Saturday Rave: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.

Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her Diamond Jubilee this weekend, so I'm celebrating with a book in which she stars.

Now, even if you are neither a subject nor a monarchist, consider: the Queen has done this job for sixty years. Without once assaulting a Minister of State.

How can we be otherwise than awe-struck?

In The Uncommon Reader it's the corgis



 that start everything. They lead the Queen to the palace mobile libary, where she borrows a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett.

'She read, of course, as one did, but liking books she left to other people...Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people...Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself.'

 Remarkably, the Queen not only reads the book but survives the experience, and is set free to explore whole worlds until now closed to her.

Well, isn't that what books do for all of us?

Word To Use Today: preference. This word arrived in England in the reign of King Richard II. It comes from the Latin word praeferre, to carry in front or to prefer, from prae, in front, and ferre, to bear.

Word To Use Today: badger.

Badger. You have to laugh, just at the sound of it.

They're found over most of the world, are badgers: in Europe and Asia, in America, and in Africa.

The Asiatic Stink Badgers were thought to be badgers, too (yes, that's why they were called...) but they have recently been expelled from the badger family.


The claim is that this is nothing to do with their body odour. However, as a badger's sense of smell is up to 800 times more powerful than yours I can't help but have my suspicions, myself.

They're doughty fighters, are badgers, and have been known to see off bears and wolves (and not only when drunk, which badgers sometimes are when they've been at the rotting fruit). But apart from the honey badger (which is notoriously bad-tempered)  badgers don't usually go around attacking other animals unless they intend to eat them.

Having said that, the easiest way to tell a male from a female badger is by the scars the males carry from fighting amongst themselves.

Badgers will eat more or less anything, from venomous snakes to honey to rabbits to fruit to earthworms ( a badger needs about 200 worms a day to keep him in good condition). There are limits, however, and a mother's habit of sicking up earthworms for her babies to eat does seem to encourage them to start foraging for themselves.

Badger hair is sometimes made into brushes, and badgers themselves are sometimes made into kebabs in Russia and goulash in Croatia. In Japan badger meat is traditionally meat for the humble. And probably, I should imagine, desperate.

It is possible to badger someone, which means to pester them, but this seems most unfair to badgers, who spend all their time either underground or trying to creep up on earthworms.

Sure enough, the verb to badger comes from the foul human habit of watching dogs slowly torturing a badger to death. 

Suddenly even the Asian Stink Badger seems rather endearing.

Word To Use Today: badger. This word probably comes from badge + ard, because of the white mark on the badger's head, though people do wonder if the word could be something to do with the Albanian vjed hullë, which means both badger and thief.

Grexit - a rant.

On the whole I welcome new words into the English language, but this one sounds like the death-rattle of a piece of seized-up machinery...

...hm.

Perhaps it's a better word than I thought.

Grexit is a squeezing together of the words Greek and exit - exit from having the Euro as its currency, that is.

Apart from the resemblance of the word to the cry of a constipated corncrake, grexit takes the eek out of Greek exit: and I really don't think that this is what the people who use it are trying to do.

Word Not To Use Today: grexit. Look, it doesn't take much longer to say Greek exit, does it. It's not as if grexit has any wit or flair.

Unlike Eurogeddon, which has both.

Grexit was coined on 6th February 2012 by Willem H Butler and Ebrahim Rahban. I don't know if it was a slip of the tongue, or whether they were just having a rather dull day.

STOP PRESS: things have got even worse. Today, 31/05/2012, I regret to announce first sightings of Spexit (Spanish exit) and Spanic (Spanish panic).

I don't know, I think I might eventually get to like Spanic, though.

Nuts and Bolts: rivers of derivation.

So, what do bacteria and baguettes have in common?

Hm, it does sound alarming, doesn't it.

Here's a clue: they share this same thing with bails (as in the game of cricket), a debacle, a tropical American palm, and the many- many-times great-granny of the octopus.

What is it? Well, it's the Greek word, baktron, which means rod or staff.

It's easy to see what a baguette has to do with a staff because it is, well, staff-shaped. Some bacteria are, too, though they're so small you can't actually see them. Appropriately enough, the word bacteria comes from the diminuative of baktron, baktērion, which means little staff.

Cricket bails:



well, you can see where people are coming from with that one.

Nothing would seem less staff-like than an octopus, but the fossil of the shell of the bactrites:







makes all quite clear.

Palm trees are of course all staff-like. This is the bactris.


Photo by Chris 73.

But where's the staff in debacle? Well, a debacle is when things fall apart, and it comes from a French word, desbacler, meaning to unbolt. And there, with the bolt, is the staff-shape.

Isn't it amazing where the current of a word-river can take you?

Word To Use Today: derivation. This word comes from the Old French deriver, to spring from, from the Latin dērīvāre, to draw off, from rīvus, a stream.

Thing To Do Today: pulse.

Hey, how easy is this? I mean, if you're reading this your heart must be pulsing already, mustn't it?


One of the nice things about your pulse (apart from the keeping-you-alive-thing, natch) is that it's allowed to get lazier as you get older. When you were newborn your pulse had to vibrate away at as much as 150 frantic beats a minute, but by the time you're grown up it only has to do a laid-back 60 or so.


It's not just our hearts that pulse, of course. We're affected by pulses of various kinds all the time. Even something as big as a city is said to have a pulse, which most mysteriously sweeps up pretty much everyone in the whole place and has them living to its beat.

Then there's the pulse of the tides, and the pulse of the seasons...I understand that even some of the stars give out bursts of...well, something or other jolly powerful...* and that's why we call them pulsars.


Music has a pulse, too, of course, which is the general speed at which it bumps along, and this is used all the time to manipulate our own pulses and the feelings which come with them. Bach was brilliant at this, and so is a marching band, and so were the Sex Pistols. Practically every advertisement we've ever heard, too, is trying to change our pulse rate: quick quick buy buy you can be beautiful and happy but you must act at once!

Yes, dangerous things, are pulses.

Though not as dangerous as if they stop.

Thing To Do Today: pulse. This word comes from the Latin word pulsus, a beating, from pellere, to beat. Pulsar is a shortened form of pulsating star.

*Polarized radiation, apparently.

Spot the frippet: polka.

Polka dots are, obviously, traditionally associated with that popular dance style...

...flamenco.


Yep. They are. Sorry about that. The name polka dots seems to have been made up in the USA in the mid 1800s because the polka was a fashionable dance and it seemed a good way to off-load a lot of spotty fabric.


This extreme version of the polka dot:




is the maillot de pois rouge, which is worn by the leader of the mountain section of the Tour de France. Hideous, isn't it.


There are a couple of popular songs featuring polka dots by, firstly, Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss, and, secondly by Jimmy van Heusen and Johnny Burke, but it's much too early in the day to listen to them.


Slightly more restful, if not much more tasteful, is the Madagascan Hypoestes phyllostchya, the polka dot plant.


If all else fails, you could always learn to polka yourself:

and if you get really very expert you might even end up being able, most strangely, to polka in triple time, as in this polka mazurka:

Happy spotting!

Spot the frippet: polka. This word came to us from French. The French got it from the Czech pulka, which means half-step, from pul, which means half.

Sunday Rest: Word Not To Use Today: dolly.

I've hated this word ever since old ladies used to come up to me and say what a nice dolly. It was never anything of the sort. It was a queen-enchantress or a fairy princess which just happened to be...er...small and made of plastic.


Dollys are put-upon, whether they're the trolleys that hold film cameras, the trolley-dollies that serve drinks on aeroplanes, or whether they're being hit with hammers to form rivets or sheet metal or to drive piles.

When they're not put-upon they're silly. A dolly is an easy catch at cricket, a dolly bird is a girl of more prettiness than wit, and if you can have a silly sweet then it's dolly mixture (which also looks much too much like dried vomit). A big silly hat is a Dolly Varden.

Actually, a Dolly Varden can be a red-spotted trout, too. And it's the trout I feel sorry for.

Lastly, and quite bafflingly, in Northern England dolly-posh means...can you guess?*

Word Not To Use Today: dolly. This word is a pet form of a pet form (Doll) of the name Dorothy. It came into use in the 1500s and unfortunately never died out.

Dolly Varden is a character in Dicken's novel Barnaby Rudge. I haven't read it, but presumably she's a hat-wearing red-spotted trout. 

*Left-handed. Which I must admit isn't silly at all.