriously about pigeons. I don't imagine this is something that really successful people wake up and do. I've had one of those days though and have found myself thinking about pigeons on three separate occassions (including this one).

The first was while I was at a duck pond. There's always a lot of pigeons hanging around on the fringes. My thought was, why do they look so shit? And why don't they fuck off and leave the zen calm of the duck's unsullied by their grim reminder of the reality of urban life? Instead, they were trooping around after crumbs like a day out from a world war one field hospital: fost-bite crippled feet, wings mangled in some horrid accident, eye's blanched by disease.

The second time I thought about pigeons was while trying to think up a children's story. The best I could come up with was a story called Percy the Polite Pigeon. It is a touching tale, about a pigeon that always queues patiently behind the others for food, gives up his space under sheltering eaves to lady pigeons, walks away into bushes whenever he wants to do a poo. He gets eaten by a fox in one of his trips to the toilet, too hungry and exhausted to fly away.

So I thought in honour of a day misspent today's post will be about pigeon vs. pidgin English. Whenever I used to hear someone talking about pidgin English I always assumed it was spelt pigeon and had somehow derived from the birds. Maybe it had something to do with inner city slang. In fact, pidgin's etymology is unclear, although it probably comes from a mimicking of how the Chinese would pronounce the English word business in the nineteenth century. Pidgin means a language that is formed when two separate languages meet, being a mixture of the two. Pigeon comes ultimately from the pipere, to chirp. Poor pigeons, even their homophones are more interesting than them.

If pigeon English did exist then it would presumably be the language that came from humans attempts to communicate with pigeons. When we look for examples of this, we can see that the mad bird lady in Mary Poppins may in fact have been the first person to try to master this language. She's definitely decided (and in my view rightly) that the underlying grammatical strucutre of pigeon English is quite literally, crumby. Any communication with these flying rats is going to have to be heavily bread based, probably every second word will need to be a crumb just to keep the pigeons interested in the conversation. 'Cooo coo' might be important too, but I'm not sure. It might be a little patronising to the pigeons who don't really make that sound at all.

No doubt there's plenty more human lunatics who would be happy to try to strike up small talk with pigeons. But pigeon English will only take off once the pigeons are willing to meet us half way. That, after all, is what a pidgin language must be. I will be keeping an eye out for this from now on. If you would like to do the same then I believe that the early signs and signifiers to look for will be a pigeon standing squarely in the middle of the pavement alternately pecking the ground, waving a wing at you in imitation of the human 'hello' sign, and then saying 'Coooo coo' in an ironic voice.

Pan-egyric

I left work early on Friday and decided that rather than sitting down and watching the snooker all afternoon, I would seize the day and head into town. There were two things I needed to do. One was get my spring haircut. This went surprisingly well and left me strutting on my way to the second task: buy a book.
The book I was after was The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan. The first time I'd seen this story was as a manuscript in my then job as intern at an Edinburgh publishers.Of all the trash I read from their slush pile, this was the one that had shone. It was the most exciting and original thing I read the entire time I was there. Since leaving that job I've left unsolicited manuscripts behind and have been back to consuming the established classics. Yet The Panopticon still sticks out in my mind as one of the most interesting things I've read these past few years.
Strutting then, as I say, into Waterstone's I headed up the stairs to the fiction section and smiled like a lunatic to find that The Panopticon was standing bold as bold can be on a display at the top of the stairs showing the hot books of the year. I spent a good deal of time grinning at it before buying a copy and heading home.
In honour of Jenni's book then, I'm making today's post a panegyric to the Panopticon. Like all the best medieval poets, I think the best way to praise something is to really shower its very name in accolades. So let's have a look at a panoply of interesting words starting with the suffix pan- meaning all or every.

Panopticon was a word coined by ninteeth century Brit Jeremy Bentham to describe a wonderful new prison design he'd devised. -opticon comes from the Greek OPTIC meaning visible. The central idea of the prison Jeremy dreamt up was that a warden would be able to see all the inmates at once without them being able to see him. The cells would be arranged in a circle and face into the centre. Here the wardens would be stationed, but in a room with some sort of cunning window that made it impossible for the prisoners to know when the wardens were looking out at them from it. The wardens could therefore observe all the prisoners at once but would not actually have to be there all the time since the prisoners would have no idea if they were in or not. It would, Jeremy argued, save a lot on money.

In the twentieth century a Frenchman, Michel Foucault, came along and turned honest Jeremy's money saving scheme into a Pandora's box (literally meaning 'all-gifted') of social darkness. He went on and on in a pandect (treatise covering all aspects of a subject) on the Panopticon about how the prisoners became each other's jailors or something like that. Typical French pessimissm.

Poor old Jeremy was not a monstrous mind. He was guilty only of perhaps of being a touch panglossic (unfounded optimism, named after a character from Voltaire's Candide). Jeremy also did not name his prison idea very well if he wanted it to be seen in a positive light. John Milton had already used to pan- suffix in naming another imaginary structure, Pandemonium the capital of hell in Paradise Lost.

If Foucault is right and the panopticon is a model of modern society, then he himself could be one of its panjandrum's (over bearing, pompous officials). At least for the intelligensia who hang on his every word. For me, he usually brings about a prolonged bout of pandiculation (yawning). Yes, he might be one of best thinkers of Europe in the twentieth century, but the way he is lauded by some would make you think he was the biggest thing since Pangea (an ancient supercontinent that comprised all the current continents).

Acronyms Backronyms FML

Today was polling day for the council elections here in sunny Glasgow. Sadly, I didn't get to vote even though I visited two separate polling stations (or Polling Places, as they called themselves). Seems that Glasgow doesn't know I'm here since no one had me down on their list of voters.
As I walked away, I thought about how the SNP would rue the day they missed out on adding me to their supporters. Then I got to thinking about the name SNP and why so many political parties' names are acronyms: SNP, SSP, SWP. I supposed that this was all thanks to two kinds of union. Firstly the British workers unions of the twentieth century. These bodies outdid each other to see who could have the longest name (as in the banner above) and spaned thousands of acronyms. Secondly the Soviet Union. The reds loved nothing more than to wake up in the morning and think of a new government body they could endow with an incredibly long name. My guess was that when the British political left was establishing today's SNP or SSP  it was infatuated with both these unions and decided that it too was going to replace words with strings of capitalised letters.
'Bah, fuck the chattering borgeouis classes and their cushy words. We'll stare reality in the face without any of the comfort of surface meaning to hide behind. Long bunches of consonants it is lads!' they would cry.
Granted, the Scottish Nationalists are an older party than Labour (and for all I know the Conservatives too) but I stand by my point. One thing backing up this baseless belief is the fact that the word acronym was only coined in the twentieth century (acro- meaning first + -onym) and so the drive to capitalise seems to spring from somewhere in that century.
I don't have anything against political parties whose names are acronyms. Quite the opposite. But I did decide that since they were such prominent examples of acronym users they should shoulder some of the blame for the hell of the modern business environment.
At work today I was told we were going to be having a new GPS and that this would affect my job significantly. I'll take your word for it, I thought, since I've got no idea what that means. I also have little idea what my PMS is, or what the CEF ranking system we use signifies, the ITSOS compliance sheet is a mystery, I don't know what a BACS payment is, or even exactly what they conference I went to last week was about. I knew it was an IATEFL conference, I just never got to the bottom of what that means.
Then of course there's LOL, FML and co. But they're o.k. as at least people don't shout them at me at work and expect me to do something about it.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I do not believe that we will end up in a meaningless world of letters that stand for words people have long ago forgotten. The backronym will save us from this. The backronym is a stupendously silly phenomenon where someone knows what they want their acronym to spell out and works their way backwards from there to deciding the words that will be used. There was an example of something that was almost a backronym in the papers today: JUICE. It is the name of the new EU space exploration program to Jupiter and stands for JUpiter ICy Moon Explorer. Of course, it should really be called JIME, but JUICE is clearly better so they went for that.

I believe the future lies that way. These scientists' craving for JUICE rather than the meaningless JIME is symptomatic of the drive that will bring us back from the brink. People will respond to their inate need for meaning by trying harder and harder to think of acronyms that spell out a meaningful word. The results may be ridiculous in the short term and we will no doubt end up asking for a bag of Carbohydrate Heated In Pig Starch (chips). Eventually though we will be able to forget what the letters stand for and just return to the good old words they spell.

Anorak Britain

Today I was looking at slang and ended up getting sidetracked by the word 'anorak'. In Britain, an anorak can mean someone who is obsessed by a subject, usually something that is considered very dull. This is probably because many of these very dull hobbies are carried out by men who wear anoraks. Trainspotting is the prime example.
What struck me was that this is a piece of slang which could only have come from Britain. The anorak means something here. Actually, I think it means a lot of things. It means you are a boring person, because boring people wear them. Hence the slang usage. In Glasgow (my hometown) wearing one on a hot day, tied round your waste with a bottle of Buckfast in the pocket, shows that you are a chav. Particularly if it is a Berghaus anorak. Odd but true. Only in Glasgow would anorak's be gangster. On a larger level, the anorak is a symbol of Britain because it is so uniquely British (or so we think). It is the perfect coat for our changeable weather and it has none of the suspicious 'fashionableness' that hangs over some of the things they wear abroad. So when we call someone an anorak, we are at once insulting them personally and admitting that our whole culture is a little bit sad. It's as if we're resigned to the fact that men who spend their weekends in the rain watching trains arriving are an inevitable bi-product of the British identity. I own an anorak and really like it. It's just so practical. There's plenty of room for a big book of trains to fit in one pocket and a flask of coffee in the other.
As a footnote, the word anorak comes from the Inuktitut ánorâq. So there you go. What started out as an intrepid use of sealskin to fend off icy blasts has become a layer of plastic fibres used to fight off drizzle. Another way in which the anorak personifies Britain's ability to suck the romance out of life.

Ambitions

I am a lad from Scotland, U.K. Everyday, in one way or another, I spend time thinking about the English language, trying to understand it, to hide how little I know about it, or feeling sick of it. So I thought I'd start a blog to keep track of the words that have been causing me the most trouble each day. Hopefully, someone out there will like it and write something back to me.