The lost art of coining a phrase

HOMER Simpson has joined Dr Johnson.

The yellow dad from the Simpsons and the dead English thinker in the white wig are now partners in lexicographical history. Dr Johnson gave us the first Dictionary of the English Language. Homer (a good literary name, that) has given us "doh".

Doh has a proud place in the new online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I hope it stays there too, because doh is one of those genuinely useful new words for an experience that has thus far been unnamed.

Doh means the penny has dropped: it's used at that moment when I or someone equally stupid works out something blindingly obvious.

The literate Bostonians have a poetic synonym for the same thing: light dawns over marblehead (try saying it in a Loyd Grossman voice).

Doh, I think we will agree, is much neater.

But doh is very unlikely to outlive Homer any more than wakey- wakey outlived Billy Cotton. (What? Who?) There are too many new words pushing for attention and too many big companies pushing new words at us. Lexicography has become big business.

Two years ago, Microsoft linked up with the publishers Bloomsbury to produce Encarta, a multimillion dollar project claiming to be the first true dictionary of "world English". Not that the likes of the OED and Long-man's are shrinking into dusty non-competitiveness.

The doh story is only the latest in a long line of new-word press releases pushed out to a compliant media. We have discovered a rich new seam of Zeitgeist, and the publishers are neologising all the way to the bank.

New English words are being minted - forged? - at a rate not seen since Shakespeare's time. The bewildering fecundity of Elizabethan language was an extraordinary phenomenon produced by an extraordinary society.

It was that teeming, straggling heap of a language that Dr Johnson's dictionary was designed to tame. Some writers, such as Jonathan Swift, wanted us to follow the French example and create an academy to regulate and limit the flow of new and made-up words. Johnson would have none of it: he scorned the lexicographer who deluded himself that he could "embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay?" The patriotic Johnson won his historic battle with the French as surely as a Wellington or a Nelson. The nationalised French language has been dwindling in relative size and global reach ever since.

(Apropos which, when was the last time you heard a chic new Frenchism?

Once, you would not have been considered a civilised boule- vardier without a scattering of mots justes, je ne sais quois and BCBGs). English, wrenched and stretched and pummelled by a tireless gabble of journos, admen, sports commentators, rappers, surfers, druggies, cops, criminals, geeks and gurus, carries on growing and dominating the global tongue.

The only group of people who don't seem to be extending the world domination of English are the English.

Johnson's language is now being minted elsewhere.

There are huge factories churning out the stuff in Silicon Valley, San Fernando Valley, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong and Kingston. In comparison, we have a cottage industry occasionally putting out some crafted piece of retro-slang for the niche American audience: Austin Healeys for car enthusiasts, Austin Powers for connoisseurs of dated London hip-speak.

OUR linguistic balance of payments is at crisis point. We import everything and export precious little. Think of the major slang expressions of the past couple of decades that have entered the language and stayed.

Yuppies, wired, cool, go for it, fashion victims, rubberneck, emote, double whammy, synergy, cyberspace - mostly made in the USA, all adopted enthusiastically by us. We couldn't even find an expression to denote our growing unease with the Hollywood habit of pouring lurid troubles in public ears. "Too much information" had to come from America too.

In the customised spelling dictionary on my computer, I find words like aspirational, chocoholic, dotcom, morph, prequel and thirtysomething.

We probably don't even recognise such coinages as Americanisms any longer, any more than we recall how American imports such as calculate, lengthy and presidential antagonised the Victorians (as, indeed, did "antagonise").

The Victorians would be in deep trouble today, as black American street culture teaches us to redefine wicked and bad. The language of public affairs is not our own.

White American spin doctors made us ask "Where's the beef?" and parrot "It's the economy, stupid". I don't think we can expect any buzzwords from the British election to storm the US linguistic charts.

We haven't lost the ability to coin vivid and vigorous expressions. The fine Anglo-Saxon tradition of gutsy little slang words for love, sex and money is still going strong. The Americans and Australians, with their incessant y endings (scary, freaky), have nothing like snog and dosh, shag and sprog.

Only a British charity (Comic Relief) would use "stonking" and "pants" in its publicity material. Only an English TV chef would resurrect an old Anglo-Indian word like "pukka". Our TV writers are just as prolific as their American counterparts. Years after Dad's Army, we still don't panic and they still don't like it up 'em. "Suits you" and "loads-amoney" may well stand the test of dictionary time. New British creatures appear from the research surveys and style pages all the time: white van man, ladettes, Essex girls etc.

WE'VE just lost the knack of getting our fellow English-speakers to pick up our phrases when we've finished with them. As an export phenomenon, British coinage is about as successful as British beef. It wasn't ever thus.

Within a couple of years of the Beatles first appearing, we had the whole world sounding fab, groovy and gear. When the next biggest pop phenomenon came along, the Spice Girls had to put up websites to help their young fans understand what they were saying.

Perhaps Tony's Cronies or the Portillistas can do something to boost our flagging word economy. You can't help feeling, though, that those purely local verbal phenomena may soon be on the endangered list too.

* Mark Jones is editor of High Life magazine.

Copyright 2001
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