Once, in an infant school, I came across a most inventive little speller who had written ‘EGOG’ at the top of the page.
‘What does this say?’ I enquired (or should that be ‘inquired’, or can it be both?)
‘Can’t you read?’ she asked.
‘I can,’ I replied, ‘but I am not sure about this word.’
She sighed. ‘’Edgehog,’ I was told.
G B Shaw famously demonstrated the wild phonetic inconsistency of English by pointing out that if English spelling were phonetically consistent, then the spelling of ‘fish’ might be ‘ghoti’: ‘gh’ as in ‘laugh’, ‘o’ as in ‘women’ and ‘ti’ as in ‘station’.
English is a rich and poetic language but is more complex, irregular and eccentric than most other written languages and is arguably the most difficult European language to read and write. This is what makes it so fascinating.
Now, I guess you are wondering which thirty tricky and troublesome words make up my ‘little test’. Well, here they are. You might like to try them out on family and friends, but be warned – the exercise is likely to cause some argument, so have a dictionary handy.
Asinine, liquefy, purify, rarefy, pavilion, vermilion, moccasin, inoculate, impresario, resuscitate, supersede, rococo, mayonnaise, cemetery, titillate, desiccate, sacrilegious, impostor, consensus, minuscule, bureaucracy, canister, predilection, tranquillity, psittacosis, harass, unforeseen, linchpin.
Changing the Canary’s Water
I once visited a convent high school. Before leaving I enquired of the headmistress, a small bright-eyed little nun, if I might wash my hands. She directed me to a room with nothing more than a row of hooks and a small washbasin in it.
I returned to her study. ‘Actually, Sister,’ I said, rather embarrassed, ‘I was wanting the toilet.’
‘Why didn’t you say you needed the lavatory, Mr Phinn?’ she said, with a wry smile. I am certain she knew what I meant in the first place but was just being mischievous.
There must be hundreds of euphemistic descriptions for the toilet: ‘the little boys’ room’, the place where one ‘spends a penny’, ‘powders one’s nose’, ‘sees a man about a dog’. It’s called the ‘convenience’, ‘comfort station’, ‘rest room’, ‘cloakroom’, ‘smallest room in the house’, ‘facility’, ‘loo’, ‘necessary’. When I was in America, I heard it frequently referred to as ‘the john’ and the ‘WC’ and once, interestingly, as ‘the honey bucket’. I am reliably informed that, when members of the royal family wish ‘to pay a visit’, they inform their hosts that they ‘wish to retire’. Mark, my editor at the Dalesman, tells me that in Spain a customary phrase is: ‘Me voy a cambiar del aqua al canario’ (‘I am going to change the canary’s water’). Perhaps the most elegant of euphemisms for visiting the lavatory is, surprisingly, a naval one. The officer would excuse himself from the table with the phrase: ‘I am going to shed a tear for Nelson.’
The most interesting euphemistic description was told to me by Nigel Rees, who devised and chairs the Radio 4 programme, Quote . . . Unquote. We were speaking at the Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch last year, and he amused the audience with the story of the rather precious woman, who, when she wished to visit the said place, would tell her companions that she was ‘going to turn the vicar’s bike around’.
I was once inspecting a primary school in Harrogate, and the formidable infant head teacher, a woman of great expertise and long experience, informed me that she had once been approached by a mother of two children in the school who was the very mistress of the euphemism. The parent in question had been in to see her, complaining that her daughter had told her there was only tracing paper in the girls’ toilets. It was, in fact, the good old-fashioned shiny IZAL paper that I remember well as a child. Her daughter, explained the mother, liked the ‘soft tissue variety’. When the girl’s small brother started in the infants, the parent had appeared again.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Smith,’ the parent said. ‘Could I have a word?’ She explained that sometimes, when her small son went ‘for a little tinkle’, he ‘got his little nipper caught in his little zipper’. The teacher arched an eyebrow. ‘So I was wondering,’ continued the parent, ‘if you could oversee his “performance”.’ The teacher explained that were she to ‘oversee’ all the children’s ‘performances’ when they went ‘for a little tinkle’, she would be there all day and suggested that the child be sent to school in trousers without a zip.
‘I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it,’ went on the parent undeterred. ‘My husband said it was a bit embarrassing to bring it up with you, but as I said to him, Mrs Smith must have had a lot of them through her hands in her time.’
Watch Your Language
I reckon I got a grade B in ‘A’ level Geography, and not the predicted grade A, because of the wretched question on cotton. Mr Taylor was adept at predicting what might come up on the papers. One topic he reckoned we should revise thoroughly was concerned with the cotton industry in the southern states of the USA. Mr Taylor looked pretty pleased when we came out of the examination room, and announced: ‘I had an idea that cotton would come up.’
‘Where?’ I asked, holding up the paper. I had searched for the question but never found it.
The examiner, rather than simply asking the candidates to discuss the reasons for the decline in the cotton industry in the southern states of the USA, phrased the question thus: ‘King Cotton is dead! Discuss.’ I was unfamiliar with this expression; the only Cotton I had heard of with the capital ‘C’ was Billy Cotton, who had a variety programme on the television. Perhaps this King Cotton, I thought, was some rich American industrialist. Anyway, I had never heard of him so opted for another question.
When examiners fail to use words and phrases which are not part of the students’ everyday language and are not likely to be encountered in a school situation – language which is complex, formal and metaphorical – problems arise. Sometimes, the wording of the question on a paper causes difficulties in a totally unexpected way, in that it comes between the examiner’s intent and the candidates’ perception of that intent: those sitting the paper think they understand what is required but they get it wrong. In the following statement: ‘Sugar is a mixed blessing’, the candidate thought ‘mixed blessing’ was a kind of dessert like Angel Delight. Another candidate tackling the question: ‘Which lochs afford deep water berthage?’ wrote: ‘The ones near the richest towns and cities.’
When candidates misunderstand the questions, there can be amusing results. Many answers of this type are published annually as ‘howlers’. You know the sort of thing:
What is a seizure?
A Roman emperor.
Under what circumstances are steroids used?
They keep carpets from slipping on the stairs.
Explain what you understand by the term ‘artificial insemination’.
It’s when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.
What is a ‘Caesarean Section’?
It’s a district of Rome.
In a democratic society how important is it, do you think, to have elections?
Because if men didn’t have them they couldn’t have sex and produce children.
What was Hitler’s secret weapon?
He used the dreaded Gaspacho.
What is a terminal illness?
It’s when you are sick at the airport.
It is important to remember that the students are usually not trying to amuse; their answers are honest attempts to make sense of the questions. Of course, sometimes the candidate deliberately tries to make the examiner smile. One boy, required to write the essay, ‘Imagine you are a new-born baby and describe your first week in the world’, wrote a side of: ‘Glug, glug, glug, glug.’ Another, asked to discuss the disastrous effects of global warming, wrote: ‘Am I bovvered?’
The guidelines for those setting GCSE papers are clear in stating that ‘the language used in question papers (both rubric and question
s) must be clear, precise and intelligible to candidates’. Perhaps someone should have a word with the examiner who set the question, ‘Trace the events leading up to the birth of Henry VIII’ and the one who informed candidates at the top of the examination paper that: ‘This option is compulsory.’
It’s the Way I Say it
I still recall with great pleasure the occasions when, as a small child, I stood with my father at the kitchen sink as we washed and dried the dishes (which we called the ‘pots’). He would launch into a funny poem or a monologue; I thought my father made them up.
The following week, after hearing a particular monologue – which I discovered later was the famous The Lion and Albert by Marriott Edgar – I was listening with the other children to Miss Wilkinson, headmistress of Broom Valley Infant School, telling us in the assembly to sit up smartly and rub the sleep out of our eyes.
‘You are a lot of sleepyheads this morning,’ she told the six-year-olds sitting cross-legged before her on the hall floor. Then she asked: ‘Does anyone know another word for “sleepy”?’ I imagine she was looking for a word like ‘tired’, but I raised my hand.
‘Yes, Gervase?’ she asked.
‘Somyoolent,’ I replied, with all the precocious confidence of an infant. This was a word used in the monologue to describe the ‘posture’ of the sleepy old lion, Wallace.
It was years later, after many recitations of the monologue, that someone pointed out to me that the word was actually pronounced ‘somnolent’. I have to admit, I still have problems with the word.
It is a fact that many of us have trouble getting our tongues around bothersome words. I had an education lecturer at college who got in a great tangle trying to pronounce ‘pedagogy’ (ped-a-go-gee), ‘ethnicity’ (eth-nis-i-tee), ‘phenomenon’ (fi-nom-uh-non) and ‘philosophical’ (fil-uh-sof-i-kuhl). At an interview for a teaching post, a candidate asked what the ‘remuneration’ (which he pronounced ‘re-noo-mer-a-shun’) would be, and, in a recent message from a call centre, a young woman said a representative would be in the area in February (which she pronounced ‘Feb-yoo-ary’). I was tempted to correct the mispronunciations – ‘ri-myoo-nuh-reyshun’ and ‘Feb-roo-er-ee) – but resisted. There but for the grace of God . . .
Research on pronunciation was recently undertaken by Spinvox (a voicemail-to-text-message system, which corrects the inaccurate pronunciation of words). It was discovered that there are a surprising number of commonly used words that we get wrong, words like ‘anaesthetist’, ‘statistics’, ‘provocatively’, ‘anonymous’, ‘thesaurus’, ‘regularly’ and ‘aluminium’. Mispronunciation, of course, is no laughing matter, for when we get it wrong it is deeply embarrassing, particularly if some helpful person points it out.
My friend Alban, who farms near Whitby and is a plain-speaking Yorkshireman with a wry sense of humour, tells the story of when he was at school.
‘I’ll tell thee what,’ said his brother, ‘I just can’t get mi ’ead round all this stuff abaat speykin’ proper. We say “path”, and t’teacher says “paath”, we say “grass” and she says “graas”, we say “luck” and she says “loook”, we say “buck” and she says “boook”. It’s reight confusin’.’
‘Tha dooan’t wants to tek no notice,’ his brother told him.
‘Nay, we’ve got to practise it for t’next week. Dust thy know then, dust tha say “eether” or dust tha say “ayether”?’
His elder brother thought for a moment before replying. ‘Dun’t mek no difference ’ow tha says it. Tha can say owther on ’em.’
Words to Make You Wince
The Sunday Times conducted a survey to discover what people thought were the most beautiful words in the English language. The top ten words were: Melody/velvet, gossamer/crystal, autumn, peace, tranquil, twilight, murmur, caress, mellifluous and whisper. After this was published, I asked readers of my own newspaper column for their favourite words, and those words which they thought to be the ugliest. I received quite a post bag about the latter. I guess it was the unpleasant connotations which were the reasons for the appearance of words like ‘gizzard’, ‘slop’, ‘carbuncle’, ‘scrawny’, ‘ganglion’, ‘insipid’, ‘tyrannical’, ‘incarcerate’, ‘haemorrhaging’, ‘bulbous’, ‘slimy’, ‘snot’, ‘clot’ and ‘prig’.
It is understandable that words that bring on nausea like ‘vomit’, ‘gobbet’, ‘sputum’ and ‘scum’ were high on the list, but there were some idiosyncratic and sometimes surprising offerings. These included ‘gusset’, ‘hubby’, ‘panties’, ‘poppet’ and (predictably from the two teachers who wrote) the acronym OFSTED.
Poets at the Ledbury Literary Festival were asked which word they thought was the ugliest in the language. Geraldine Monk disliked the word ‘redacted’ (to have written out in literary form or edited for publication), a word I have to admit I had never come across. ‘It’s a brutish sounding word,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t flow, it prods at you in a nasty manner.’ Philip Wells had an intense dislike of the word ‘pulchritude’ (which paradoxically means ‘beautiful’). Wells was vehement in his aversion to the word. ‘It violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language,’ he said, ‘being stuffed to the brim with a brutally Latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants.’ Wow! That’s a bit strong. Actually, I quite like saying the word. It’s from the Middle English and has fallen out of use. I think it should be more commonly used, particularly the adjectival form of ‘pulchritudinous’.
My pet dislikes are the jargon words and phrases that have crept invidiously into the language. I wince, when listening to a lecture on management, when the speaker employs the latest buzzwords and phrases. I particularly bristle when I am exhorted to ‘run that extra mile’, ‘give it 110 per cent’, ‘get on board’, ‘suck it and see’, ‘bounce ideas around’, ‘throw it into the ring’, ‘pull in the same direction’ or ‘give it my best shot’. I dislike having things ‘flagged up’ for me and I don’t feel inclined to ‘get up to speed’, ‘think outside the box’, ‘climb aboard’, ‘have a thought shower’, ‘push the envelope’ and ‘find a window in my diary’. I don’t want to ‘touch base’, ‘run it up the flagpole’, ‘square the circle’ or engage in ‘blue-sky thinking’. I do not like ‘no-brainers’ and ‘bullet points’ and I don’t want to ‘chill out’ or ‘have a comfort break’. Buzzwords reveal nothing that couldn’t be more effectively communicated using simple language. There are ample words in English to express one’s feelings clearly and accurately without resorting to this gobbledegook. Of course, buzzwords are designed to make the speaker (sorry, ‘facilitator’) sound go-ahead, up-to-date and something of a specialist.
One word I do find rather ugly is ‘galimatias’. It sounds like a disease of a very personal nature or a species of parasitical plant. However, it is a word which those who use that management terminology which infects the language like bacilli should know. It means a style of writing which is confused and full of somewhat meaningless jargon.
So There!
Our English teacher Mr Smart
Says writing English is an art,
That we should always take great care
When spelling words like wear and where,
Witch and which and fair and fare,
Key and quay and air and heir,
Whet and wet and flair and flare,
Wring and ring and stair and stare,
Him and hymn and their and there,
Whine and wine and pear and pare,
Check and cheque and tare and tear,
Crews and cruise and hare and hair,
Meet and meat and bear and bare,
Knot and not and layer and lair,
Loot and lute and mayor and mare.
Well frankly, I just couldn’t care!
So there!
‘Are You Anybody?’
Becoming Famous
Do You Know Who I Am?
I was once asked by a self-important councillor with whom I had crossed swords:
‘Do you know who I am?’ I wish I had summoned up the courage to reply, ‘No, and frankly, I couldn’t care less who you are,’ but I bit my lip and merely replied that I did not.
I really have to smile when I hear that ridiculous question. A Mr Don Mudd of Nantwich was waiting patiently in the queue at the check-in counter at Auckland Airport. The single attendant was attempting to deal with a long line of exasperated passengers when one loud and angry man pushed his way to the front, slapped his ticket on the counter and informed her, haughtily, that he was in first class and insisted on being dealt with before the rest. The attendant explained that there was a queue of people before him and asked if he would mind waiting his turn. Undeterred, he shouted at her: ‘Do you know who I am?’ Without hesitating, the young woman picked up the public address system microphone and announced: ‘May I have your attention please. We have a passenger who does not know who he is. If anyone can identify him, could they please come to Check-in 14?’
There’s the story of Margaret Thatcher who, when Prime Minister and at the height of her power, visited Yorkshire with Bernard Ingham and a handbag. She was touring a residential home for the elderly and, of course, the residents were keen to meet her. There was one exception; one lady continued reading her book, apparently oblivious of all the fuss.
The Prime Minister, intrigued, approached her. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ replied the woman.
‘And how are you?’
‘I’m all right. How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ replied the Prime Minister. ‘And are you enjoying it here?’
Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill Page 20
