Gyles Brandreth has spent most of his life collecting English words, and most of them are in this stout book. He no doubt thinks our world-dominating language is unsurpassed in its limitless variety so it must have come as a bit of a dampener for him when, according to one of the juicier anecdotes in the book, he went to interview Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, racehorse owner, and a man who apparently sleeps only for two hours a night.
Sleep, the Sheikh suggested, is for sissies. So what does he do in the dark hours? “I read a lot of classical Arabic. It is a beautiful language. How many words did Shakespeare use? Forty thousand? In Arabic there are forty thousand words for different fish.”
Pressed to pass on some wisdom, the Sheikh added: “Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a gazelle or a lion, Mr Brandreth. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
Talk about preaching to the converted. I wonder if the Sheikh had done his homework. Brandreth must surely have woken up running every day of his life. There can hardly be a busier author, lexicographer, broadcaster and, let’s not forget, at one time a politician, and all of his lives are brought together in this volume. The sub-heading is “a cornucopia of puns, anagrams, euphemisms and other contortions and curiosities of the English language”. My dictionary defines cornucopia as a symbol of plenty consisting of a goat’s horn overflowing with, among other things, corn. There is copious corn in the book, and some good jokes too. It will be much enjoyed by fans of Brandreth’s word game programmes on Radio 4.
There’s a great deal of nostalgia in the word games that are described in the book. The Victorians loved them and Radio 4 listeners still do. I wonder, though, if anyone nowadays could persuade their children to play acrostics, pangrams, logograms, or even riddles. It would take a brave parent, or a very wet holiday with no computers. I liked a small ad that Brandreth quotes, from The Times of 1842, otherwise known as an alphabetic:“To widowers and single gentlemen — wanted by a lady, a Situation to superintend the household and preside at table. She is Agreeable, Becoming, Careful, Desirable, English” etc, etc.
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Lost and endangered words are the sort of favourites that feature in Brandreth’s current radio game, Wordaholics, and many of them appear here. I was more interested in the section on new words, and the dates on which they make their first confirmed appearance — discotheque, for example, is the same age as me. How very appropriate. Acronym first appeared in 1943, adventure playground in 1953. Amazingly “Old Etonian” only made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, perhaps because there seem to be a lot of them around these days.
Some individuals get their own section. Brandreth clearly has something of an issue with John Prescott, “sometime MP, deputy prime minister and amateur pugilist”, and now Lord. The animus dates, so it seems, to an episode in 1992 when Brandreth, newly arrived in the House of Commons, found himself being barracked during a speech by Prescott shouting “woolly jumper, woolly jumper” at him. Better a woolly jumper, which can be removed, than a woolly mind, Brandreth observes. Prescott, he says, “has the gift of treating the English language like a Rubik’s cube”, and looms large in the chapter on malapropisms.
For no obvious reason, but entertaining anyway, there’s a section on literary abuse and famous rejection letters, and Brandreth’s own recipe for omelette Arnold Bennett. A tribute to Groucho Marx has all the usual quotes, but also one I can’t remember having come across before: “When you’re in jail a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you, saying ‘Damn, that was fun.’ ” There’s a whole novel there, just waiting to be written.
My own favourite chapter is the one with word games to make you go to sleep. I find the alphabet vegetables are usually quite enough to send me off — a for artichoke, b for beetroot, etc, but for someone of Brandreth’s logoversatility, the game has to be superhumanly obscure and demanding. I had a go at one of his less taxing lists — words that use a particular letter twice in succession — bazaar, ebb, accord, etc, and was out like a light by K. I wonder if the Sheikh would appreciate a copy.
Wordplay: A cornucopia of puns, anagrams and other contortions and curiosities of the English language by Gyles Brandreth, Coronet, 368pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134