Recessionista: not the ‘Millionth English word’

Today’s Word of the Day is inspired by the item on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, where this morning there was a discussion about whether the ‘Millionth English word’ will be coined today. You can read about this and hear the discussion on the BBC site.

Global Language Monitor declared the millionth word would be ‘Web 2.0’ – but we already know that one, don’t we? So I’ve picked on another word thrown out during the discussion:

recessionista

Wikipedia defines this as ‘a blend of the words Fashionista and recession that describes a person who strives to remain fashionable on a minimal budget’. You can find its use tracked on Word Spy and find a fully-fledged article in The New York Times for 24 October 2008.

Should Laureates wear cloaks? And other reasons why poetry matters

Andrew Motion and the poet’s cloak

As a delightful footnote to yesterday’s post about Andrew Motion, I came across Nancy Banks-Smith’s review in the Guardian of Wednesday night’s Why Poetry Matters on BBC2. ‘Among the better bits was Andrew Motion’s abashed admission that he used to wear a cloak, feeling it was incumbent on a poet. His mother bought it for him.’ So although yesterday’s poem showed the influence of the Georgian Brooke, Motion (bless him) already saw himself as a latter-day Tennyson. Well, it did the trick: like his hero, Andrew eventually took the Laureate’s wreath as well as his cloak!

The Poetry Archive site has a recording of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in a wonderfully atmospheric wax-cylinder recording.

Poet of yesterday still haunts poet today

The First World War is still providing material for poems for today

The First World War continues to haunt poets. The first contribution to BBC Radio 3’s Poems for Today in their Poetry Season 2009 was broadcast this morning on the Breakfast programme. It was, Sara Mohr-Pietsch told us, recorded by Andrew Motion just before he relinquished the post of Poet Laureate. It’s a personal and not a ceremonial work, in which Motion recalls when he was 17 and the poems of Rupert Brooke were ‘the only ones I had read in their entirety’. Brooke’s collected works had been presented to him at school and the leather-bound volume took pride of place in his parents’ ‘whirligig bookcase’ (this was the word Andrew Motion actually used, as I found out when I caught the poem a second time round over lunch, not ‘hurdy-gurdy’ as I put this morning: must pay more attention). With two friends he visited the island of Skyros to find Brooke’s grave – and the heat on the harsh hillside, he says, meant the ill-equipped English schoolboys almost joined their hero in early graves. Even in 1969 this devotion to Brooke (‘who died,’ the grave records, ‘for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks’) must have seemed quaint English nostalgia. Read more about Brooke’s death and see a picture of the grave on Wikipedia and Poet’s Graves.

You should be able to listen again to all forty Poems for Today readings on the BBC site for the next year, though at present there are no recordings available. So make do with Ian McMillan’s more cheerful collaborative poem ‘I pull the curtains wide and feel the morning on my face’, composed with the help of listeners this morning in a new form he’s calling the ‘Pietsch’ in honour of the Breakfast presenter.

Poems of Today, incidentally, was a very popular collection first published in 1915 and much reprinted; I have a leather-bound copy on my shelves dating from 1925 and a school edition from 1942. The preface tells us: ‘This book has been compiled in order that boys and girls, already perhaps familiar with the great classics of the English speech, may also know something of the newer poetry of their own day. Most of the writers are living, and the rest are still vivid memories among us, while one of the youngest, almost as these words are written, has gone singing to lay down his life for his country’s cause.’ That ‘singing’ young poet was, of course, Brooke. There’s more about the collection, and where to find it online, on Literary Connections.

More about the new Poet Laureate, including exclusive revelations, in a later post!

Stories are easy, sentences are hard

That, roughly, was what James Patterson said on last night’s edition of The Verb, Ian McMillan’s always entertaining discourse on matters literary on BBC Radio 3. Fortunately I had timed the washing up to catch Patterson’s thoughts on writing, though this also meant I couldn’t capture his exact words because my hands were in the sink. Still, if phenomenally successful ‘commercial writer’ (as he modestly described himself) finds sentence-level work harder than creating block-buster plots, where does that leave all the carefully-structured word, sentence and text level work in the literacy strategies?

Just where they were, I suppose.

(And, yes, I could listen again online to The Verb to discover Patterson’s exact words – but hey, sentences are hard and it’s easier to tell you to that yourselves. You’ll enjoy it.)

It’s a bearpark out there

British Association of Private Security Companies is led by Bearpark. But not in one.

‘Andrew Bearpark, director general of the British Association of Private Security Companies, said he was in favour of self-regulation. But he has raised the prospect of an international code of conduct.’ Soberly thus, today’s Guardian reports how the Foreign Office proposes self-regulation for private military firms. It is somehow fitting that the leader of these ‘private military companies, some of which have been engaged in highly controversial activities’ (as the paper also notes) should be called Bearpark, even though he doubtless denies that they ever behave as if they were in one. Looking up this article online, I discovered from an item on 16 June 2007 that Andrew Bearpark was ‘probably the Coalition Provisional Authority’s central British figure’ in the US-led administration set up to run Iraq following the invasion in 2003. He described Britain as ‘being complicit in Iraq’s current position as a failed state due to its the failure to prepare a postwar plan.’ So he clearly knows how a bearpark looks and behaves.

Still, we must not jump to conclusions about the meaning of names. Another article informs us that ‘Bearpark comes from “beau” park, “beautiful” park’. Unfortunately, it also tells us that Bearpark (two miles outside the fair city of Durham) ‘is hideous’. Let us hope that both Iraq and Bearpark, Durham, have more beautiful futures.

Cry, God for Harry, England, and Saint Bede?

Shakespeare and our other saints

1599: A Year in the Life of William ShakespeareIt’s St George’s Day again. Last year I was startled to be presented with a synthetic rose (made in China) on behalf of Tameside Council to celebrate England’s patron saint. Today in The Guardian, Ian McMillan reminds us that April 23rd is a deadly day for poets, marking as it does the deaths of not only Shakespeare but also Wordsworth, Cervantes, Vaughan, Brooke and others. He’s staying in today, just in case.

Alice in SunderlandA more cheerful celebration might be to read James Shapiro’s fascinating account in 1599 of the year the Globe was built, Shakespeare completed Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It and drafted Hamlet. Those who are rather troubled by the pushy patriotism of today’s flag wavers should enjoy the reflection by Michael Goldfarb on last night’s Night Waves (BBC Radio 3), in which he points out just how many other countries claim St George (he was Turkish, for a start). For a more appropriate patron saint, he suggests Bede, who died on 26 May 735 – though his feast day, confusingly, is May 25. Sometimes it takes an outsider such as the American Goldfarb, to remind us of the oddities of our customs. (His short contribution isn’t listed on the Night Waves page but starts about 38 minutes into the programme.)

For a quick and colourful account of Bede and much else, take a look at Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot, which featured in an earlier post.

Shill

Differences between American and British coinage.

Today’s Word of the Day is shill. You may not find this in a British English dictionary, but the American journalist Michael Tomasky wrote in his Guardian blog post yesterday:

“Listen up. I am not a shill!!”

The Oxford English Dictionary does list the word in Tomasky’s sense of ‘a decoy or accomplice, esp. one posing as an enthusiastic or successful customer to encourage other buyers, gamblers, etc,’ which it dates to 1916. It adds, from 1976, ‘One who poses as a disinterested advocate of another but is actually of the latter’s party; a mouthpiece, a stooge’. The usage is described as ‘slang (chiefly N. Amer.), [Origin unknown.]’

Interestingly, Tomasky later uses the verb shilling – what kind of a coinage is that?

Taxonomy, tax avoidance and banned words

Banned words and secret tax documents make uneasy companions

Today’s Word of the Day, taxonomy, is hastily rescued from the ‘banned jargon list’ before it disappears.

The BBC site has an article about council leaders’ ‘banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon’. A Plain English Campaign spokeswoman said: ‘Churchill and Einstein were both plain speakers and they did OK.’ So the theory or relativity is plain English, then? Odd, too, that quantum is on the ‘worst offenders’ list.

I console myself that my concerns about the loss of, inter alia, symposium and pathfinder may be misplaced. After all, the mighty Barclays Bank (have they banned apostrophes?) has been granted an injunction (councils note: ‘gagging order’ to be used in future) to remove documents about its tax affairs from the Guardian site. Only 127 people had, the paper reports, accessed the documents before they were removed at 2.30 am yesterday. Yet these same papers are now available elsewhere on the Internet in seconds by searching for something like ‘Barclays tax avoidance secret documents’ (though all references to this are immediately removed from the paper’s discussion threads, so don’t say I told you). So it looks as though ‘coterminosity’ will be at least as safe as a banker’s bonus.

Have a profitable and jargon-free day – even the taxonomists amongst you!

‘Playwrights are more important than politicians’

Mark Ravenhill comments in The Guardian: ‘Playwrights are more important than politicians. So why do powerful people mesmerise me?’

He claims: ‘I think what playwrights do is more important than what most politicians do. Being a dramatist isn’t just about writing. That part often takes just a few weeks. But we do spend a long time thinking about how people behave, how they live together, how they might live together better – as well as the great cruelties they are capable of. And we’re constantly testing language, time and space in our work, to extend the possibilities of human experience. Politicians are concerned with the pragmatic business of running the world; artists, meanwhile, dedicate themselves to finding new insights into our existence. Most of the insights are feeble or crackpot – but some are visionary.’ And, as he says, many are about politicians.

Free resources on National Theatre productions

Really useful education packs from National Theatre productions

The National Theatre has some really useful education packs from productions past as well as present – though they’re not very easy to find on the website. The section you need is in the ‘Discover’ section, where you should follow the link to Resource Packs; the Past productions section, in particular, has a long list. Of course Stagework, also from the National Theatre, is excellent and more interactive, but these pages on the main NT site have materials from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet and Translations.