kurpierz.net

It is not the first time I mention Stephen Fry in this little series of celebratory essays. "Celebratory of what?" you may well ask yourself. Well, in my opinion, the inventiveness of language users is as much cause for celebration as the versatility of language itself. People are constantly inventing new words - or new uses for an old word. Some people are better at it than others and some simply excel. Stephen Fry is of the last category.

The last time one of his neologisms was featured here, he still took several pages to establish the context in which the process of "unnatural recaffeination" made sense - hilariously, if you recall. This week it is only one sentence.

In the British comedy show "Absolute Power" Fry play s the CEO of a public relations company. He commands "a team of ambitious young agents who work in the dark art of repackaging black as white." (BBC synopsis) In a Tuesday morning meeting creative and senior staff of the company discuss the possibilities - if not strategies - of "spinning Bin Laden" - or rather Bin Laden's intentions of purchasing British Airways

At a particularly bad suggestion by one of his subordinates the boss replies incomparably,

"If the smell of rat gets any stronger I shall vomit niagaraishly."

You must admit it is rather pictorial, if not picturesque.

When I was about fourteen or fifteen years old I was utterly in love with the stories about Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Dr Watson. Possibly that is one of the reasons I have been so captivated by House MD, a character very closely modelled on Holmes. The strange yet often quite easily deducible vocabulary allured to me. Words in Doyle were my favourite puzzles.

One of the words that for the longest time escaped all my attempts at decoding was this week's specimen. You see, I would never use a dictionary. That was my challenge. Sure enough that was before I found out what fascinating reading dictionaries make.

Fortnight eluded me for the longest time despite being an easy case. When - years later, already studying linguistics on university level - I found out the etymology it was so blatantly obvious that I was literally laughing and figuratively  crying. At the same time. Fourteen nights, contracted to fortnight.

A word for the period of time that lasts two weeks. In German we do not - as far as I can see - have a one-word translation for fortnight. It is a piece of vocabulary now widely put out of use. It bears witness to a time in history when things were allowed to last two weeks. Like a letter to arrive, or travelling from one place to another, or finding information pertaining the disappearance of a piece of precious jewellery or even an heir to it, as might have been the case in one of Holmes' mysteries.

Maybe I can put it back to use and rename this column. Stop calling it "word of the week" and name it "fortnightly vocabulary reflections". Naw, I don't think, so. Though it would take the pressure off a bit.

From when I was about eleven I was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes stories. Back in the GDR the books were not easy to come by so I spent a lot of time visiting the few used book shops in my town quite frequently in order not to miss the occasional copy. I must have just turned fifteen when I got my hands on a three volume Wordsworth Classics edition of Sherlock Holmes stories. The battered look of the volumes testifies to my having read them many a time since then.

Upon reading Stephen Fry's autobiography Moab is My Washpot, I noticed that he was fascinated with Holmes stories much as I was. My reasoning was that other readings Fry showed himself enthusiastic about could prove just as entertaining to me. The result is that for the last couple of weeks I have been practically hooked on P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories. I am glad that there is ample supply of these. At the moment I have four volumes of approximately 600 pages each. But I believe there are a few more.

Bertie Wooster is the none too bright English Gentleman who constantly sees himself – or one of his chums – "in the soup", as it were. Reginald Jeeves is Wooster's valet. Intelligent, modest and thorroughly in control of his young master, time and again he gets him out of the most embarrassing situations. The plots in themselves are marvellous. But the humour, especially of the linguistic sort, is pure gold. As in this week's word. Bertie describes the process of ingesting his breakfast using a peculiarly twisted perspective. He was not putting the food inside himself, oh no. Bertie relates from his point of view how one morning he read the newspaper while still in bed: "I received a nasty shock while getting outside my morning tea and toast."

One of my favourite authors is Stephen Fry. He became famous as a television comedian in the 1980s co-authoring and co-starring with Hugh Laurie (now known as Dr House) in A Bit of Fry and Laurie. He also appeared in such classics as Jeeves and Wooster and Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder.
In his writing he quite often fearlessly explores the limits of language. However, he never loses respect for it, never blows up the balloon until it pops.
Especially his immense range of vocabulary is fascinating to me. Apparently it is - among other things - the result of a game Fry used to play in school. As he recounts in his autobiography Moab is My Washpot, he used to study the dictionary in his leisure time and challenge a friend to use a particularly remote word in conversation with a teacher. The dialogue he relates in his book contains the words pleonasm and sesquipedalian, both of which are not high on the list for my word of the week.
When the English language is unable to provide him with the fitting vocabulary, Fry is unafraid to create his own. As in this weeks example. It is taken from the author's third novel Making History. In the opening scene the protagonist is frantically and desperately searching his whole household for coffee. Imagine his disappointment when all he finds is some of his ex-girlfriend's "naturally decaffeinated". But before despairing, the coffee addict remembers the only half empty bottle of caffeine pills from back when he took his exams. He simply takes a few of those, grinds them up, dissolves them in the decaf-brew: "The chunks of white pop and wink in the coffee mud as I pour the boiling water on. 'Safeway Colombian Coffee, Fine Ground for Filters: Unnaturally Recaffeinated.' Now that's coffee."

Today's word cannot be found in any dictionary. Yet. That is because I made it up myself. Not entirely out of the blue, naturally. There was some inspiration in a current viral video that I have embedded with this article (read more).
Kenleeing is actually a widespread phenomenon. I would not go so far as to proclaim that everybody does it. But I am quite certain, that everybody knows what I am talking about.
To kenlee is to sing a song in a foreign language. You have only heard the song and you do not know the language it is originally sung in. You have no idea at all what the lyrics are about. In fact, you have no idea at all what the lyrics are.
I know I did a lot of kenleeing when I was a child. I kenleed songs like Depeche Mode's "Master and Servant" before I knew enough English to comprehend what it was about.
Unlike the now unfortunately famous singer of "Ken Lee", I never publicly kenleed, mainly because I was painfully conscious of my deficiencies in understanding and speaking English. I simply knew that "what I am singing here cannot be right".
I feel for all the mocking the singer has to endure for her passionate performance and for taking kenleeing to the public stage she deserves to have kenlee created in her honour to give a name to an activity we are all familiar with.

Current events in the world make it seem appropriate to include this weeks word into the series. Especially since its interesting history reveals quite a bit about how bankers whose businesses failed were dealt with in the past.

Most dictionaries trace it back to Renaissance Italy where Florentine moneylenders conducted their business across a cloth-covered desk or bench – banca. Whenever one of them became insolvent (or went belly-up as a more modern and informal metaphoric expression has it) his banca was literally broken to pieces, shattered. His desk was turned into a banca rotta, a broken bench.

Having your counter broken was a public announcement of your inability to pay your creditors. It was a symbolic act with an absolute finality about it. It was a disgrace that meant you could not simply set up your stall at another market and start over.

That was the past. Today, if your banca was rotta you would in all probability ring up your government and say "Hello there, dear government, I am bankrupt. You must help or the whole economy will collapse." And today's governments will buy all the worthless broken benches that no one wants. They will give the old corrupt bankers new money so they can buy new benches.

I am not naïve. But in some ways the olden days' readiness with axes and saws seems more satisfying.

 

bankrupt at dictionary.com

Actually I wanted to follow up with another very nice alliteration that I heard this week. But I will save it for another week.

I rather think it is time, however, to introduce the first juggling related piece of vocabulary here. It is a word from ordinary language, which is saying a lot because juggling has, in a very literal sense, a language of its own, namely an artificial formal notation for writing down juggling patterns. But I will not trouble you with that. Yet.

Even though ambidextrous sounds complicated it is actually quite straightforward. The etymology is Latin: ambi: both and dexter: right-handed. If you are ambidextrous you are right-handed with both hands. There exists a rarely used opposite: ambilevous, which is an upscale synonym of clumsy.

Ambidextrousness (and even ambidexterity) is a very useful quality for any juggler. If you are able to perform any juggling pattern or any juggling trick with both hands equally well, your juggling skills, especially your ability to combine moves seamlessly, increase exponentially. Some jugglers even go so far as to learn and practice every trick with their inferior hand first, believing that then the dominant hand will pick it up even faster.

Not every juggler, however, would go as far as Pavel of the Flying Karamazow Brothers, who is quoted in the rec.juggling newsgroup as having said, "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."

ambidextrous at dictionary.com

English is very good at changing nouns into verbs. Or maybe not changing them but instead simply using them as nouns. Toboggan, for example, the last word in the series can be used as a verb in a sentence like The weather was so beautiful, we stayed outside tobogganing all afternoon. Linger, however is a 'genuine' verb and, in fact, the first verb featuring in this little word of the week series.
I came across this on one of my favourite artist's CDs, namely Kate Bush's second album "Lionheart" from 1978. The song is called "In the Warm Room". In the original vinyl release it was the second title on the B-side, on the CD it's track 7. Among the things happening in the warm room is this:

In the warm room
She prepares to go to bed.
She'll let you watch her undress
Go places where your fingers long to linger.

Fingers long to linger - one of the most poetic lines of pop song lyrics I have come across; one of the most perfect alliterations, too. The minimal pair finger/linger is in itself beautiful but the sensuality is intensified displaying it as - for the moment - unfulfilled desire, adding longing.
This is an instance where you really do feel what poetry can do. Namely freeze a moment into words making it last. It is what Shakespeare calls "eternal lines" in his famous eightteenth sonnet, preserving fleeting moments or fading beauty in verses that will remain beautiful, no matter how brittle the "papers, yellowed with their age" (sonnet 17) are on which they are written.

linger at dictionary.com

Last week I introduced you to an English word with French origin. Today I give you the Native American toboggan. The first time I saw this kind of sled was in the film Home Alone (1990). The main character Kevin is left behind by accident as his family goes on Christmas Holiday. Among all the stupid things he does while they are away is going down the front-room staircase on a toboggan. But it was not a standard model as the movie geeks at IMDB will tell you but rather a film prop:

"As Kevin flies through the air outside the front door after he sleds down the stairs, you can see the rollers on the bottom of the toboggan."InternetMovieDataBase : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099785/goofs;7 December 2008)