Evolving English

It's moments like this one needs a Tardis. Keen to see Evolving English: One Language Many Voices at the British Library - an exhibition that traces the social, cultural and historical influences on the English language in an interactive, hands-on, 21st century-cool kind of way. 
So if one happened to be in London right now, one could pop along and check out 'the roots of Old English, slang dictionaries, medieval manuscripts, ads and newspapers from around the world, everyday texts and dialect sound recordings' from all over the place.
It also has an audience-participation section where people can record themselves reading the kid's book Mr Tickle - the text of which apparently evokes a wide range of sounds present in the English language - the idea being that as people participate the exhibition experts compile a living 'voice map' of where we English speakers of the world are today and what we sound like. Go on, record your voice here.
This one, however, happens to be in Sydney right now. So instead I got my word-geek fix at the Gleebooks summer sale. Picked up a copy of Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler and it's bursting with stuff-one-needs-to-know.
Stuff that makes perfect sense in this Y, Z, Whatever Gen world we live in, where kids write essays on iPhones using animated emoticons, words of one syllable or less, no vowels. And some of them have never in their life felt the dewiness of grey finger-printy digits smudging the tablecloth after an hour with a real, hard copy, freshly minted newspaper. 
Stuff like this, from the cluey old Greek dude Horace - who may or may not have realised the weight of his words way back in 70BC - when he wrote: 
'Many words that have fallen will be reborn, and many that are now in honour will fall, if usage wills it, for that holds the judgement, the law, and the standard of speaking.'
I, for one, believe a Renaissance is due for the word 'behoove'. It would behoove us all to remember our words and use them wisely so that our language may flourish.
Which words do you think deserve a newfound appreciation?

11.1.11

In acknowledgement of today's palindromic date - 11/1/11 - I give you a palindromic poem. Listen all the way to the end to see how the poem reverses on itself and ends where it began. Super clever!

Woo-hoo...it's Saturday!

I love Saturdays. Especially the fireworks. 
Those in the know say that Saturday was named in the second century for the planet Saturn - dies Saturni - which controlled the first hour of that day according to the Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens. 
In Scandinavian countries Saturday is called lördag, lørdag, or laurdag, meaning 'bath day', derived from the Viking tradition of bathing on Saturday.
Meanwhile, across the seas and in the southern hemisphere on Saturdays the Maoris were doing their washing. They call it rahoroi or haterai, named for the day they washed their whites for church on Sunday.
If you give birth today, the folk rhyme Monday's Child prophesies that your baby will grow to 'work hard for a living'. 
And if you happen to read a good book today, your world will be richer for it. Have a great day.

Not tonight Josephine

Flipping through a copy of Nigel Cawthorne's Sex Lives of the Great Dictators over the weekend, I came across a creepy piece of Napoleonic trivia... 
It's widely known that Napoleon Bonaparte was rumoured to have an astonishingly small appendage. Some say it was just a vicious story invented by the British, but no matter how sizeable - or not - it was in his heyday, 160 years after he died on St Helena it wasn't looking too good. Apparently Napoleon's penis was sliced off his corpse by the Abbot Vignali, preserved in a bottle, stored along with a small collection of his personal (material, not physical) belongings and served up for auction through Christie's in 1969. 
No, I didn't believe it either, but a little internet research says it is indeed so. Not surprisingly, the item was passed in and is last thought to have been seen in the hands of a leading New York urologist.
Google 'Napoleon's penis auction' and you'll find stories in which the specimen is variously described as resembling a 'shrivelled eel', a 'small dried-up object' and a 'tiny seahorse'. 
Gross huh? But it was worth a few minutes' investigation just to find this headline:
Napoleon's Boner-part.
Ding ding. I wish I'd said that.

Five meet the 21st century

Once a treasure always a treasure… even if means changing the lingo. They've done it to the Ancients - Homer, Socrates, Ovid - and the Classics - Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton - too many to mention, so that we modern plebs can access, appreciate and perpetuate the creative greats. Now they're giving the marvellous Enid Blyton a turn.

The Guardian reports that, approaching 70 years since they were written, publishers have ‘updated’ Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series because they feared her 1940s vernacular was putting off 21^st century kids.

Commenting on Hodder’s decision to release ten updated versions of Blyton’s Famous Five novels, journalist Alison Flood bade “farewell’ to “awful swotters,” “dirty tinkers” and “jolly japes,” explaining:

“Hodder is ‘sensitively and carefully’ revising Blyton’s text after research with children and parents showed that the author’s old-fashioned language and dated expressions were preventing young readers from enjoying the stories. The narrative of the novels will remain the same, but expressions such as ‘mercy me!’ have been changed to ‘oh no!,’ ‘fellow’ to ‘old man’ and ‘it’s all very peculiar’ to ‘it’s all very strange.’ …

“Other changes include ‘housemistress’ becoming ‘teacher,’ ‘awful swotter’ becoming ‘bookworm,’ ‘mother and father’ becoming ‘mum and dad,’ ‘school tunic’ becoming ‘uniform’ and Dick’s comment that ‘she must be jolly lonely all by herself’ being changed to ‘she must get lonely all by herself.’”

Mercy me! The old lady might be rolling in her grave, but hopefully happily, as it signifies her perpetuity.

A little alliteration...

Ever wake up in the morning with a song in your head? This morning I woke up with a poem in my head. A verse spinning around sing-song inside my mind. Specifically, a verse from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
And as a song stuck in your head is passed from one to another by singing a few simple bars, let me pass on to you this verse, because I love a little alliteration in the morning...
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea...
I'm also reminded of a few lines from another favourite, totally different poet, Banjo Paterson. From The Wind's Message:
Oh! rocky range and rugged spur and river running free
That swings around the sudden bends in swirls of snow white foam...
Ah beauty... Happy Friday.

The Word Cup of Football

My sole interest in the 2010 FIFA World Cup lies in checking out the space-age stadiums and trying to spot my Japie mates in the crowd. Hello Thorntons hello Spencers hello BreadHead!
Then Doris from Sandton sent me this enchanting fan photo from the Boston Globe, which was crying out to be shared, so I got to thinking about the World Cup and literature (which incidentally, if you make a typo when spelling as I just did, comes out as Word Cup...ha!).
Anyhow, there is a link. Ben Schott, author of Schott's Original Miscellany and subsequent volumes, writes a blog for the New York Times called Schott's Vocab, which he describes as: 'a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles - some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy...'
He's created an almanac of facts and statistics pertaining to the Soccer World Cup which kicked off in South Africa last Friday.
Soccerphiles can check out all the gory details in his Schott Op-Chart: Soccer World Cup Miscellany.
To see the complete collection of images in the Globe's brilliant World Cup photo essay, click here.

Yaka-wow!

A little story of how a simple mistake spawned a brand new word that swiftly set the globe alight.
Two journalists writing for The Times of London have told how they were interviewing the  Baroness Greenfeld - a neuroscientist no less - who was despairing at the technological habits of young people who flip relentlessly from games to Facebook to YouTube. 
In describing these brain-frying computer geeks, the journos thought the scientist said 'yaka-wow'.
Within 24 hours of publication, Google had amassed 75,000 results for yaka-wow. There was a Facebook page, a Twitter stream, and some nut had established online the 'First Church of the Yaka-Wow'. 
'Is it phonetic for Eyjafjallajokull?' someone asked.
Another dubbed it 'Kumbaya for the 21st century. A world of people saying ‘yaka-wow’ is better than a world of people shooting each other and smoking.'
You can now purchase your 'Yuka-wow not war' T-shirt in a range of 10 colours.
The word is, in fact, a transcription error of the humble 'yuck' and 'wow'. The scientist's comment misheard by the writers to be:
'Is it going to be a planet worth living in if you have a load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Is that the society we want?'

So lovely days...

I remember as a kid, reading with friends a book called Fractured Fairytales, in which some joker had irreverently re-written a stack of classic bedtime stories. The words cheeky and bawdy spring to mind. We laughed ourselves silly.

That dusty old memory popped into my head when my mate Spearmint Leaf and I snapped these fractured phrases in Japan. We laughed ourselves silly.

Hungry? Fancy a long leek?

Perhaps some tasteful living with your beer?

Nihon bathrooms dispense soap as well as wisdom.

A broken toilet? Or an epitaph for the legless antipodeans stumbling out of sake bars on your average Niseko night.

Brobdingnagian lexemes*

There I was, getting happily reacquainted with the frantic and furious Yossarian in Catch 22, when Joseph Heller went and tripped me over a huge big word.
"Infundibuliform". It sat there, fat and smug on the page, taking up half a line with erudite verbosity. Even in context I still couldn't put my finger on exactly what it meant.
"...had it not been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy, rumpleheaded, indestructible smile..."
Ardent readers will nod their heads in quiet understanding when I tell you that I have a system for dealing with random injections of sesquipedalian loquaciousness. If a dictionary is not at hand, I fold over the bottom corner of the page so I can look up said word later.
(By the way it means funnel-shaped. Why didn't he just say so?)
There's a time and a place for big words, but I try to use smart words - that is, words that will ensure your reader knows what you're on about. Doesn't matter if it's plain language, it's whatever's appropriate to move your story forward and take your readers with you.

If you're writing for an audience of intelligentsia whose preference is to engage in the manifestation of prolix exposition, splendid! Use big words.

If you're writing a novel for people who enjoy a great story, use smart words.

I'm pretty sure if my mate Bob the Builder was reading this, he'd have zoned out by the third syllable of the infundi-word. He reckons I'm guilty of magniloquence here in my blog. But I have a word for you Mister: 
"Sesquipedalophobia" - the fear of long words. In more severe cases known as "Hippomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" ;)


* 'big words'

Did you know "Santa" in Arabic means wart?

I find inspiration for writing in mining my treasure trove of newspaper clippings, random quotes scribbled on scraps, articles torn from magazines and other literary flotsam and jetsam I've tucked away over the years, thinking it might come in handy one day.
Tonight, while delving into some long-untouched boxes, I came across an article from the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine dated November 5, 2005.
I read somewhere recently, and I can't think where, but someone supposedly qualified in such matters said English has the most depth and versatility of any modern language. The implication being that the writer who writes in the English language has the most advantageous start.
I'm not sure about that.
In his Good Weekend article, Adam Jacot de Boinod, author of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words From Around the World, introduces turns of phrase in languages that make English look stolid.
There's a writing exercise right here in some of these gems. Let's see - can you craft a credible storyline using any of these words?:
nakhur (Persian) - meaning "a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils have been tickled"
areodjarekput (Inuit) - "to exchange wives for a few days only"
marilopates (Ancient Greek) - "a gulper of coal dust"
tsjuri-giri (Japanese) - "to try out a new sword on a passer-by"
zechpreller (German) - "someone who leaves without paying the bill"
neko-neko (Indonesian) - "one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse"
serein (French) - "the rain that falls from a cloudless sky"
pu'ukaula (Hawaiian) - "to set up one's wife as a stake in gambling"
scheissbedauern (German) - "the disappointment one feels when things don't turn out nearly as badly as one had hoped" (...bizarre!)
And from the "I can't believe someone made up a word for that" files...how's this one?!:
bakku-shan (Japanese) "a woman who seems pretty when seen from behind but not from the front"
Some country, somewhere, has got to have a male equivalent. Anyone??

Oh pun intended...!

I love a good pun. Especially when the recipient gets it first time around... for some reason they never seem quite as laugh-out-loud funny when you have to explain them. 
Anyhow, I found this list of Top 10 Puns on kid lit blog Alien Onion, and I especially like the bit where they say: "The ability to make and understand puns is considered to be the highest level of language development."
Check it out. Number 9 is pure gold. Haha! I defy you not to laugh out loud. 
Can you beat it?

If we could talk to the animals...

Elephants can do maths*. They grieve as humans do when a member of their family dies. They can identify individual elephants far away by the sound of their call (hey bloooooke, it's me Fred. Wassup.).
Pretty cool.
But even more impressive, researchers suspect they can differentiate between human languages. These magnificent creatures don't have the best eye sight in the world, but their hearing is excellent.
Elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park commonly come across three different different human tongues as they traverse the park's reaches and it seems they're pretty cluey about their homosapien neighbours.
There are the Masaai, a semi-nomadic people who speak Maa. The Kamba people, who have their own language. And there are your cut-and-paste English speaking tourists who have morphed their way into the African landscape.
According to scientiest Graeme Shannon, "detecting whether they can tell languages apart depends on whether the elephants exhibit defensive or perhaps aggressive behaviour."
"Amboseli's elephants and Maasai community are wary of each other. Sometimes elephants will kill Maasai cattle and, very occasionally, people. When this happens, young Maasai warriors will go out and spear an elephant to death in retaliation.
"Least threatening to the animals are the English-speaking tourists who just want to watch and take photos."
Why am I writing about this?
Because I'm thinking about my characters and the way they communicate using senses other than oral.
Sometimes I think linguistics serves to complicate the way we communicate rather than elicit understanding. Sometimes the more we talk to each other the more confused we get. And don't even bring sms and email into the equation.
I'm a firm believer in the old adage that actions speak louder than words.
Sometimes too you just need to go back to basics. I'd go so far as to say that even in 2010, there's a time and place for the grunt and call of the caveman...

*Africa Geographic says a Japanese study provides evidence that elephants have considerable numerical skills. They've proven adept at recognising the difference between two quantities of objects as they were placed into buckets. In these tests, elephants outperformed a range of primates, including human children.

Expressing yourself

Life is bizarre and full of surprises. Someone asked me the other day: "Think back to when you were a kid. What did you want to do as a grown up?"
Of all the regular stuff - fireman, teacher, doctor, race car driver, big business banker - I bet none of us kids ever replied: "I'd like to do something so resoundingly fabulous, or stupid, that my name becomes a part of the Aussie vernacular."
But it happened to Stephen Bradbury and sitting here watching the 2010 Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremony I'm wondering, who could it be next?
Google "doing a Bradbury" and you'll find pages of examples of how his famous gold medal victory (by being the slowest skater on field and simply navigating his way through an array of carcasses splayed helplessly before him) has become slang for "winning something almost in spite of yourself". Even Bill Clinton uses it.
Two other infamous Australians spawned the phrase "having a Barry". There's some argument over whether it should be attributed to Barry Crocker (responsible for writing that God-awful Neighbours jingle) or Barry Unsworth, (Labor politician and NSW Premier in the 1980s. Enough said.) Either or, both are perfect namesakes for a phrase that means "having a shocker".
It's kinda fun to think about how to etch your name into infamy...perhaps it will happen to one of my characters? The possibilities boggle the mind. 
I want to know - what could you do to ensure your name was writ eternal into our lingo?

On rivers #3... the Banjo

Alliteration! How to evoke an image (taste, smell, time, touch, sensation!) in two perfect lines....poetry in motion. 
Look at the picture, read the words. Enough said.

"Oh! rocky range and rugged spur and river running clear,

That swings around the sudden bends with swirl of snow-white foam"

       - from The Wind's Message by Banjo Paterson

Photo by Julie Magers Soulen Photography

Somewhere on the Australian east coast...

Today's musical inspiration comes with pictures not sound - imagine waking here at daybreak to a thousand-strong cicada orchestra. Magical! Ear-splitting.

Avoiding adjective overload in my writing has become a focus. Mark Twain's advice is: "As to the Adjective; when in doubt, strike it out... They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart."

See below, sans adjectives, snaps from a writing spot somewhere on the Australian east coast... 

Life in Spoonerville...

I'm not a pheasant plucker;

I'm a pheasant plucker's son.

Nonetheless, I pluck pheasants all day

Until the pheasant plucking's done.

From David Astle's column on Spoonerisms in the SMH yesterday which made me laugh. 

Crooks with a crock or crusaders with a cause?

The media buzz about climate change and the Copenhagen conference evaporating into thin air got me thinking about this term that's bandied about so relentlessly and has wangled its way into our vernacular. 

'Climate change' - What does it mean? 

Depends how you look at it really.

If you flip the letters around a little you get:

'Chemical Agent' (conspiracy theorists will be delighted)

or

'Technical Game' (...possibly)

and

'Chalice Magnet' (driving everyone to drink?)

As well as my two favourites: 

'Cheating Camel' and 'A Camel Etching' 

(both of which, it appears, would be as useful as said conference).

With so much conjecture about what on earth climate change is or means, none of these options could be dismissed as ridiculous.

PS. I'm not that clever. Impress your friends.

How not to bet on the horses...

I’m back. The internal thermostat has at last righted itself and I lost again on the Melbourne Cup. Life has clearly returned to normal. And not without a lesson learned:

When making your once annual flutter on the GGs, find a friend who has a clue and take your tips from them. 

Good advice. Thanks. I’ll do that next time.

I picked my winner because I liked his story. So while my brain shifts back into writing gear, I’d like to share it with you.

Exactly this time last year I was talking to the man who bred 2008 Melbourne Cup winner, Viewed, and asked him how he came up with the future champion’s name.

While your average punter may not question it, a significant amount of cryptic consideration went into its choosing.

The story goes that Viewed was sired by Scenic out of Lovers Knot.

The first three letters of the word Viewed spell the French word for ‘life’ and the second three spell ‘wed’.

Wed for life – Lovers Knot. Scenic. Viewed.

Aah, love a good play on words. Pity he only ran seventh this year.

The people of Africa believe that a name is not simply a random sound applied to a person, animal or thing. To indigenous Africans your name is your soul. Your symbol. And it possesses magical qualities that are bestowed upon you the moment you are named.

Hmmm… anyone got the inside tip on how this year’s winner got his name? 

A word chiefly used for the weather...

Last night my friend Sam asked me to blog about the rain. 
Given the darkening thundery sky and violent flurries of stinging raindrops marching like frenzied tin soldiers out of kilter across the roof, she may have imagined poetry.

But it made me think about weather reports. And more specifically the question: Do you ever hear the word ‘chiefly’ used anywhere except in weather reports?

“A trough sweeping across the east is generating areas of rain and storms over NSW and southern QLD. A high is pushing cool southerlies and a few showers into the southeast, chiefly along the coast. A trough over the west is generating rain patches and a few storms.” News.com.au

That happy gas bloke who reads the weather on Channel 10 often says it too.

“It’s gonna be drips and drops across rooftops chiefly up and down the beaches tonight folks, so if you’re heading out on the town to flick a hoof don’t forget your brolly!”

The Bureau of Meteorology website has a page called Weather Words where it carefully and specifically outlines conditions that require particular word usage.

For example: ‘Drizzle: Fairly uniform precipitation composed exclusively of very small water droplets (less than 0.5 mm in diameter) very close to one another.’

In the absence of direction on when to use the term ‘chiefly’, I’ve concluded that this word is a throwback from the days when the Queen’s English was the common vernacular in the Commonwealth. Before newsreaders started joking about what they had for breakfast on the 6am national broadcast and kids created an entire new electronic language where digits and consonants jockey for position and vowels have been excluded all together.

I quite like it. ‘Chiefly’. It has a ring of authority and confidence despite, or perhaps in spite of, the BOM’s inability to predict the weather with regular accuracy.

Conviction is key when imparting important information. Whether the weather is written or spoken it’s all, chiefly, in the delivery.