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'.