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.