Something Rhymes with Purple - Masheen

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

It’s an honor to have you with us today Purple People as we plow through the colorful world of the lexicographer, author, language reformer and perhaps famously the dictionary creator, Noah Webster.  Known as the father of American English, he is the man principally responsible for the loss of the ‘u’ in the American spelling of words like ‘color’ and the person responsible for adding J and V to our alphabet.  Although we still visit islands (not ilands) and operate machines rather than masheens, his contribution to language is staggering and in this episode Susie and Gyles will deep dive into what cawt on and which went to the linguistic jail (thankfully ‘jail’ was one of the replacements that did catch on and replace its former ‘gaol’).  If you have a question or there’s a topic you’d like us to explore in a future episode then please email [e-mail]  A Somethin’ Else production.  To buy SRWP mugs and more head to.... https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple  Susie’s trio: Finagal - to use devious methods to bring something about Havey-cavey - unsteady/uncertain or not sure of what you’re doing  Toot-Moot - a low, muffled conversation  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android and play LEGO Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes with Purple. It's co-hosted by me, Giles Brandreth, and my friend, Susie Dent. Today, we are celebrating one of the great figures in the world of words. We did an episode a while back, episode 72, about Dr. Johnson, the great Dr. Samuel Johnson, who compiled the first well-known English dictionary. But today we're going to look

at the life and work of another key figure in the world of words, another great dictionary maker, an American called Noah Webster. And I've actually been to the home of Webster's dictionary. I've been to the place where Noah Webster was born. And I'm showing you, because I can't show the viewers, but you can see me on your computer. I'm showing you the facsimile that I've got of his first dictionary, a compendious dictionary of the English language by Noah Webster. And there's a picture of the great man who looks quite endearing on the cover, bushy eyebrows, sunken eyes, quite a prominent nose. Anyway, he was born, this man, Noah Webster, and you're going to be astounded if you listen on to the influence he's had on world language. He was born in October 1758, on October the 16th, in West Hartford, Connecticut. And I think he shares a birthday with Oscar Wilde if it's

October the 16th. Anyway, in 1774, when he was 16, he went to Yale, where he was a student, but he interrupted his studies there briefly to take part in the American Revolution. Graduated in 1778, began studying law, but because of family finance difficulties, he had to give that up, and he became a schoolteacher. Persisted with the law, admitted to the bar in 1781, but he was teaching in New York, and he became dissatisfied with the British-made textbooks. Because this is the time, as it were, before then, the Americans, you know, not the indigenous people, but the people who arrived in America, they were speaking English. They mean those who spoke in Spanish, because they came over with the Spaniards, but the people who arrived in America, they were speaking English. They'd been those who spoke in Spanish because they came over with the Spaniards, but the British had been there

and British English was spoken. And he set about changing all this. So that's the sort of overall view of the great man. Why do you think he's important? Why are we devoting a whole episode to this man? Why should more people have heard of him? People have heard of Webster's Dictionary because of the line from a famous Bob Hope, Bing Crosby film, we're on the road to Morocco. Like Webster's Dictionary, we're Morocco bound. But beyond that, why is Webster so important? If you go to the States, and obviously I studied there for a very long time, people will often introduce the definition of a word by saying Webster says, in much the same way as if you're in Britain, you might say Oxford says.

And Oxford has become a metonym, if you like, for the dictionary, because, you know, as we've often said, Giles, there is no academy for English, there is no government. And so people look to the dictionary to lay down the law. But, you know, we still speak of Webster in the present tense, even though he died in 1843. And he certainly reinforced the idea that the true determiner of correctness when it comes to language was usage. It was the usage of people in society, not edicts from a, you know, from a dictionary maker or an individual or a privileged class. There was no room for linguistic elitism. He hated it, notably because he thought of it as British. And we'll

come to that, his, you know, the difference between British and American English and how much, so much of that goes down to Webster. But he's probably the least known of the founding fathers, isn't he? Because his fame as a dictionary maker actually has come to overshadow, I suppose, so many of his other accomplishments. His brain was picked by George Washington about how to set up a government. You know, he was an extraordinary individual. And I'd love to tell you in a bit just what he felt about British English and how important he thought it was to set up a national language. Tell us now, because I know that when he was quite young,

when he was doing this teaching in New York, he became dissatisfied with the texts that were available for children because he felt they ignored American culture. And he wanted to create a distinctively American kind of education. It's good that you speak of him as one of the founding fathers, because people don't realize how fundamental language is. I think language is the reason this podcast is important. The reason language to me is important. I was chatting the other day to some people who had come from Afghanistan recently, who had left Afghanistan. And one of them was an interpreter. He'd worked for the British in Afghanistan.

And he spoke perfect English because he was an interpreter. But his family who'd also come with him didn't speak English. And they said, apparently, we're going to be given these courses on becoming, you know, on British culture. And I said, well, all you need, in my view, to do is to make sure that your family speak English as well as you do, because the way to absorb a culture is to be able to speak its language. If you can speak its language, then you can watch its television, you can read its literature, you can absorb its culture. Now, the problem for Webster was that in America, he felt that what they were absorbing through the reading that they had was British culture. And he wanted to create an American culture. Is that right? He did. And for this, you have to remember the nastiness of the breakup between the US and

Britain. You know, it was an eight-year war, thousands and thousands of casualties, and the Americans rejected British aristocracy and the British structure of government. And because of that, and I have to recommend a really fantastic book here, if you are interested in the love-hate relationship between British and American English and how over here we tend to, you know, completely denigrate American English as a sort of mongrel version of our own. And this is a book called The Prodigal Tongue by Lynn Murphy and she goes into this in a lot of detail and talks about how rejecting the king's English was basically another way to reject the king which is obviously what Americans wanted to do and in fact some early Americans went so far as

to suggest that French or Greek or even Hebrew should be the national language just to be different from the British. And Noah Webster came along and he said that Britain's language, our linguistic preferences, should not be copied over there because the taste, it says, the taste of her writers is already corrupted and her language on the decline. So he wanted Americans to assert their nationality. They were a new independent nation and they needed to develop their own ways of speaking and writing. He wanted to reject the British standard, which was sabotage, he thought, and bring a new kind of English to his country. English to his country. He says our political harmony requires a uniformity of language and said that Americans should look to America for that language and not to Britain. And that goes in tandem with his also wanting to make it much easier. You know, he rejected the kind of archaisms of British spelling, for example, which you and I love because they're a gateway to etymology.

But it's very hard to argue that when a child is learning how to spell centre which we spell r e because the normans spelt it that way and they were our conquerors you know it's it's why should we argue that that is a better version of the american centre e r at the end because that is actually how we say it and that that was thanks to Webster, who wanted to make it a lot more comprehensible to American students, to children, and also a lot, lot easier to write. So there was a big, profound political principle informing all of these decisions, but he also did want to simplify spelling. Now, give us some specifics on this, because all this began before his dictionary, which I showed you the facsimile of from 1806.

Right at the beginning, in 1783, he published this rather portentously titled Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part 1, known as the blue-backed speller because of the binding of the book. It's never been out of print, and it provided him with an income for the rest of his life. People estimate that it sold a hundred million copies, if not more. What was this simplification of spelling? What was it all about? His impact on spelling, I would think it was not to the degree that he had hoped. He wanted to simplify it to the extreme. So he wrote Essays and Fugitive, which he wrote without any writings. And if you read that, was is spelled W-A-Z. And he gets rid of all the kind of sort of Chaucerian remnants and cleans those up. So tongue, he wanted to spell T-U-N-G, feather, F-E-T-H-E-R, and so on. And he did actually sometimes look back to the etymology as well. So he said that bridegroom should actually be bridegum, as it was in old

English. It's got nothing to do with the groom of the stable. It's just it sounded like that to us. So it was actually guma, G-U-M-A. It was a sort of another word for a man, really. But because, you know, we mixed it up, it was our mistake with groom. We just kind of put that in instead. He wasn't averse to looking to a bit of etymology, but also he just wanted to make it easier. Quite a lot of them didn't stick, as I say, but some of them did. And you have to remember, we talked about this in our American English episode, that English was all over the shop when the settlers went over on the Mayflower and other ships

to, you know, found America. I mean, as you rightly said, there were so many indigenous tongues and indigenous peoples there. But when they took English over, spelling was in absolute disarray. And you will find centre, C-E-N-T-E-R, honour, H-O-N-O-R, rumour, R-U-M-O-R, all of these you'll find in Shakespeare's first

folio, which his compositors used. So, you know, a lot of these spellings were ours, but Webster decided to take the ones that weren't so common in Britain and to establish them as American English in order to differentiate them. And he literally took every word in the language. I mean, he began at the beginning and worked his way through. Yeah, he was extraordinary. And actually, he also wanted to reflect the influences of those Native American terms. I mean, English became awash with terms that were borrowed from indigenous languages by the founding fathers, I suppose, you know, as they encountered new things, new environmental phenomena that they just didn't have words for. So they did borrow things like burying the hatchet or tomahawk or moccasins, etc. They borrowed all of these words. And again, we went into this quite a lot in our American English episode. But so did Webster. He wanted to reflect those.

Why does it catch on? Because I know he wanted, for example, the word machine. Sensibly, he wanted to spell it M-A-S-H-E-E-N, machine. Plough, instead of the O-U-G-H, P-L-O-W. It's so much simpler. The draft, a draft, D-R-A-F-T, is much better than A-U-G-H-T. Why did his spellings not catch on universally? It's a really hard one to unpick this. I mean, there's not really been any successful effort at spelling reform. And you will still find movements to encourage spelling reform here in Britain. There's a simplified spelling society, I think they're called, who are calling understandably for a simplification of our very gnarly spelling system.

And I feel slightly torn on this because I know just how difficult it is for our kids to learn spelling, and it's almost impossible for very difficult for non-native speakers. But as you know, I love the fact that they hide behind them all these fantastic etymological stories. So I feel slightly torn on it, but there's not really been any concerted effort that has made a universal impact on a language. So why some caught on and why others didn't, I'm not completely sure. He did actually contribute to the alphabet, didn't he? I mean, he gave us letters that we didn't really have before. Or is that an urban myth?

He was the first English lexicographer really to recognise letters J and V as separate, distinct letters of the alphabet rather than as alternate forms of I and U, because they were very commonly interchangeable. And, you know, they were kind of, they had the same pronunciation, etc. So those two weren't really distinct until he made them so. Again, I think it was because he wanted to simplify things. So before him, English dictionaries would have J words throughout the I section. So ice would be there after jangle, apparently, and V words would appear under U, and it wasn't very simple at all. So again, he wanted to impose some kind of uniformity on these, and he was partly successful. You need to explain this to me, Susie, because

I've opened his dictionary, the Companion's Dictionary of the English Language, the 1806 edition, okay? And under J, and you're telling me that he pioneered, did he pioneer the use of J? No, he pioneered the separation of J, because a word like jabber, which is the, I love it, the first word under J, jabber, verb, to talk idly, chatter, prate, that's rather nice. Jabbering is idle talk, prating, noise. A jabberer is one who talks unintelligibly or idly. I feel I may be, I'm a bit of a jabberer today.

But that can only be jabber. It can't be yabber, can it? Or yabber. So the letter J began as a kind of typographical sort of embellishment of the letter I. And it represented lots of different things, really. But they started out as the same character. And it started with a pictogram, actually, a Phoenician pictogram, which was a leg with a hand. That was how it was first represented in pictorial form. But both I and J were used interchangeably to express the sound of both the vowel and the consonant. And I think it

was during the Italian Renaissance, there was a grammarian who was known as the father of the letter J because he made then a clear distinction between the two sounds. because he made then a clear distinction between the two sounds. Giacomo and Jack is a good example. Giacomo is Jack in Italian, yes? Yes. And Jack is our version of Giacomo. So we say Jack, but it's actually an I in both cases.

The J in jam is kind of phonetically the same as the soft G, isn't it, in general? And then the J sound that you hear in hallelujah is is pronounced like a y so i think all of these sounds were used interchangeably and it wasn't webster himself who absolutely you know imposed final order on it because people before him were beginning to do this as i say um during the italian renaissance there were people trying to do this. As I say, during the Italian Renaissance, there were people trying to do this. But he was somebody who certainly kind of laid it down as an unofficial kind of law, if you like, that these two letters were distinct, and they would continue to be so in the American language. I've just looked up jam in his dictionary of 1806. And it says jam, well, there are various versions of it. Jam, the noun, is a conserve of fruit.

Well, that's what we think of as jam. But it also is a child's frock. Isn't that interesting? And it's a bed. A jam is a bed, a child's frock and a conserve of fruit. To jam, the verb, is to confine in or between, to wedge in. Jam with a B is a noun, the upright part of a door. Yeah. A supporter, that's still the same. Isn't that interesting? There's so many reasons why I think we decided we didn't like Americanisms. And maybe it goes back to that same antipathy that Webster himself was showing.

And he wasn't alone. There were a lot of people at the time who thought that, you know, we needed a distinct language. But it's interesting because Americans don't tend to look at British English as being inferior at all. They might see it as being slightly kooky with words like swat and boffin and that kind of thing. But it seems to be a fairly, you know, one-way traffic system, this kind of resentment of another type of English. Well, we're celebrating the great Noah Webster. We'll take a break and maybe then we'll touch on some of his other extraordinary contributions to the world.

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You know that feeling when you're like, why isn't there more of this? This show is so good. That was how I felt when I started to get really hooked on Black Butler that I think is just incredible. Yeah, it's coming back. It's coming back.

He's like, I'm on top of it. I got it. I'm very excited. And this is The Anime Effect, the show that allows It's coming back. He's like, I'm on top of it. I got it. I'm excited. After like a 10-year hiatus. And this is The Anime Effect, the show that allows celebrities to nerd out over their favorite anime, manga, or pop culture. The Akatsuki theme song. You know what it is.

I listen to that one all day. That thing go crazy. That thing keep being the gym going. And they're like, what is he listening to? Oh, it's not even in the gym. I be on the field. I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray.

And I'm Leah President. Find out which live-action anime adaptations David Dostmalchian is praying he'll get to star in. Or how Jamal Williams uses the mindset of Naruto for his NFL career. Listen to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Something Rhymes with Purple, where we are getting stuck in to Noah Webster's spelling reforms, we might like to say. Although I'm not sure they were always reforms. As I said, Giles, quite often he was taking things that had been distinctly British and then recognized perhaps that they were on the wane in Britain, decided then to make these part of America's national language. It was incredibly important to him

and others at the time that they were seen as the embodiments of a new nation. So he hadn't invented these spellings, he'd kind of opted for them, if you like. And I think he understood, because I'm dipping into the preface of the facsimile that I've got of his original dictionary. And he says under orthography, the orthography, that's the way we spell words, isn't it? Orthography? Yes, absolutely. What's the origin of that? Graph is to write, is writing. Yes. And ortho means? Ortho actually in terms of kind of orthopedics and that kind of thing means correct or right. So, orthopaedics were originally kind of resetting children's limbs, if you like, in the correct way. It kind of means writing correctly or

spelling correctly. Yeah, well, he says, the orthography of our language is extremely irregular, and many fruitless attempts have been made to reform it. The utility and expedience of such reform have been controverted. Controverted? Does that mean controversial, do you think? Yeah, controverted means kind of turned on their head, doesn't it? So if something is controverted, it's kind of turned over. So you either argue it or you deny that it's true. And both sides of the question have been maintained with no inconsiderable zeal. But that's the point.

People to this day, I get people who hate what they see as American spellings. I don't know why people can't hang much more loose about language. Oh, good grief. This is always something I've never really understood. I remember talking to Anne Robinson, our new host about American English on the show. And, you know, she, like so many others in Britain, hates, can I get a cappppuccino even though you will find that formulation going back centuries but yes it was popularized by friends and so it is seen as being you know undeniably or unmistakably american but you know sometimes they just say it like it is and there's no rhyme nor reason to say that our spelling is better than theirs simply because we opted as i

say for the kind of anglo-norm O-U-R for honour rather than the O-R which actually etymologically is slightly closer and more faithful to the original which is Latin which didn't have a U in it so the insistence that our English was the right one and you know I could go off on one here just because we used to call autumn fall and we used to talk about sidewalks and so many of the verbs that we think Americans created out of nouns were, you know, were around for a long time in British English before they went over to American English. But this sort of desire to make ourselves distinct was what informed the eventual separation. It's intriguing at the back of the dictionary, he's got a table giving both the British terms for money and the

American equivalent. You know, a farthing was equal to 0.4627 cents. Two farthings equal to, well, obviously twice that. Then there's three farthings. Four farthings was a penny. Tuppence, we know, thruppence. Four pence was a groat. I never knew that. Did you know a groat was four pence? No. Five pence, six pence, seven pence, eightuppence. Fourpence was a groat. I never knew that. Did you know a groat was fourpence? No. Fivepence, sixpence, sevenpence, eightpence. And he gives you what the American values of each of those would be. Twelvepence or a shilling. A crown or five shillings.

A pound or 20 shillings. A guinea or 21 shillings. Oh, and then it says, this is interesting, Irish money is less in value by one thirteenth. Isn't that interesting? A shilling sterling being thirteen pence, Irish a pound. He was an absolute polymath, I think.

You know, we think of him, as I say, as a dictionary maker, but there's so many other accomplishments, really, in terms of his political philosophy, etc. And democracy, because, of course, the dictionary is the absolute quintessential democratic record of language. But it wasn't entirely downhill for Webster in terms of it being easy. I mean, I think establishing these spellings and also pronunciation was, you know,

was quite tricky. And as so often in pronunciation, there are fashions and there are class implications too. So you would find, for example, that Harvard University decided to go for linguistic propriety, and that was training its students in the accent of the English upper classes, because they thought that American English was somehow a poorer cousin. So it's not just the British who see American English as being inferior. Actually, you know, quite a few Americans did as well. And so particularly in New England, there was definitely a copying of British English. So there's all of this mishmash going on, you know, the forces that kept British English and American English apart, but also the ones that kind of tried to bring them together. And it's absolutely fascinating, a kind of war of language, just as we have the dictionary wars these days in terms of who represents language better and who has the, you know, the most

comprehensive record of the language. We're right to describe him as the father of modern American English, are we? Yes. I think, yes. In terms of the popular conception or perception of the authority on American English, you will find people saying Webster says this, Webster says that, meaning it's all right. And he clearly was a most remarkable man. He wrote on so many subjects, politics, economics, medicine, science, as well as language. And he travelled a great deal as well. He collected language.

And he was often, I think, assailed, wasn't he, as people are today, for including slang and jargon in the dictionary, not realising that the dictionary is not sitting in judgment. It is simply recording what happens. Yes. And often slang is the very part of language that you need to look up because, you know, it's unintelligible. It's designed to be unintelligible, really. And so that's why it needs to be documented. But yes, I get this all the time, particularly with words that are allowed on Countdown, the show that I work on. It's, you know, why is that in? Because it's slang. I mean, yes, it is slang. So yeah, it's absolutely fascinating, the history of it. And I think, you know, the fact that he's still referred to as a

sort of living person says a lot about how he is viewed and his importance in the history of it. And I think, you know, the fact that he's still referred to as a sort of living person says a lot about how he is viewed and his importance in the history of American lexicography. And he went one better than Dr. Johnson, because this 1806 dictionary that I've got here, it contains about 5000 more words that were than were in Dr. Johnson's dictionary. So didn't he do well then? So we salute him. Today, the dictionary is known as a Merriam-Webster because I don't think he made a great deal of money out of it. And then it was bought by brothers George and Charles Merriam. Yes. So we salute you, Noah Webster. And you give us, and I'm sorry in a way that his simplification of spelling hasn't worked out. Other people have tried it.

Have we done an episode on Bernard Shaw? We ought to sometime. George Bernard Shaw, the great Irish playwright, because he very much wanted to reform spelling and simplify the language. And indeed, he left part of his considerable estate. For example, you had a share of the rights in the musical My Fair Lady, and that's made millions over the years

for language reform. So people have been trying to do this over the centuries, but somehow language has its own life, doesn't it? You can't tame it. Yes, I remember being a German student that when the German spelling reforms came along, and there is an academy for German as such, and they insisted that certain German characters,

such as the S-set, which stood for a double S, that those be removed from all textbooks. And it was an enormous exercise. You know, they had to reprint so many different books and partially successful, but not entirely. Just as we know, the French Academy tries to eradicate anglicisations creeping into the French language. And it's unfortunately, more or less an impossibility. So thankfully, we don't have one. But Noah Webster certainly,

as I say, is the closest to being an authority on American English in terms of public imagination, as you could get. Well, we here in Purple Country, we believe in letting the language hang loose. And we also believe in listening to people who listen to us. So thank you all for your correspondence. It's purple at something else if you want to get in touch. And who's been in touch this week? As always, we've had some brilliant emails hitting our inbox.

We received an email from Charles and one from Pete, both asking about right and left on the one hand you know why do we use right for a direction and then on the other meaning correct and then pete evan fleet what a brilliant name has asked why left-handers are called southpaws which is a really good question as well so we've spoken before about how left-handers get an incredibly hard time of it completely you know wrongly but they have done right from the start and the sort of southpaw idea I suppose I'll start with that the southpaw was originally used in boxing and a southpaw was somebody who used their left fist, if you like, to land a punch. So they're a left-handed boxer who led with their right hand. And in baseball, it's a left-handed pitcher, a Southpaw.

And that usage in baseball, which I think is probably the one that's being referred to here, is because of the diamond in baseball, which orientates itself to the same points of the compass so the pitcher has his left hand on the south side of his body so that's why he is a southpaw he is a left-handed pitcher so the various meanings of right all come from a common origin start with the beginning at the beginning it goes back to the old english richt or, R-I-H-T, and that originally meant straight. In other words, it wasn't crooked. And we still talk about someone who is a straight person in terms of kind of morally correct or good, don't we? Whereas if somebody is mischievous or nefarious in some way, they are crooked. So that idea of being sort of right in a good way began to catch on so you could say that's the right

answer because it's factually correct it's straight it's not crooked and that concept of morally correct then expanded to mean what you deserve because it's the correct thing so you could say yes it is absolutely right that you were given that right to do something, if you like. So it became a sort of legal entitlement, if you like. And therefore, the dominant hand, the correct one, became the right hand. So then if you were going in a direction that followed your right hand, you were going right. And if you were using your left hand, you would be going left. So it was simply using the body to point you in a particular direction. You turn in the direction of your left hand you would be going left so it was simply using the body to point you in a particular direction you turn in the direction of your right hand or you turn in the direction of your left hand so all of these ideas of right are linked to the idea of being skillful of being

correct of being upright whereas left is then associated with the opposite of being crooked not straight and not correct all of which as i say is very very unfair but um the opposite of being crooked, not straight, and not correct. All of which, as I say, is very, very unfair. But that was an extremely long answer to the question, are the directions and the moral legal meanings of right, are they connected? And the answer is yes. I picked up the edited highlights and I thought it was rather good. Did you fall asleep? No, no, I didn't. Sinister is the Latin word for left, isn't it? It is sinister. And then we have dexterity and dexter is the Latin for right.

You know, setting off on your right foot, getting off on the right side of the bed, all of that stuff. So this is the sort of thing when we talk about our childhoods, this is the kind of thing I think is interesting. How if you were a left handed child, instinctively you would try to move to a right handed. That led to some people had problems then when speaking. It affected the way you speech, you developed a left-handed child, instinctively you would try to move to a right-handed. That led to some people had problems then in speaking. It affected the way you speech. You developed a stammer. How we're brought up so affects our whole lives. I wonder what Noah Webster's childhood was like.

He clearly was a remarkable man. Anyway, we salute him and we salute Laura, who's been in touch. Dear Susie and Giles, my husband and I are devoted purple people, positively Purpurian. I love that. P-U-R-P-U-R-E-A-N. been in touch. Dear Susie and Giles, my husband and I are devoted purple people. Positively purpurean. I love that. P-U-R-P-U-R-E-A-N. I think it's an invented word, but we like the idea and we love listening to your podcast. We were watching the football today and the commentator described

a player as being at sixes and sevens. And we wondered if you knew where this expression comes from. Being at sixes and sevens sixes and sevens yes in other words or over the shop a purpureal is in the dictionary by the way i think but maybe not purpurean but purpurea is in the dictionary anyway the answer is it didn't start off with six and seven it actually started off with five and six and there was a french saying a cinq et six which meant that you were throwing the dice and taking a random punt on its outcome. And this idea of uncertainty and unpredictability then was translated into something being in a bit of a mess and confused. In other words, there was no sure outcome of it. And somehow, if you were doing something, you were essentially surrendering it to fate. And somehow, if you were doing something as sank and cease, you were essentially surrendering

it to fate. And for some reason, we decided to make it sixes and sevens. And of course, we don't have a seven on a die or dice. But that is how it began. The earliest references were two, five and six. Next, Ian has been in touch from Romford in Essex in England. I very much enjoyed your episode Icar, on air travel. I was wondering if the phrase winging it, as in, of course, to achieve something more by luck than skill, also came from the language of air travel. Could it perhaps be an offshoot of on a wing and a prayer, winging it? Yes, it's not an offshoot of on a wing and a prayer,

although it does absolutely have the same meaning. On a wing and a prayer actually goes back to an old hymn about an injured aircraft that was coming into land. And it became, I think, a musical song. So that actually came from a song lyric. But Winging It is actually from the theatre. And it's the idea of waiting in the wings and essentially not necessarily knowing your lines, but you were about to go on. So you were kind of winging it and it would go one way or the other.

And there's also possibly a reference to the fact that if you needed some help, you might have somebody in the wings who was, you know, actually feeding you the lines very quietly under their breath. That's exactly what we shall need. We'll be winging it when we do our live podcast later in the year. In November and December, we're getting out. We're going, I think, to Bath. They're all in England at the moment.

We're going to go global soon. We're going to the Bath Forum, I think, on the 20th of November. We're at the Chichester Festival Theatre on the 28th of November. And then I think as Christmas approaches, we're actually going to the Birmingham Town Hall. I love going to Birmingham Town Hall because whenever I'm there, I remind myself it's where

both Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens performed in Victorian times. So I think we're following in very mighty footsteps. Get in touch with those theatres and we'll find out more about that. And look out for us. I'm going to lots of places this autumn, signing my book. And please keep listening to us and please keep sending us your letters. We call them letters. It's emails. Nobody sends us a letter any longer, do they? Well, they're very welcome to.

We still get some sent to the Countdown office, I have to say. And they very kindly then take a scan of them and email them over to me. So they do end up as emails, but I get to see people's beautiful handwriting. That is nice. Well, get in touch with us whichever way you can. It's purple at something else dot com. Susie, you always give us three interesting words. I'm going to start just because we've been talking about Noah Webster with a very well-known word, but it's just one of the examples of the words that I think we should be thankful to the US for rather than knock their particular style of language. And that's just finagle, because I think finagle is such a good word. And it means to use devious methods to bring something about, to fiddle. If you finagle something, you'd get it by trickery. And that's

so often, of course, it goes back to British dialect. As it did, it goes back to a Scottish, I know, English dialect word this time, actually. So it began with us, but it was first used in America in relation to politics. You might say nothing's changed, although Giles obviously was a politician, so I won't say much more than that. One from Cumberland, Lincolnshire in Yorkshire, Politician, so I won't say much more than that. One from Cumberland, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Heavey cavey. Heavey cavey means unsteady, uncertain,

or just not quite sure of what you're doing. Heavey cavey. Heavey cavey. That's me. Which is good, isn't it? Heavey cavey. I love it. And then I just like this one.

I can imagine this being said in an American accent, actually. Toot moot. So T-O-O-T-M-O-O-T. And it means... Toot mood. Toot mood. A low muffled conversation. Oh, toot mood. We're having a toot mood.

It's talking like there's a little bit of hugger mugger. Oh, yes. I love hugger mugger. Hugger mugger is brilliant too. So hugger mugger means if you are literally, you would imagine people kind of huddled together and speaking clandestinely and conspiring together. But hugger mugger means exactly that.

It means in secret and concealed. I'm going to use toot. Is it toot mood or hoot mood? Toot mood. Toot mood. Toot mood. Toot mood. Yeah.

Shall we have a little toot mood? That sounds quite inviting, doesn't it? Come over to my place for a toot mood. Whispering sweet nothings in your ear, having a toot mood. Lovely. I've got a special poem this week. It's a comforting poem, I think. It's written by a Canadian-born writer, Vincent Starrett,

who was a devotee of Arthur Conan Doyle's great creations, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. And I was thinking we've been saluting a real person here, Noah Webster, who has affected the way English is spoken around the world. And yet it's interesting that, and he was real, and he dealt with real words. And yet there have been people like Arthur Conan Doyle, greatest Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, who created all the extraordinary characters who still live in our imagination, Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Hamlet, all the extraordinary characters who still live in our imagination, Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Hamlet, all these fictional characters. Peter Pan created by J.M.

Barry. It's strange how the fictional characters can be more real than the real people. This poem is called 221B, and it was written during the Second World War. I suppose, in a way, it's a kind of tribute to Britain's defiance during the war. 221 B. That, of course, was the address of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Here dwell together still two men of note, who never lived and so can never die. How very near they seem, yet how remote that age before the world went all awry. But still the game's afoot for those with ears attuned to catch the distant view-halloo. England is England yet for all our fears. Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the windowpane as night descends upon the fable street. A lonely handsome splashes through the rain. The ghostly gas lamps fail at 20 feet. Here, though the world explode, these two survive and it is always 1895 Oh, wow. It's evocative. I don't know where you find these. Where do you find the inspiration for your poems? Well, I've been collecting poetry all my life. One of the great gifts that my parents gave me, there's a famous poem by Philip Larkin, which I, the opening line of which I won't repeat, but I do do a version of it myself about my parents, which begins, they tuck you up, your mum and dad. And my parents tucked me up when I was a little boy and they read to me and they

recited poems to me and they gave me my love of language. My father was a lawyer. He loved spoken language. He loved the art of rhetoric. My mother was a teacher and particularly taught young children with reading difficulties. And they loved words and language. And I've been collecting poems. And when I find a poem, I just put it in a big box. And when I came to do an anthology of poetry to learn by heart called Dancing by the Light of the Moon a couple of years ago, I simply emptied this huge box and discovered that I'd literally got more than a thousand poems that I'd fallen in love with over the years, some of which I still knew of bits of by heart. And I put them into the anthology. So I've been collecting them

randomly, whatever I find them. Excellent. Well, we love them. So thank you for that. And thank you to everyone who has listened to us today. Please keep getting in touch. We absolutely love hearing from you. It's purple at something else.com something rhymes with purple is a something else production produced by lawrence bassett and harriet wells with additional production from steve ackerman jen mystery jay beal and what can we say giles wing and a prayer wing and a prayer mr havey cavy himself it's gully