Cheeselogs, scurryfunge and snagglers may not be common words to come across in daily conversation, but its par for the course with Susie Dent of Countdown fame. Interview by Molly Catterall, words and research by Ben Woolhead.
“Celebrity lexicographer and etymologist” might be an unlikely epithet, but it’s an entirely accurate description of Susie Dent, who brings her show The Secret Lives Of Words to Cardiff this month. The longest-serving member of the current Countdown team, Dent made her Dictionary Corner debut in 1992 and has gone on to feature in comedy spin-off 8 Out Of Ten Cats Does Countdown.
“I was never meant to be on TV at all,” she admits, revealing how, after taking up “a perfectly normal editorial job” at Oxford University Press, she was persuaded into reluctantly appearing on the Channel 4 show. “It certainly wasn’t the career path that I had deliberately chosen and I’m naturally the sort of person who likes to fly below the radar.”
Dent has grown to love the role, though, and her insatiable, infectious enthusiasm for words of all hues is evident both on screen and in conversation. During the course of the interview, she looks things up on the OED Online – “my desert island book, always” – and eagerly makes notes on terms that fascinate her. Her book How to Talk Like A Local, in which she explored regional dialects, threw up a whole host of gems: ‘dardledumdue’ (an East Anglian expression for a daydreamer), ‘dimpsy’ (meaning dusky, “possibly one of my favourite Devonian words”), ‘chuggy pig’ and ‘cheeselog’ (two of the many dialect terms for a woodlouse). “Quite honestly”, she says, “my favourite word changes from day to day”; if pressed, though, she confesses a fondness for the old US term ‘scurryfunge’, which means “to madly rush about the house frenetically tidying up just before visitors arrive – because I do that a lot.”
Dent’s most recent book looked at “modern tribes” and the distinctive, specialised languages that they use. Most interesting to her was the code spoken by prisoners as “a method for survival”, both to “escape the notice of the authorities” and “develop some kind of banter”. Similar codes are also evident in more mundane settings, though, such as restaurants and coffee shops. A former waitress herself, Dent admits that “there’s a real temptation to talk about customers and yet you can’t always do it – you don’t want to be blatant about it, you don’t want to be overheard”. If you catch yourself being referred to by a barista as a ‘snaggler’ (a disagreeable customer) or a ‘camper’ (someone who lingers for hours nursing a single drink), then you can let them know they’ve been rumbled.
Her mission might be to resurrect useful words that have fallen into obsolescence, but Dent is quick to emphasise that “there has never been a golden age of English where everything was perfect” and that linguistic change is inevitable. New modes of communication (email, texting, social media) have undoubtedly had a profound impact on language – “what we have now is a kind of written spoken language where we write as we speak” – but this impact is not necessarily negative; on the contrary, she insists that the internet has “actually enriched language, in that there are so many new dialects that are appearing.”
Of the OED’s controversial decision to select an emoji as the Word Of The Year in 2015, she is firmly supportive: “Emojis are almost certainly the fastest-moving area of language at the moment. Pictorial representations of words have been with us for centuries.” However, she does concede that technological advances can sometimes be a communicative hindrance: “You actually have to be quite good at English to be able to use a spellchecker – otherwise it can lead you astray.”
What, we ask, can we expect of The Secret Lives Of Words? A “nerdy wordy” show encompassing everything from etymological delights and a section on American English to some “silly videos” from Countdown and a mini-guide to swearing – “why it’s always been with us and always will and why we absolutely need it.”
The Secret Lives Of Words, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Tue 16 July. Tickets: £22. Info: 029 2064 6900 / www.shermantheatre.co.uk