I literally can't wait . . .

I can't help wondering whether editors of magazines sometimes deliberately dumb down contributions from better writers than themselves. Did Fiona Bruce, of the Antiques Roadshow, really say (or write) "I literally can't wait to see what Nancy Dell'Olio [of 'Strictly'] is up to every week" ? Surely not.

To start with, we have no choice in such a matter: there is no way that we can see now, at this moment, what will happen next week . You jolly well have to wait. But of course, the 'can't wait' idiom is only a fun way of expressing eager anticipation*. Not, though, to whoever penned that statement attributed to Ms Bruce. She 'literally' can't wait; and 'literally' means 'actually, really, no kidding, not pretending, truly, in fact, not in imagination, not mere idiom'. So how does she manage actually and really not to wait ? Three options seem to be available: (a) the use of an effective crystal ball; (b) give up trying to wait, and forget it; or (c) drop dead.

*Even the word anticipation has been dumbed down. It's component parts (of Latin origin) mean 'capturing beforehand' - and that is exactly what its sixteenth century inventors intended it to mean - to do something beforehand, to take action now that will deal with a problem or an opportunity when it occurs; not just the feeble 'to hope or expect'. If you go to meet someone at the station, and there they are, getting off the train, you have anticipated their arrival. If they weren't on the train after all, you haven't actually anticipated it. You never did; you just wrongly expected* it.

* But wait ! Even the word 'expect' has lost its original potency. It too is derived from Lain, and its true meaning used to be to 'watch out for something until it happens'. In fact it could be used as a synonym for 'anticipate.' But it's too late to rescue the term now.

I literally can't wait . . .

Anchovie-Bairstow's Pensee

I like to think - no, I am quite sure - that the stars are the glory of heaven glimpsed through pin-holes in the dome of the sky, said my neighbour Mr Anchovie-Bairstow.

Made by Almighty God with a little pin, I suppose ? (I am a bit of a sceptic.) What's this dome made of ?

You're being rather silly again. I expect you're just doing it to try me. In a way, though, it's none of our business what the dome of the sky is made of. God knows, because he made it. There are some things we are granted to know, and some not.

How do you know that bit about the stars ?

We all learn as we grow. God himself teaches us, like we are little children.

How has he taught you, then ?

Like any teacher, sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes from a book. Sometimes God reveals truths through the Book of Books, sometimes he speaks to us direct.

And those pin-holes in the sky - how did you learn about that ?

True, it's not in the Bible so far as I know, though I haven't read all of it, but God may speak to any of us through the imagination that he has so graciously bestowed upon us.

Do you believe in Science ? (I thought I'd try a new tack).

Indeed I do. Science just means knowledge. It's from the Greek word SKIENTA meaning what you know. What God reveals to me, by his written word or by the spoken word of private revelation, is ipso facto science.

Ipso facto ?

Yes, Greek for 'by definition'.

Then these holes in the dome of the sky are science, then ?

No, think more carefully. The holes in the dome of the sky are not themselves science, but knowledge of them is.

Ipso facto, as the Greeks say..

Precisely.

Anchovie-Bairstow's Pensee

While shepherds watched . . .

How did the shepherds watch their flocks by night without the aid of infra-red technology* ?

This is a false question, based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word 'watch'. In the twenty-first century we go out to a stadium to watch a football match, or to a nature reserve to watch birds, or stay in to watch television. To us, the term 'watch' is all about sight, and following action with our eyes.

To our Anglo-Saxon forebears, though, the verb wacian meant to be 'awake' (rather than asleep); the related word waeccian meant to 'stay awake' in order to forestall any possible attack. Thus there are the 'watches' or periods of vigil on board a ship, and the 'night-watchman' who remains awake patrolling the town to ensure that nothing untoward happens to the other, sleeping, inhabitants.

So the shepherds on the hillside near Bethlehem were 'keeping watch' over their flocks, listening rather than looking, ready to scare off wolves or thieves. 'Watch' in this sense virtually means 'guard'**.

* OK, there could have been a full moon overhead that night.

** The watch that you wear on your wrist seems to get its name from some primitive alarm or 'waking' clock, designed to rouse a person from sleep.

Now 'flock' is interesting, too.

The natural assumption might be that the 'flock' of sheep is somehow related to the 'flock' that means 'fluff'', such as we meet in the term 'flock wallpaper'. After all, sheep are fluffy, and if we can have a 'pride' of lions or a 'murmuration' of starlings, surely we can understand a 'flock' of woolly sheep.

But no: there are two entirely different words 'flock'. The Anglo-Saxon one is flocc meaning a troop or band or gathering, whether of people or (other) animals. The other derives from Latin floccus meaning 'fluff' or (metaphorically) worthlessness. There is a lovely word still to be found in big English dictionaries, 'floccinaucinihilipilification', implying 'treating something or someone as not being worth even fluff or dust or a hair or indeed anything at all'. The word is based on a similar composite Latin word introduced into a play by a Roman comic dramatist. They had stage comics even in Julius Caesar's Rome.

So our flock wallpaper has no connection with flocks by night. And that comic 29-letter word must be the only one in the English language containing nine letter 'i's.

While shepherds watched . . .

A Norfolk dilemma

Said a worried fiancé from Rushall
"I cannot make up my mind whushall
Come first in my life -
Myself or my wife:
And yet the decision is crushall."

A Norfolk Dilemma

Would You Believe It ?

“When I was a boy”, writes the Hon Eldred MacFriary, “I remember we used to catch red squirrels by tying half-sucked toffee apples to the lower branches of a great big beech tree in my uncle’s (Lord Grassenthwaite’s) grounds at Grassenthwaite Castle. We would then hide in a nearby shrubbery. It didn’t take long for the little brutes to emerge from behind the trunk with their fluffy red tails bobbing and, overcome by that insatiable curiosity of theirs, approach the toffee apples, grabbing them between their front paws. Of course their fur stuck to the toffee, and after they had had a lick or two they would try to scamper away, but found themselves trapped. We jumped up and wrung their necks. We often caught a dozen in a day that way. Great sport, but disappointing eating.”

* Hon Eldred MacFriary, Our Animal Friends: a Memoir of Country Life (Bagnall & Stockling, 1995)

Would you believe it ?

The Department of Nomenclature

The offices of the Ministry of Communications are situated, I think, somewhere near Victoria Station, in a vast stone building in a 1960s minimalist style that tells you nothing except how minimal its original architect and clients were.

Somewhere on the fifth floor is a long corridor on either side of which are big rooms housing rows of desks, each equipped with a computer and all other mod office cons. There are similar rooms on the sixth and seventh floors too, but we are referring here to those of the Department of Nomenclature, and in particular to the Fabrics and Medications division with its two units, usually abbreviated ‘Manmadfabs’ and ‘Dispensimarks’.

‘Dispensimarks’ is the office where the names for new drugs are created. A few years ago it was done by a small team of men, known as nomenclators, with a dictionary. The men would think up new and fairly predictable names like Throatex and Constipan and Pimplol, and one of the senior women secretaries would look in the dictionary to ensure that there was no such word already, and if the whole team thought the name was a good one, it was listed in the Official Index (HMSO) and in due course licensed to any manufacturer who thought they might use it.

Then computers were introduced, but they were so prolific of new names that the team of nomenclators had to be trebled in size, merely in order to rule out silly names like Prtotgn%_dz and HjTi#fbnaaa. This took up far more time than the old team needed to produce a similar flow of more serviceable names, so recently the procedure has been simplified.

Now the process begins at the ‘syllabary’, where new word-bits are concocted, mostly out of the heads of specially chosen young graduates with an ear for words and a poetical (but not too poetical) imagination. They prepare ‘pools’ of suitable short syllables such as -tri- and -pol- and -clor- and -zyn-, which are fed into a computer which treats them rather like the machine with numbered ping-pong balls that deliver the lottery winners. The syllables are produced in random order in batches of anything from three to six. These are passed across the screens of a battery of monitors, each watched by a senior nomenclator who clicks an ‘approval rating’ of 0 - 9 on the side of the screen. The scores are totted up by another computer, and only the top ten out of every hundred (you can see that the level of scrutiny is pretty severe) are passed to a ‘Referral Officer’ who takes each day’s list to be vetted by the Minister of Communications’s Senior Nomenclature Advisor who eliminates the ones he doesn’t like* with a blue pencil and refers it back to the Dispensimarks office to be typed up.

* ‘Tritoblerone’, for instance, he rejected because it might be read as an advertisement.

There is such a demand for newly licensed names for newly licensed products that the Dispensimarks staff can only just keep up with it. Names like Phlognostican and Drigoblin, Cratulopsipan and Plantospitrol, Sillimoxlin and Ganjospermadsidate, actually bring in millions of pounds a year to the Treasury.

There has, of course, been a black market in names. This was inevitable. Some have been produced in large quantities in innocent looking sheds on city allotments, or the cellars of houses in Islington. Many are imported illegally by word-smugglers who copy the names on to the back of the little round paper discs that you find at the bottom of tins of cough sweets, or are written on cigarette papers and then rolled and carried casually between the lips of day trippers returning from the continent. The following list was found by British Rail police on a small piece of paper secured to a bunch of daffodils with a rubber band in the left hand of an eight-year-old girl whose right hand was in the hand of her mother on platform 16 at Waterloo:

Vamstatsinim
Thrandestine
Preposterol
Polyphrasterin
Phytoglysterol
Dispralocalculaburol
Glyxtrocyclone
Crepuscinofozil
Pyglixiphogratulate
Brentiligropatine
Aspidoxipral
Spiflitoxin
Centrofigoblin
Fibrillipantimon
Propesterol
Hexodorodistine
Aspidoxapril

There is money in this business.

The Department of Nomenclature

Gave him a scare, though

There was a young fellow from Puglia
Whose wife started acting percuglia.
He thought she was dead,
Lying under the bed,
But she winked and said "Knew I could fuglia !"

Gave him a scare, though