By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

cartoon – the stuff of Antz.

      The students weren’t the first to think up beedom. The OED editors had already found an instance of it in 1868. They also found one use of beeishness in 1674. Beedom turns up several times in the writing of the missionary poet John Bradburne. It is the sort of word that gets repeatedly invented.

      I wonder if von Frisch was ever stung? An occupational hazard of an entomologist, I imagine. And if I ever had the chance to do some detailed work on the languages and dialects of animals, I think I’d prefer sheep to bees, having been stung more than once.

      Of course, all this talk of language and dialects is metaphorical when applied to animals. Von Frisch knew this very well. We can hardly compare the infinite possibilities of expression and comprehension mediated through human language to the limited set of instinctive reactions that we find in a bee, whose brain, he pointed out, is the size of a grass seed. And we would find huge limitations of communication, similarly, if we were to investigate the communicative patterns of larger-brained animals, such as we find in gull cries, thrush songs, ape calls – or sheep bleats.

      We do keep underestimating the ability of animals to learn facets of language, though. For a long time, it was thought there were certain properties of language that animals could never learn, and this may still be true. Maybe the defining characteristic of humanity is indeed being ‘Homo loquens’, the speaking animal. But animal researchers have been steadily chipping away at the idea that there is a major evolutionary gap between humans and other species.

      Some animals may not be able to speak, write, or sign in the way humans can; but they can do more than we might expect. Chimps can be taught manual signs. Parrots imitate a remarkable range of vocal sounds. Dogs recognize subtle tones of voice. There was even news, in 2006, of a species of African monkey that varied the sequence of calls in order to express different meanings – much as we vary word order in English. And in the same year a research team in California reported that they had taught some starlings to tell the difference between the song equivalent of simple sentences and those containing a song into which another bit of song had been inserted – in effect, a subordinate clause.

      Actually, 2006 was quite a year, because in August there was a report suggesting that cows have regional accents too. Apparently some Somerset dairy farmers had noticed that cows have different moos, depending on which herd they come from. Mooolects. Maybe bleatlects aren’t such a fantastic idea after all.

      A huge flock of starlings flew towards me and then turned back at the last minute, as if they were wanting to keep out of Gwynedd. Maybe starlingese syntax is different there. Or maybe they understand more about human dialects than we give them credit for. If so, any especially sensitive starlings would steer well clear of the town I was about to pass through, Caernarfon.

      There is an English four-letter taboo word beginning with the letter c which is so sensitive still, in the minds of many, that if I were to print it in full in this book I would cause unknown quantities of upset and complaint. So, not being in the business of upsetting readers, I will rely on folk memory to supply the missing word. And in case there are any who do not know what I am talking about, I will provide a clue in a couple of paragraphs’ time.

      In Caernarfon, this same word is used among some sections of the population as an amiable form of address. Much as you might hear ‘Hello, mate’ as a friendly greeting, so in the streets of Caernarfon you can hear an affable ‘Hello, c—.’ Anywhere else in the UK, such a greeting would earn you a black eye at least. But not here.

      Book publishers are able to eliminate such words at an early stage, if they want to. But what do you do with the Internet? The search engines had a real problem when they first tried to devise filters which would identify pages containing offensive words or images. They thought that all they had to do was have a piece of software search through a page, and if it found a string of letters which added up to a potentially sensitive word, they would block access to it.

      The only thing was, the software didn’t make a distinction between the string of letters when it was a separate word and the string when it was part of a word. So, the search engine having decided that sex was a ‘bad word’, the residents of Sussex and Essex found they were unable to access many web pages relating to their counties. Not to mention the good citizens of Scunthorpe.

      Software is a bit more advanced these days, but it still lacks the kind of linguistic sophistication which is needed to ensure that basic blunders are avoided. A couple of years ago, there was an Internet news page that reported a street stabbing in Chicago. The automatically-generated ads down the side of the screen said ‘Buy your knives here’ and ‘Get cheap knives here’. The dumb software had spotted the word knife and assumed that this was what needed to be plugged. It wasn’t clever enough to analyse the content of the page and see that, if there were to be any ads at all, they should be about personal protection.

      Publications go to extraordinary lengths sometimes to protect their readers from the shock of encountering a taboo word. Even dictionaries. In the 1940s, Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the first to pay full and detailed attention to all four-letter words, was banned by some libraries and placed on the reserved shelves by others. If you were interested in slang and asked to see it, the librarian would look you up and down as if you were a pervert.

      Modern dictionaries generally include all taboo words, marking them with a stylistic label such as ‘taboo’ or ‘offensive’. But even these sometimes back away from a full frontal presentation. I have a dictionary, published not very long ago, where the last word on the right-hand page to be given a definition is fuck. This should therefore appear as the guide-word (or ‘running head’) at the top right-hand corner of the page. But it doesn’t. Instead we see its alphabetical predecessor, fuchsia.

      As I drove through Caernarfon, past the castle, I stopped at a zebra crossing to let a young man cross. He had just stepped onto the crossing when a car coming from the opposite direction zipped past in front of him, giving him a bit of a fright. He shouted after the miscreant. It was the c-word again, but not at all affable this time.

       3

       We Want Information

      PORTMEIRION

      The road south from Caernarfon into mid-Wales runs along the Lleyn peninsula then cuts across through Porthmadog and past the Italianate village created by Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1920s in loving memory of his visits to Portofino, on the coast of north-west Italy. Portmeirion. I had to go and worship there, for a little while, because it was chosen as the location for The Prisoner, the 1960s cult television series starring Patrick McGoohan. I am of the generation that watched it assiduously, week by week, and puzzled over what on earth it was all about.

      Portmeirion was ‘the Village’ where (it seemed) kidnapped spies and agents of all descriptions were kept for interrogation, so that whatever data they had in their heads might be extracted for use by those (whoever they were) who were in charge. McGoohan’s character has suddenly resigned from his job in British intelligence. He is followed home, put to sleep with a gas spray, and taken to the Village. Each episode begins with his character, now a prisoner, waking up in his new bedroom and having an exchange with the Village’s current second-in-command (‘Number 2’).

      PRISONER: Where am I?

      NUMBER 2: In the Village.

      PRISONER: What do you want?

      NUMBER 2: Information.

      PRISONER: Whose side are you on?

      NUMBER 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information. Information.

      PRISONER: You won’t get it.

      NUMBER 2: By hook or by crook, we will.

      PRISONER: