Susie Dent
****
Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Tue 16 Jul
Tonight’s show was tentatively titled Susie Dent: Word Detective until Dent’s Countdown colleague Rachel Riley printed up some business cards featuring the doyenne of Dictionary Corner wearing a deerstalker hat. Instead, she settled on The Secret Lives Of Words, which effectively casts her as a linguistic biographer, revealing how particular terms began life and gradually grew to take on the familiar meanings they have today.
So it is that over the course of an illuminating evening we learn how “currying favour” originally referred to combing a French horse called Fauvel, the surprising way in which the two meanings of “pupil” are related, the connection between the Jerusalem artichoke and Jerusalem (there isn’t one) and the precise moment in 1704 that the expression “to steal one’s thunder” was brought into existence by a playwright miffed that a production of Macbeth had appropriated his contraption for simulating the sound of storms.
All of which, added to the fact that she would probably admit to not being a natural performer, reminds us that Dent is first and foremost a professional lexicographer and self-proclaimed word nerd rather than a TV personality – albeit one who can count on the support of a cast of famous comedian friends (David O’Doherty, Jo Brand, Joe Lycett wearing a My Little Pony face mask) to provide short video interludes and prompts.
The scene from Blackadder The Third in which Robbie Coltrane’s Samuel Johnson presents his dictionary to King George is used to underline her point that such tomes are never comprehensive and language is never static, while clips of Billy Connolly and Brian Blessed illustrate the segment on swearing and its physiological/psychological benefits. She traces the way in which blasphemous exclamations have lost their resonance whereas blunt anatomical terms that were once perfectly acceptable have become taboo thanks to our squeamishness about bodily functions. Somewhere along the route we sadly lost marvellous words like “arseropes” (intestines), but “fuck”, she notes, still retains some of its power even after 500 years and is arguably the most versatile word in the English language.
In the second half of the show Dent delves into linguistic gaps, arguing that we shouldn’t merely try to plug them by forging new words or borrowing from other languages but by digging around in historical dictionaries like archaeologists in search of buried treasure. After all, our ancestors already had words for the comfy old clothes you slip into at the end of the day in the privacy of your own home (“huffle-buffs”) and the frantic last-minute tidying you do before guests arrive (“scurryfunge”).
The latter is Dent’s favourite word, and a cornerstone of her contention that we should learn to love American English, which is received with good-natured dissent from the audience. Many Americanisms were originally English, she points out, while several terms that we would consider quintessentially English (“stiff upper lip”, for instance) actually came from across the Atlantic. She also mounts a defence (or should that be “defense”?) of American spelling, venturing that it sensibly tidies up some of the bizarre historical idiosyncrasies to make it easier for learners.
On the subject of spelling, if you’ve ever wondered why “ghost” has a silent “h”, Dent has the extraordinary answer: it was inserted in the fifteenth century by a Flemish typesetter, brought to England by print pioneer William Caxton, who simply felt that “gost” looked wrong. This is just one example proving her point that mistakes – typos, mishearings, mixed metaphors, so-called “eggcorns” (when one word is substituted for another similar-sounding one, usually in ignorance) – are not only fascinating and often funny but can also be critical catalysts of linguistic change, as can technological developments and popular culture (she uses the example of Love Island).
Ultimately, The Secret Lives Of Words demonstrates that dictionaries are reflective of usage rather than prescriptive and that language is an ever-evolving entity. Audience members may grumble about personal bugbears (“like” used as a filler, “literally” now more often meaning “figuratively”), implying that they’re symptomatic of declining standards. But, as Johnson himself observed, anyone who imagines that “his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay” is deserving of derision; to do so is to attempt “to lash the wind”.
words BEN WOOLHEAD
Susie Dent is in Bristol next week and will tour on-and-off until January. More info here