Are you a wizard with words?
Countdown veteran GYLES BRANDRETH loves the English language — and in this effervescent and gloriously funny series, he celebrates its magnificent quirks and curiosities
WHAT’S the word you most like the sound of? The word that brings instant happiness? For Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith — creator of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency — it’s ‘fantoosh’, an expression used exclusively North of the Border.
The late Spike Milligan favoured the simple ‘fish’ while for former MP Ann Widdecombe there’s delight to be found in ‘rodomontade’, (meaning boastful behaviour).
It’s the sound that helps make these words so endearing, but people’s favourites can also be influenced by meaning. When Cambridge Dictionaries conducted a survey to find the nation’s Top Twenty words, both Mum and weekend featured high in the list which ran, in descending order of popularity, as follows:
Nincompoop, Love, Mum, Discombobulated, Excellent, Happy, Squishy, Fabulous, Cool, Onomatopoeia, Weekend, Incandescent, Wicked, Lovely, Lush, Peace, Cosy, Bed, Freedom — and finally, at number 20, Kiss.
A list of our least-favourite words threw up many with distinctly unpleasant connotations: Moist, Phlegm, Smear, Pustule, Panties, Croak, Mucus, Congeal, Dangle, Chunk.
Whatever our reasons for loving, or hating, certain words, there is no disputing the power of language in our lives. With just one word — Abracadabra — you can conjure up a whole world of magic. With three words — I love you — you can change your life. Or, with half a dozen, ruin someone else’s: I don’t love you after all. Of course, expressing such sentiments can take more words or less, depending on which language you are speaking. And we are fortunate that English is the parent tongue of 400 million people across the planet and the richest of the world’s 2,000 and more languages.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists some 500,000 English words and there are at least half-a-million English-language technical terms you can add on top of that.
Mandarin Chinese may have a vocabulary to rival that of English, but no other language comes near it. The Germans have a vocabulary of 185,000 words. The French have fewer than 100,000 — and that’s including le weekend, le snacque-barre and le feel-good. Growing up with this rich linguistic heritage, it’s no wonder I’ve been into words all my life — so much so that I have been on TV’s Countdown more than anyone else — and over the next few days I hope you’ll be informed, stimulated and, above all, entertained by my A - Z of word play, a cornucopia of the contortions and curiosities of the English language.
Along the way there are various puzzles which you might like to try. Playing with words will increase your vocabulary, willy-nilly. And it will help you live longer by keeping your wits about you.
Willy-nilly, by the way, comes from the Old English phrase Will ye or will ye not? Did you know that? You didn’t? Well, there you go. I’ve saved you looking it up.
AIS FOR ALPHABET SOUP You might be surprised to learn that Alphabet Soup — that childhood favourite featuring different letters shaped in pasta — dates as far back as 1867, just after the American Civil War. It was then that a newspaper in Raleigh, North Carol i na, first r eported on t hi s ‘culinary novelty’.
I’m amazed it took anyone that long to realise that words are good enough to eat. I love words, which is why I collect them. And, for starters, let me offer you a tasty selection with extraordinary and curious qualities.
MOST USED WORDS: In written English the ten words most used are: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, is, I, it. SHORTEST WORD CONTAINING ALL THE VOWELS: Eunoia, meaning ‘beautiful thinking’, and I think it is a rather beautiful word.
LONGEST WORD: With 29 letters, floccinaucinihilipilification is the longest non-technical word in The Oxford English Dictionary. It means ‘the act of estimating as worthless’ and dates from 1741. LONGEST WORD WITH
DIFFERENT LETTERS: At 15 letters each, uncopyrightable and dermatoglyphics (patterns of lines on the skin, such as fingerprints) are the two longest words with letters that are not repeated. MOST USEFUL WORDS IF YOUR SCRABBLE RACK HAS NO VOWELS: Twyndyllyngs (an old word for twins), at 12 letters long, is the longest word in English without any of the five main vowels. An eight-letter word with this property is symphysy. It means the fusion of two bodies — or two parts of the body. And symphysy leads us nicely to two seven-letter words that don’t feature any of the f i ve main vowels: nymphly and rhythms.
ABC and XYZ: Crabcake and drabcloth are among the few everyday English words that contain the letters abc in order. Hydroxyzine, a form of antihistamine, is the only word in English that contains xyz.
SEEING DOUBLE: Subbookkeeper is the only English word with four pairs of double letters in a row. Assessee and keelless are the shortest words with three pairs of double letters, and cooee the shortest with two double letters. When t he pl a y wri g ht Noel Coward was introduced to one of these remarkable word wonders, he murmured appreciatively: ‘You live and learn.’ After a moment’s thought, he added: ‘ Then, of course, you die and forget it all.’
BIS FOR BOOSTING (OR BOLSTERING OR BUILDING) YOUR VOCABULARY The maxilla is a part of the body but is i t your el bow, your jawbone, an eyelash or part of the brain? You’re quite right. It’s your jawbone.
Your vocabulary i s obviously impressive — but just how good is it? The test that follows — devised by educationalists and philologists then developed and refined over a period of years — will tell you accurately the size of your vocabulary.
Count the number of words you recognise and understand in the list below. Every single word you know counts for 600 words in your overall general vocabulary so if you get 30 right, your vocabulary i s about 30 x 600 words = 18,000 words.
HOW DID YOU DO?
LEVEL 1: 0–6,000 WORDS. Most who score from 0 to 10 out of 55 are children aged six to nine. Hopefully, you’ll have scored higher than that. LEVEL 2: 6,600–12,000 WORDS. A score of 11 to 20 out of 55 is usually attained at age 10 or soon after. Those who reach it at age 10 are likely to score 40 or more out of 55 as adults. About 25 per cent of adults have vocabularies no larger than 12,000 words. LEVEL 3: 12,600–18,000 WORDS. Among adults, scores between 21 and 30 out of 55 are the most common range. In the range 12,000– 15,000 are most of the adults who left school as soon as the law would let them; and they haven’t read much since.
In the range 15,000–18,000 are adults who may have left early, but continued with some reading or are in jobs involving language skills. An 18-year-old intending to pursue further education should have reached the top of this range. LEVEL 4: 18,600–24,000 WORDS. Adults with little or no higher education may get 31 to 40 out of 55 if they have maintained a keen interest in what is going on in the world, plus a wide range of reading. Most graduates are in this range, and so are the members of most professions. This is where you will find me, so you are in good company. LEVEL 5: 24,600–30,000 WORDS. Those in this range (41 to 50 out of 55) are well educated and do a lot of reading. They are in the top echelons of their professions or heading in that direction. LEVEL 6: 30,600–33,000 WORDS. At this level, the tests become more an intellectual game than a significant scientific measurement and the few who fall into this category (51 to 55 out of 55) do not necessarily achieve more in their professions than those at Level 5.
If there are words in the test that you did not know before, consult a
dictionary. Most people’s vocabularies grow through adulthood at the rate of about a word a day until they hit their 40s.
Using tests like this means you can continue to know more and more even as bits of you start drooping and dropping off. That’s the joy of word play. C IS FOR CLEVER OLD CHAUCER The English language is rich because it’s a mongrel tongue. It has taken almost 2,000 years to evolve and many peoples, f rom the Celts and the Jutes to the Welsh and Hawaiians have made some contribution.
So have some of my favourite authors. Did you know the original Nerd was a character in Dr Seuss’s 1950 children’s book, If I Ran The Zoo? Or that the poet, daffodil f ancier and hil l walker William Wordsworth coined the word pedestrians?
The Oxford English Dictionary credits Geoffrey Chaucer with the first known use of more English words than any other writer: 2,012 to be precise. And his genius i s that so many of his words from the 14th century still count for something. Twitter, the onomatopoeic word for birdsong, which has become the byword for modern communication, was one of his. So too were womanhood, sperm, dung-cart and dismember.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) comes second in terms of the sheer volume of words he is credited with originating: 1,700 of them.
Here are some of the words first found in Shakespeare: addiction (Henry V), assassination (Macbeth), advertising (Measure For Measure), courtship and madcap (Love’s Labour’s Lost), luggage (Henry IV, Part I), hobnob and zany ( Twelfth Night), grovel (Henry VI, Part 2), marketable and puking (As You Like It).
Yes, before Hamlet, ours was a l anguage without excitement. Incredible, isn’t it?
Surprising too, to discover that the phrase ‘ What the dickens!’ has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.
‘Dickens’ was once a euphemism for the devil and the expression is first found in print in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives Of Windsor: ‘I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.’
Happily, Charles Dickens (1812– 70) has managed to make his way i nto the dictionary with 258 new words and phrases including doormat, the creeps (as in ‘ give someone the creeps’) and — my favourite — butterfingers.
Moving on from Dickens, I also like chortle — a combination of chuckle and snort conjured up for Lewis Carroll’s second book about the adventures of Alice. Other memorable li t e r ary
contributions to the English language include:
BLURB: Invented in 1907 by American humorist Gelett Burgess to promote his book, Are You A Bromide? The back cover featured a photograph of a ‘ Miss Belinda Blurb’ extolling the merits of the book. The book itself has long been forgotten, but the blurb is still with us.
FEMINIST: Actually a man-made word, coined in 1873 by Alexandre Dumas (son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count Of Monte Cristo) in his play La Femme De Claude.
TWEEN: Could J.R.R. Tolkien ever have envisaged a creature as remarkable as Canadian singersongwriter Justin Bieber, who is regularly described as a tween idol? Probably not but Tolkien invented the word ‘tween’ in The Fellowship Of The Ring, describing one as a hobbit in ‘the irresponsible twenties between childhood and coming of age at thirty-three’.
YAHOO: The word ‘yahoo’ has its origins i n Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 allegorical adventure in which the Yahoos are a race of dangerously brutish human-like creatures. Within a few years of its publication, the term ‘yahoo’ had been adopted into English to describe a loutish, violent or unsophisticated person. Now i t’s an i nternet search engine. Enough said. D IS FOR DIDDYBUMS The actor John Gielgud attrib - uted his longevity to his passion for crosswords and when he died in 2000, aged 96, it was with a completed puzzle at his bedside. ‘Completing the crossword is the only exercise I take,’ he used to say. ‘I smoke non-stop and solving the crossword clears the fumes.’
Once, on a film set, another actor looked over his shoulder when the great man had just completed his puzzle. ‘Sir John, ten across? What on earth is DIDDYBUMS?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Gielgud airily, ‘ but it does fit frightfully well.’ E IS FOR ECONOMY OF SPEECH Some years ago, I wrote what I thought was the shortest poem on record. It was in memory of Spot, our family goldfish, who, unfortunately, was eaten by Oscar, one of our cats.
It went like this: O Wet Pet!
The verse was featured on Roger McGough’s Poetry Please programme on Radio Four and I was very proud of my achievement until I discovered that mine wasn’t the shortest poem on record at all.
That distinction goes to a work by the American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel (1902–78). In his poem One Question, he managed
to encapsulate in just four letters theth essence of mankind’s quest for self-understanding:se I W Why?
AsA for brevity in everyday speech, Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), 30th President of the United States, wasw particularly noted for his taciturnity.ta Once, at a dinner at theth White House, an attractive youngyo lady turned to him and said, ‘Mr‘M President, I’ve got a bet that I can get at least three words out of you tonight.’
Coolidge l ooked at her and smiled. ‘You lose.’
F IS FOR FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD When i t comes to eating and drinking, all too often we’re gobbling and sluicing without knowing t o whom we are indebted.
KIT KAT: The Kit Kat, the world’s best- selling chocolate biscuit (I have been to the factory in York where they produce a billion of them each year), is named after the Kit Kat Club, a late 17thcentury political and l i terary association, which met in a London pie shop owned by pastry chef Christopher Catling. The club took its name from an abbreviated version of Catling’s names.
LUSH: Slang for a drunkard, the origins of the word are to be found i n an 18th- century London drinking club called the City of Lushington. Some say that it was named after Dr Thomas Lushington, a chaplain famously fond of a tipple.
MARMALADE: The preserve was originally made from quinces rather than oranges and one story has it that when Mary, Queen of Scots, was poorly all she could stomach was this quince preserve, earning it the nickname Marie Malade, sick Mary.
MARZIPAN: Traditionally, it is eaten on St Mark’s Day, April 25. It comes from the Latin marci panis, meaning Mark’s bread.
PAVLOVA: This tasty confection of meringue, fruit and cream was invented by a New Zealand chef to celebrate an Antipodean tour by the world-famous Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) during the 1920s.
PEACH MELBA: Another dessert, a delicious mixture of peaches, ice cream and raspberry sauce, this was created by the famous chef Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846– 1935) to honour soprano Dame Nellie Melba’s performance in Wagner’s Lohengrin at Covent Garden in 1892.
I ncidentally, Dame Nellie’s name has its own story. Nellie Melba (1861–1931) was born Helen Mitchell and chose her stage name as a tribute to her place of birth, Melbourne.