D'oh! Homer Simpson joins Dr Johnson; The doughnut-loving yellow

Homer Simpson has joined Dr Samuel Johnson. The yellow dad from The Simpsons and the dead English thinker in the white wig are now partners in lexicographical history. Johnson gave us one of the first dictionaries of the English language. Homer (a good literary name) has given us "d'oh!"

"D'oh" has a proud place in the new online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I hope it stays there too because "d'oh" is one of those genuinely useful new words for an experience that has previously been unnamed. "D'oh" means the penny has dropped. It's used when I or someone equally stupid works out something blindingly obvious.

But "d'oh" 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 publisher Bloomsbury to produce Encarta, a multi-million-dollar project claiming to be the first true dictionary of "world English". Not that the likes of the OED and Longman are shrinking into dusty non-competitiveness. The d'oh 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 at a rate not seen since Shakespeare's time. The fecundity of Elizabethan language was an extraordinary phenomenon produced by an extraordinary society. It was that teeming, straggling beast of a language that 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 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 nationalised French language has been dwindling in relative size and global reach ever since. ( propos, when was the last time you heard a chic new Gallicism? Once, you would not have been considered a civilised boulevardier without a scattering of mots justes, je ne sais quois and savoir faires.) English - stretched and pummelled by a tireless gabble of journos, admen, rappers, surfers, druggies, cops, criminals, geeks and gurus - carries on growing and dominating the global tongue.

The only people who don't seem to be extending the world domination of English are the British. Johnson's language is now minted elsewhere. Huge factories churn out the stuff in Silicon Valley, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong and Kingston. In comparison, we have a cottage industry 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, emote, double whammy, synergy, cyberspace - mostly made in the USA, all adopted enthusiastically by us.

In the customised spelling dictionary on my computer, I find words such as "aspirational", "chocoholic", "dot.com", "prequel" and "thirtysomething". We probably no longer even recognise such coinages as Americanisms, 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, with black American street culture having redefined "wicked" and "bad". 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 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 the Anglo-Indian word "pukka". British TV writers are 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 "Loadsamoney" may well stand the test of dictionary time. New British creatures appear from research surveys and style pages all the time: white van man, ladettes, Essex girls.

We've just lost the knack of getting our fellow English-speakers to pick up our phrases. 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 and groovy. 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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