Something Rhymes with Purple - What the Dickens?

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

This week we are on an absolute rampage, alleviating boredom and staving off the Scrooge in the news as we acquaint ourselves with that master wordsmith, Charles Dickens. Gyles gives us a salacious biography and Susie demonstrates her aptitude for a career in talking books. Keep a tight grip on your podcatcher Butterfingers because we’ve got your number and promise book recommendations so perfect for a Christmas cloff, that it’s sure to give you the creeps… A Somethin’ Else production If you want to get in touch with Susie and Gyles to ask any questions, you can get in touch at [e-mail]. Susie's Trio: Scurryfunge- the mad dash around the house to tidy up just before visitors arrive. confelicity- joy in other peopls happiness. sockdolager- the final blow in an argument that settles the matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Something else. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hello and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes with Purple. And more importantly, Merry Christmas. This is our Christmas episode. And this time last year, Giles, we covered the stories behind lots and lots of traditional Christmas words,

didn't we? And that, I think our listeners can find on Le Petit Man. That's what the episode is called. I'm just looking across at you wearing a Christmas jumper. I am wearing a Christmas jumper. I'm wearing holly in my hat.

I'm feeling very Christmassy. And you've got those deely boppers on again. And in my head, I'm singing very Christmassy. And you've got those deely poppers on again. And in my head, I'm singing ding dong melody on high. And we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It's been very frustrating, you know, in the United Kingdom, singing carols has not been possible because people have been nervous that the aerosols because of COVID have been hanging around. And so people have been discouraged from singing, which is a great shame, because normally at this time of year in the UK,

they reckon about 7 million people would have been singing carols. And it's been very... It'll be extra special next year. It'll be extra special next year. And I, of course, love Christmas. I love everything to do with Christmas. And I particularly love Charles Dickens. And in fact, this year, I've had a wonderful experience because the Lawrence Batley Playhouse, which is a wonderful theatre in the north of England for our international visitors, have done a community production of A Christmas Carol, the hugely successful Charles Dickens novel, one of his shortest novels and one of his most successful and most enduring. And they've done a version with local community members. And I voice the part of Ebenezer Scrooge.

And it's been great fun to do. Amazing. You were actually as far away from Scrooge as I can possibly imagine. Very sweet, but it's a great story and it was a fun part to play. I can imagine. And if people want to, I think you can get it online, you just have to download it. Go to the Lawrence Batley Playhouse and you'll find it, A Christmas Carol. So that's fun. But we've talked about Dickinson, his contribution to Christmas, the Christmas vocabulary. But he is a novelist that we really associate with this time of year. And you can't do better, I think, in the Christmas season than for an hour or two, stop playing the games, even stop listening to the podcast, certainly turn off the TV, find a fire of some kind or even a hot water bottle, curl up with it. And read a good book, escape into the world of the imagination.

You've just reminded me of a great word. Yes, tell me, what is the great word? It's a great regional word. It doesn't exactly conjure, the sound of it doesn't exactly conjure up its meaning, but I still love it. Clothin, C-L-O-F-F-I-N. To Cloughin is to sit peacefully by the fire and do whatever you want to do, but it's just to bask in the warmth of a fire, which is just lovely. This is the time of year to Cloughin with a good book. And Charles Dickens was the author of some amazing good books. 14 completed novels, hundreds of other works, including short stories, lots of them with a Christmas theme. Obviously, there are letters of his that are published. He

wrote plays, he wrote poetry, he collaborated with others. He even wrote famously a biography of Grimaldi, the clown Grimaldi. Have you heard of Grimaldi? Oh, yes, vaguely. I can't say I know much about him. You should have heard of Grimaldi. The reason you should have heard of him at this time of year is he was the original Crown Joey, Joe Grimaldi. And he was the person who, in a way, made pantomime famous in Britain. He was a pantomime clown. He suffered from depression very badly. And towards the end of his life, feeling very depressed, he went to see his doctor. And he said, you know, I'm feeling very, very depressed. And the doctor said, you must get out

of yourself. Go to Drury Lane, go to the pantomime, go and see the great Clown Joey. And Grimaldi said, I am the great Clown Joey. And that's a story told to us by Charles Dickens, because he wrote Grimaldi's autobiography poem. He ghost wrote it under the name of Boz. Amazing. And as a lexicographer, Dickens has a special place, really, quite similar to Shakespeare. He was a neologiser, so he came up with lots of new words,

but he was a real populariser as well, wasn't he? And he wrote for a mass readership using words that were kind of, I don't know, they just perfectly matched the stories that he told. And I'm sure we will talk about his naming of characters a bit later. But he also really expanded the vocabulary that was in Common Circulation. Well, I've dug up a list of all the amazing or some of the amazing words that he introduced. I mean, the OED, your favourite dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, credits him with coining 258 new words and has 1,586 first citations for giving a new sense to a word. Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable, isn't it? It is. It absolutely is. And, you know, for even the ones that the words that were around before, because, you know,

boredom, for example, precedes bleak house and dustbin was around before he used it in Dombey and Son, but they wouldn't have survived without Dickens bringing them to the public attention. And that's, you know, that is also his huge linguistic power, I think, like Shakespeare. I have a favourite and it's Butterfingers. Butterfingers. It first appeared in the posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as the Pickwick Papers in 1836. At every bad attempt at a catch and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciation as, ah, ah, stupid, now butterfingers, muff, humbug, and so forth. Ah, humbug, of course, occurs famously in A Christmas Carol. But that's the first use of

butterfingers. Have I got time to tell you a quick story? Yes. There was a production, a famous production, of the play Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's darker plays. And it was produced at Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1950s, starring Laurence Olivier and his then-wife Vivian Leigh. And he played Titus Andronicus. And in the play, the character played by Vivian Leigh, tragically, is brutalized. play, the character played by Vivien Leigh, tragically, is brutalized. She's ravished, and the men who ravish her then cut off her hands so that she can't write down their names to name them, and they tear out her tongue so that she can't speak their names. It's a ghastly, grim play. Anyway, on the first night of this production in Stratford-upon-Avon, in the audience were lots of the friends of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, famous actors, including the

great Noel Coward. And the play began, and Vivien Leigh was quite nervous. And in the play, the character that she played, Lavinia, she names her assailants by finding a stick and writing, holding the stick between her sort of forearms and writing their names in the sand. That's how she names the people who have attacked her. But on this opening night, she was very nervous, understandably, because she was nervous, I think, as she was a great film star, but her voice was smaller than Olivier's. She was quite tentative. Anyway, she comes onto the stage for this final scene, holding the stick.

And unfortunately, it slips from her grasp, the stick with which she's supposed to be writing the names of her assailants. Not only does it fall from her grasp, it lands on the stage. And because there's quite a steep rake on the stage, it rolls down the stage and into the orchestra pit. So ruining the end of the play. After the performance, Noel Coward rushes round to her dressing room,

knocks on the door, flings the door open and goes, tut, tut, butter stumps. Oh, no. Because of course she's had her hands cut off. Anyway, that's whenever I think of butter fingers, I think of butter stumps. Doormat was one of his too, wasn't it? Yes, Dormat was another one.

You know, some of them sound very, very old and inexplicably, well, they sound so wonderful. They didn't survive, like confuseled, confuseled, meaning a bit sort of a mix between discombobulated and bamboozled. I love that one. But some of them sound incredibly modern. Like, I've got his number. You know, if you say I've got someone's number, it means you know what they're up to. But actually, he uses it for, you know,

all the awful, interminable legal machinations in Bleak House. Whenever a person proclaims to you, in worldly matters, I'm a child, that person is only a crying off from being held accountable. And you have got that person's number and it's number one. So, you know, that's that's I know it's fantastic. Giving someone the creeps as well. He was the first to give us that idea of of the creeps.

And he again, like Shakespeare, sorry to keep drawing these parallels, but he was brilliant at flipping parts of speech. So, you know, create at flipping parts of speech. So, you know, create converting adjectives to nouns. So messy became messiness and likewise creepy became the creeps. He just let his creative impulses fly really in terms of playing around with language and not everyone liked it. Quite a few people thought, you know, what is he doing to the language? But you will know, because I know you've just done a series on places associated with some of our greatest writers, and Dickens was one of them. He had a sort of a really tough life, didn't he? But what sort of person was Dickens? Well, I think he was a complicated person.

We love him. He's popular. And he was popular with his friends. And yet we have to face the fact that he was unkind, very unkind to his wife, who bore him many children. And he loved her very much. I mean, they were young when they got married. He was only, I think, 19. She was the daughter of his editor. He wrote for a newspaper at that time. And they fell in love, and they got married, and they had lots of children. They were happy in the early years. But I'm afraid it was probably

when she grew fat on having all these children that he didn't fancy her so much. And I think he began to find her dull. And he was in love with the theatre. And he had a roving eye, And he was in love with the theatre. And he had a roving eye, eventually lighted on an actress and had an affair. And the girl became his mistress. He turned out his wife. He disowned her. He made life difficult for her financially. It became very fraught because her sister continued to be his housekeeper, his wife's sister,

sided with Charles Dickens rather than with Mrs. Dickens. He didn't live openly with his mistress because that would have been too great a scandal for the time. He had a sort of hideaway with his mistress and they had a place where they escaped to in France. It became a public scandal when he and the mistress were involved in a train accident, and her name was mentioned. But he denied that there'd been any impropriety. Yeah, so there may be a bit of Scrooge in him, actually. I was just thinking about some of the cruelty in his naming, which you mentioned earlier. I mean, ingenious, the way that he names his characters. But you can tell that there's some sting there, can't you?

I think we get into trouble if we start feeling that to love someone's writing, you've got to love the writer, because it's the work we fall in love with. And I know that people have been now put off reading Dickens. They think, well, actually, he wasn't a very good man. Well, fortunately, we know almost nothing about Shakespeare. It's always seemed amazing to me that we know nothing about Shakespeare, and yet he seems to know everything about us. But it's good that we know nothing about Shakespeare because we might not like some of the things that we know. His great strength, Dickens, was that he was an incredible worker. He lived for work. He would get up early in the morning. He would write for several hours before going off to do his journalism for his day job.

He did a lot of thinking while walking. He walked for miles, as many as 20 miles a day. I mean, once he famously set off from his London house and walked all the way to Gad's Hill in Kent, his country house, which was 30 miles away. So he was an incredible worker, and he gave himself to his public and the public adored him. He was in a way the inventor of the one-man show. Other people had done it before, but not quite in the way he did. He certainly was the inventor of the popular author who went on tour. He would entertain a thousand people, travel the length and breadth of the country. In fact, he killed himself performing, giving readings of his plays.

And they were all serialised as well. So they were real cliffhangers, weren't they? Which is brilliant. If you had to choose, Giles, a favourite name from any Dickens novel, what would it be? Bumble. I love the name Mr Bumble. Mine would be Mr Boffin. Oh, I don't remember Mr Boffin. Mr Boffin is in Our Mutual Friend, which is probably my favourite of all of Dickens' novels. Mr. Boffin is in Our Mutual Friend, which is probably my favourite of all of Dickens' novels. I mean, just to talk about his names, as I mentioned, I mean, I don't think any novelist has been more inventive in this area of using names that are so memorable that they become completely inextricable from the characters and their traits. So you've got Scrooge, of course, which has become a byword in English all by itself.

Great. So you've got Scrooge, of course, which has become a byword in English all by itself. Mr. McCorber, who is a spendthrift and always, you know, something will turn up. Uriah Heep. I mean, you just imagine him kind of bent over in a kind of toadying sort of way. Pecksniff. But in Our Mutual Friend, you've got the veneerings who are all about show. And they're just brilliant. And you've got the Podsnaps. And you've got Bradley Headstone. And you've got Silas Wegg with a wooden leg. I mean, he's just genius.

My favourite family in Dickens are the Crummles. They're the theatrical family in Nicholas Nickleby. But you're right, the names conjure up the personality Gradgrind from Hard Times. Gradgrind, yeah. And also, what I didn't realise, which is quite interesting, Names conjure up the personality grad grind from hard times. Yeah. And also what I didn't realise, which is quite interesting, is that he would play around with many of his invented names until he was satisfied that they were just right. So take Martin Chuzzlewit.

Apparently he toyed before with Martin Sweezledon, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, Chuzzlewig, and then finally landed on Chuzzlewit. It was a very carefully crafted thing for him. We call them acronyms. Do you remember we talked in an earlier episode about nominative determinism, you know, how people's names perfectly describe or perfectly suit their professions or their personality. I mean, Dickens is the absolute master of creating acronyms, really. And in his really earlier writings, I think they were probably a bit less sophisticated. So he had a Lord Muttonhead, and then he had some scientific gentleman called Mrs. Pestle and Mortar. So I think they became more subtle as he went along.

But I just think that for me, that's the greatest part of his genius. Well, interestingly, it's an old tradition, of course. Other people have done it before. Restoration playwrights gave their characters a museum name. Of course, that's true. Mr. Teasel in Sheridan's School for Scandal. You go back to Shakespeare, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. But what I think is unusual about Dickens is some of those words entered the vocabulary. We all know what a Scrooge is. And people of my father's generation,

he would call, my father would call an umbrella a gamp. Oh, and that's from Mrs. Gamp, isn't it? Mrs. Gamp had an umbrella. And for people, late Victorians, Edwardians, even up to the Second World War, people called umbrellas gamps. Also bumper shoots, if you remember, but that's not Dickens. Another really important contribution, I think, of Dickens to linguists and to lexicographers or dictionary makers is that he really knew his street slang. So you have to remember that actually the earliest glossaries of slang were from the criminal underworld. They were the first collections of words really to be

documented and collected formally. And Dickens really knew his stuff. So if you take the Bow Street Runners in Oliver Twist, they speak a really distinctive language, which is what they called cant. Cant being the variety of slang that was used as a secret language by criminals and their associates. You know, they talk about burglary as a crack and they use blunt for money. And both of those were really common in Dickens' time, sort of thieves slang, but he really knew his stuff there. And he also, he was very much in touch with the language of his day. So euphemisms, do you remember we've talked about euphemisms for trousers at the time which i absolutely love so again there was just there's lots of things in his novels where it shows that kind of real victorian reluctance to use the word trousers so in all of a twist the butler

giles is describing his actions he's been disturbed by burglars and he says i tossed off the clothes and got softly out of bed drew on a pair and someone says ladies present And he says, I tossed off the clothes and got softly out of bed, drew on a pair, and someone says, ladies present. And he says, of shoes, sir. And yes, so whenever there are sort of women present, they're never allowed to mention the word trousers. So all of these are really useful for us because they kind of give us real concrete evidence of what people were squeamish about at the time. And also, as I say, what the kind of underworld was doing linguistically. about at the time and also, as I say, what the kind of underworld was doing linguistically. I've made a list of some of my favourite words that were coined by Dickens or that he gave a new meaning to. And I want to rattle through them because I don't think our listeners will

quite believe that it was Charles Dickens all those years ago, the early part of the 19th century, who conjured them up first. And if you want to comment on any of them, just interrupt me. Boredom, we've mentioned. Cheesiness, incredible. He came up with that. Fluffiness, flummox. Flummox is a brilliant one. Isn't it? Amazing. And I think it comes in Pickwick Papers. And my opinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don't prove an alibi, he'll be what the Italians call regularly flummoxed and that's all about it is that an Italian word that it's based on or was he just inventing that it's just I think well for me it's really like again like discombobulate and kerfuffle and all those sort

of things it sounds very onomatopoeic to me um I'm looking here in the OED it says perhaps of English dialect origin and and in Gloucestershire dialects, no Herefordshire dialect, sorry, there is the verb flummox, CKS, meaning to mangle. And a flummox is a slovenly person, but it can also mean kind of hurry or bewilderment and making something untidy. So it says the formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily. But you've got those kind of regional backups as well. Rampage.

To clap eyes on someone. That's a Dickens original. A slow coach. Somebody who is very tardy is a slow coach. Rampage, by the way, just to interrupt. Rampage was around before, and it was all to do with a wild beast going completely mad. But it was Dickens who kind of brought it into the humans there. Oh, I mean, a ram going mad do with a wild beast going completely mad but it was dickens who kind

of brought it into the humans there oh i mean a ram going mad or just a wild beast um no i don't that's just a very good question i don't think it's anything to do with rams it is a state of excitement or violent passion oh maybe it's an as in outrage but you're ramping it up a bit so it becomes rampage yeah it's the ramp so to ramp of an animal was to rear or stand on the hind leg so definitely in heraldry if you were rampant that's what you were doing but as i say dickens kind of introduced that into the idea of absolute human destruction well there are four more i want to share with you devil may care it's extraordinary isn't it that he came up with that devil may care but this one i find amazing egg box oh isn't that interesting but so i suppose i mean also that reflects the period i imagine previously eggs

arrived in baskets yeah and maybe at his time people were introducing the idea of an egg box but that's the origin of the use of it casualty ward a casualty ward didn't exist before Diggins coined the phrase, and my favourite of all, fairy story. Oh, isn't that lovely? Yeah. Yeah. But again, it's an idea of sort of taking existing words and then sort of, you know, creating new compounds. I mean, they may have been around at the time, but he was not only a sort of street professor of slang, but also just a great populariser. I've got one description from Our Mutual Friends. just a great, a great populariser. I've got one description from Our Mutual Friends. I mentioned that's my absolute favourite, which has got nothing to do with creating new words, but

everything to do with poetry. I think he just had such a vivid eye for landscape. And Our Mutual Friend starts off with people dredging the river for bodies. So again, it's kind of set in that sort of world of crime where people would get money for the bodies that they dredged up from the river but this is just beautiful it's the white face of the winter day came sluggishly on veiled in a frosty mist and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances and the sun blood red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire. I mean, that's just so beautifully vivid, isn't it? You should be doing talking books.

Oh, I love that. It's such a lovely novel. It is a great novel. I want you, after the break, to tell me, other than Dickens, what your favourite novel is, what you would recommend, what we would recommend for people to read this Christmas. If they can get hold of a book that isn't by Dickens, they should curl up by their fire. What's it called that? Warmth of the fire again? What was that word you gave us earlier? Clothin'. Clothin'. To clothin'. When you're clothinating this Christmas, what's the book you're going to read?

Or just, you can just say clothin' actually. Clothin'. Is it I-N-G at the end or is it C-L-O-N-N-G? Yeah. Well, there's two versions. It's probably easier to use the cloth. You can either clothin' or you can cloth. You can cloth. So you can clothin or you can cloth. You can cloth. So you can cloth in, you can be cloth in. Very confusing. Sounds very Dickensian, doesn't it?

Yes, oh, let's go cloth in. Hi, I'm Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast Dinners on Me. I take some of my favorite people out to dinner, including, yes, my Modern Family co-stars, like Ed O'Neill, who had limited prospects outside of acting. some of my favorite people out to dinner, including, yes, my Modern Family co-stars, like Ed O'Neill, who had limited prospects outside of acting. The only thing that I had that I could have done was organize crime. And Sofia Vergara, my very glamorous stepmom.

Well, why do you want to be corruptible? Or Julie Bowen, who had very special talents. I used to be the crier. Or my TV daughter, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, who did her fair share of child stunts. They made me do it over and over and over. very special talents. I used to be the crier. Or my TV daughter, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, who did her fair share of child stunts. They made me do it over and over and over.

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every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. Here we are again. We're talking Christmas reading. We've been talking about Dickens, not about the words he gave us for Christmas,

but just the words he gave us. What a genius he was. I mentioned that fairy story was one of the phrases he introduced us to, maybe as a result of the visit of Hans Anderson. You know, he had a correspondence with Hans Christian Andersen, the great Danish fairy tale writer, and he invited him to stay, not just for a day or two. Not just for a week or two, not just for a month or two. After a week, after a week, after a week, Dickens did not know what to do, how to get rid of this man,

this crashing bore that turned out to be Hans Anderson. He was a bore. Don't tell me this. I know. Maybe that's where boredom, maybe that's why he coined boredom. Maybe that is why he coined, yes, it's extraordinary, isn't it? Anyway. But of course, Anderson's got that dark side as well, isn't he? Which Dickens has in spades. But you asked me about my christmas recommendation please i'd love to hear yours as well i know the answer to this because i was asked

this very recently actually and there's only one choice for me and it was something i read when i was a teenager and it totally captured me in so many different ways and it's um in french it's called le commun but in english it's called in French, it's called Le Grand Monde, but in English it's called The Lost Estate. It's by Alain somebody. Alain. Alain Fournier. Yeah. Alain Fournier.

This was his only book. He died in the First World War. And it's haunting and it's dreamy and it's about first love and a magical lost house. It's just this sense of magic that pervades the whole thing. And it's set in the twilight world between childhood and adolescence when we don't know what we're going to lose by growing up. And it's just innocent, but sensual. And honestly, I can't recommend it more highly. It's gorgeous. So The Lost Estate or The Lost Domain, that would be mine.

The Lost Estate is the English translation. The Lost Estate of Le Grand Monde or Le Grand Monde? Le Grand Monde. And you can see why they didn't want to translate Monde, because it's quite difficult to pronounce. It's M-E-A-U-L-N-E-S. And that's what it was called in French and quite a difficult title to translate. But honestly, once you get past that, it's just great. I really love it. Well, I think I would choose always Victorian writers. I've never really left the 19th century. My favourite Victorian writers are probably in this order. Thackeray, William Makepeace Thackeray. Oh, yeah.

He wrote some Christmas stories, but he also wrote one of the great novels, Vanity Fair. If you haven't read Vanity Fair, it's a wonderful... I haven't read Vanity Fair, so I've got that in store. I've given you a Christmas treat. I shall read Le Grand Monde. I probably will read it in translation because my French is a bit rusty. Well, there's a Penguin Classic translation.

And what was the translation called again? What was the title again? The Lost Estate or The Lost Domain. The Lost Estate, The Lost Domain. I shall read that. You should read Vanity Fair. It's got this character and it's called Becky Sharp. She is a kind of heroine who's an anti-heroine.

Fantastic. William Makepeace Thackeray. I've read actually all his novels. They are amazing. And Trollope as well. Of course. You're quite a Trollope person. I'm a huge Anthony Trollope fan.

And I've read, in fact, the complete works of Trollope. I have fiction. I've not read his nonfiction. I've read all his fictional works. I'm a member of the Trollope Society, and I've got these beautiful editions that I'd never opened. I've read them in paperback. So, The Chronicles of Barset, which is a sort of story set in Barsetshire that are all about around a cathedral close. They are wonderful. I think there's six novels in that series. And then they're the ones that

became the political novels that were turned into a television series called The Palaces. the political novels that were turned into a television series called The Palaces. So I would go for Thackeray and then Trollope. And then if I wanted for you, for you maybe almost above Vanity Fair, but you've got to read that, I would recommend Arnold Bennett. Now people haven't really heard of Arnoldnold bennett nowadays he was a hugely popular writer in his time for a while he was the highest paid writer in the world and uh he went out of fashion largely because the bloomsbury crowd was snobbish about him people like virginia wolf rather distant but he he came from the potteries in england part of them sort of mid, where pottery came from. And where Dickens gives you character, characters, Arnold Bennett gives you people, real people.

And a lot of women writers, women critics, say that Arnold Bennett is the male writer who understood women best. Okay. So what should I read? The Old Wives Tale. The Old Wives, okay. Old Wives. The Old Wives Tale, written by Arnold Bennett at the beginning of the 20th century. There was an extraordinary year, I think something like 1904, when all the great works of literature ever written were written in that one year. I think Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard, J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan, and Arnold

Bennett wrote The Old Wives Tale. Okay. That's my Christmas recommendation. Excellent. If you listeners have got books you think we should read, or books we should recommend, particularly if they've got a linguistic feel to them, all these are writers who did amazing things with words, do get in touch with us. People do. They communicate with us.

It's purple at something else dot com. Have we got some emails in this week? We do. Well, we have so so many and we do read them all even if we can't get to all of them so thank you and this one's from olivia in aberdeenshire she says she wasn't born there so she's not a native doric or scots speaker but over the time she's lived there and picked up a fair bit and two of her absolute favourite scots and doric words are the words quine for girl and loon for boy both of which are in common use and she's wondering if there's any link with the word queen for quine and where does that word come from anyway um so thank you olivia well to go back to queen first of all the old english spelling was c-w-e-n and it meant a wife specifically the wife of an important man

such as a king of course and related to that was an old English queen spelt the same way c-w-e-n but with an e at the end meaning woman and I don't know if you remember Giles but I told you how women have had such a rough ride in English really because quite often words that started off being very neutral and very innocent then went rapidly downhill and somehow loose morals always came into play. And so happened with queen because an alternative spelling of it, Q-U-E-A-N, emerged, meaning a bold or impudent woman. And in the 16th and 17th centuries, a queen was a prostitute. So that spelling of queen existed alongside the modern queen, E-E-N, which was obviously completely the opposite. So the example I'd given you before was hussy coming from husweef, a housewife, a woman who was in

charge of the house. And housewife went one way and hussy went the other. And so it was with queen. Eventually the Q-U-E-A-N,n the prostitute sense just disappeared because it all got too confusing but quine that olivia mentions is indeed related to that old english queen meaning a woman so you don't get any of the impudent sense in there so they're all they're all linked it's a complicated picture but they are all linked together and loon originally meant a man of low birth or conditioned. So one of the phrases that you won't find anymore is lord and loon, in other words, the whole world, people who are high and mighty and then people who are lowly. But eventually that relaxed, as it often does with men, it doesn't take the negative turn that it does with women. And it simply meant a man or a chap or a boy. So they've got really,

really old roots. Take us all the way back to Anglo-Saxon England. Well, I think there, as far as men are concerned, you've been kicking us in the crotch, which leads me neatly to this communication from Edward in West Virginia. This is Edward H. Kafka Gelbrecht. Great name.

Oh, wow. I wonder if he's related. Well, to Kafka. Oh, yes. One of my favourite novelists, yes. Oh, really? And what if it's related. Well, to Kafka. Oh, yes. One of my favourite novelists, yes. Oh, really? And what about Gelbrecht? Studied him.

We've not read Gelbrecht as much as we wanted to. Anyway, Edward in West Virginia writes, Dear Susie and Giles, I'm smitten with your podcast. We love to hear that. I've spent the past several weeks devouring the major part of your back catalogue. In your Place Names episode, Susie mentioned Crotch Crescent. C-R-O-T-C-H, Crescent. Near me. My dictionary tells me crotch crescent, C-R-O-T-C-H, crescent. Near me.

My dictionary tells me crotch is related to crotch, though I don't exactly see how. Here in West Virginia, some of the older folks do refer to the crotch of a tree where a limb attaches to the trunk. So there does seem to be a connection to wood. Many of these older folk could also be described as crotchety. Is that also related to crotch? And can crochet be looped in as well, or crotchet? Wow. So many different questions there. But actually, thankfully, they all have a similar root. So Edward mentions the crotch crescent and the crotch of a body. So crotch crescent

near me is indeed crescent-shaped, and it's kind of in a loop. It's a bit like a hook. And that was the original meaning of crotchet, which was basically from the old French crotch, meaning a crozier or a shepherd's crook, but which was based on a Viking word meaning a hook. So it's all about the hook of the body. So the crotch, if you think about it, is where your legs, you know, your legs fork out from your crotch and a crotch, which is related, is also a kind of, you know, you have two crutches and it's almost like you've got that sort of forked help to support you, if that makes any sense whatsoever. A musical crotchet is linked to the same idea of a hook because of the shape of the musical notation. I think that's my doorbell, that might be Lloyd the Postman.

And crotchety means kind of perverse in some way. So sort of slightly hooked or slightly kind of bent, if you see what I mean. Croquet also linked in there because croquet involves putting a ball through a hook in the ground. And they are indeed all related. So the crotch of a tree where a limb attaches to the trunk, it's all about creating that fork shape. Does that make any sense? Total sense. Edward signs off. Keep up the fine work. Isn't that kind?

Thank you very much. And you, please, listeners, keep up the fine work of writing to us. We do love to hear from you. Do you know, I've always wanted a back catalogue. Makes it sound very grand. It does. You've got your own back catalogue, Susie Dent. Now tell me, anything else?

Yes. We received a couple of questions actually relating to cats this week. So Rhoda Gillespie has written to ask why we call cats pussycats. She wonders if it's anything to do with the French word for flea, la pousse. And Izzy Sale, who's in her final year of French linguistics at Leeds University, has said, where does the word wuss come from my mum tells my cat that she's one of these because she's scared of everything um well Izzy we also have a little rescue cat who seems to be scared of everything and scaredy cat would suit her too okay I'll start with the pussy cat that apparently according to the Oxford English Dictionary was imitative of the hissing sound that you would use to get a cat's attention. I'm not sure I've ever gone to my cat other than to try and, you know, scare her off. But, you know, you might laugh, but actually the conventional

name for a cat in Germanic languages and as far off as Afghanistan, apparently, is all, it's quite similar sounding. So in Romanian, you have pisica, I think it would be. In Lithuanian, you have pus. In Low German, you have pus. And in Swedish dialect, you have catapus, et cetera. So there's so many variants of this up and down the globe, really. And that is the dictionary's best bet, that it's imitative of the sound that we as humans make to get a cat's attention. Now, wuss, simple answer to that, Izzy, is that it's probably a blend of wimp and puss, with the puss idea being linked to the scaredy cat bit, which I think is what your mum also calls your poor cat. So thank you very much for those. We love cats.

I think scaredy cat, we can credit the great Dorothy Parker with coming up with the first use of scaredy cat. She wrote a story called The Wolf. Dorothy Parker with coming up with the first use of Scaredy Cat. She wrote a story called The Wulse. Dorothy Parker, a wonderful American writer of short, sharp verses, a great writer for The New Yorker, wrote stories as well. It's so nice to meet a man who isn't Scaredy Cat about catching my beriberi. So Scaredy Cat. We can credit Dorothy Parker. If you want to communicate with us do please

we do our best to well we certainly read everything we do our best to answer everything and every week you come up suzy with three special words for us and this is christmas week have you got christmassy words or just words that you love these are real words always aren't they some people say to me oh she just invents them but But you don't, do you? I don't invent them, no. I mean, you know, anybody can invent any word, and of course, it's still a valid word. But these ones have been documented. Most of them come from the dictionary. So, okay, I'm going to abandon the ones that I had, actually, and come up with three Christmas words, which may well be a repetition of the Christmas words that we talked about in Le Petit Amen, but I think they are worthy of repeating because they describe Christmas experiences for so many of us. The first is

my absolute favourite and regular Purple Alert listeners will know this one off by heart, but it's scurryfunging. Do you remember what that means? Oh, I love that. You see, I love the word, but I can't remember what it is, what it means. Well, I'm not sure how much of this we'll be doing this Christmas, but we can look forward to scurryfungges of the future. To scurry funge is to run around the house, dash about trying to tidy up just before visitors arrive. Ah, yes. So we all have a good scurry funge.

Con felicity, another one that I absolutely adore. Con felicity is joy in other people's happiness. So no apologies for repeating that one because it's just perfect for a Christmas day. And the other one, okay, I'm going to give you a sockdollager because if we have got people, if we are allowed to have people around this Christmas, you might have just, just have an argument or two. It might be over the Scrabble or Monopoly board. It might be about who's going to get the last quality street. The sockdolager is the final blow in an argument. In other words, it's the knockout punch from which there is no return. It's the final say in a family argument, the sockdolager.

I like it. The sockdolager, great word. Well, look, you've given us a great year. I'm now going to give you a great poem. It's a Christmas poem. And we were talking about Victorian writers today, from Dickens through Trollope and Thackeray, right up to people like Arnold Bennett and your man Alain Fournier at the beginning of the 20th century. I suppose the most distinguished member of my family was a writer called George R. Sims. Ever heard of him? 1847 to 1922? Well, George R. Sims was hugely famous in his day. He was a household name. He was a journalist. He was a poet, a playwright. He wrote pantomime scripts, in fact, for the big drudgery-lame pantomimes before the First World War. He was a novelist. He was a

social reformer. He was a celebrity. He was a Victorian Edwardian man about town. But his greatest claim to fame was writing a sentimental ballad called Christmas Day in the Workhouse. It begins, it was Christmas Day in the Workhouse. That phrase, does that ring a bell with you? No, I was just thinking about Dickens in the Workhouse. Well, he was a kind of poor man's Dickens in the sense that he took up the causes that Dickens had espoused later in the century. And he was appalled by the plight of the London poor. But the conditions of the people in the workhouses where prisoners and paupers were kept and, you know, given very little charity. And he wrote this famous poem that became probably, possibly one of the most famous poems learnt by heart and spoken by people over Christmas around the fireside.

And my father certainly knew it by heart and would perform it to us at Christmas. side. And my father certainly knew it by heart and would perform it to us at Christmas. And I knew a wonderful English comic actor called Ronnie Barker. British listeners won't need to be introduced to Ronnie Barker. Globally, maybe some people might be. Ronnie Barker with Ronnie Corbett did shows that at Christmas were hugely popular. He was a brilliant man, Ronnie Barker. And when I knew him, he said, you're related to George R. Sims, aren't you? And I said, yes. He said, well, I've got this poem, this parody I did of Christmas Day in the Workhouse, and I've never been able to get it on radio, on TV. They won't touch it because it's a bit cheeky. He said, but it's actually completely innocent. So he gave it to me and I put it in my anthology of poetry to learn by heart, Dancing by the Light of the Moon.

anthology of Poetry to Learn by Heart, Dancing by the Light of the Moon, and I thought I would share it with you. And while you are, while you're coughing by the fire, enjoy this. It was Christmas Day in the workhouse, the merriest day of the year. The paupers and the prisoners were all assembled there. In came the Christmas pudding, when a voice that shattered glass said, We don't want your Christmas pudding, so stick it there, with the rest of the unwanted presents. The workhouse master then arose and prepared to carve the duck. He said, Who wants the parson's nose? And the prisoner shouted, You have it yourself, sir. The vicar brought his bible and read out little bits said one old crone at the back of the hall this man gets on very well with everybody

the master rose to make a speech but just before he started the mistress who was 15 stone gave three loud cheers and nearly choked herself and all the paupers then began to pull their christmas crackers one pauper held his two low down and blew off both his paper hat and the man's next to him. The mistress, dishing out the food, dropped custard down her front. She cried, aren't I a silly girl? And they answered, you're a perfect picture as always, ma'am. So then they all began to sing, which shook the workhouse walls merry christmas cried the master and the inmates shouted best of luck to you as well sir so that's my christmas poem that's

brilliant george r simms adapted by ronnie barker performed by giles brandreth who recommends for christmas a wonderful book by Susie Dent called Word Perfect. It is exactly that. So as well as your fiction, we've recommended lots of fiction, you will need some nonfiction. And I'm recommending Word Perfect by you, because it's just got a different word for every day of the year. It's a joy. And what are you recommending in the nonfiction stakes? In nonfiction? Well, can I return the favour? And I'm not just doing this to toady up to you, Giles. But as you will

know, I was asked by GQ magazine here in the UK what I would recommend for people this Christmas and what has been my oasis during lockdown year. And it's got to be your Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes. I promise you this isn't just back-slapping. I genuinely love it. And there's one story in there, which I just tell everybody because it made me laugh so much. And it was the perfect antidote to kind of hours of doom scrolling through my phone. Okay. So it's from the actor Peter Bowles, who was remembering a conversation with one of the great late actors, Albert Finney. And they were 18-year-old flatmates at the time. And one night they're discussing what part they'd most like to play.

And it turned out they both had the same one, which was to play Macbeth. And Albert asks Peter how he'd prepare. And Peter sort of at length goes on about how he would play the role in a kilt. He would imagine himself into Macbeth. He would adopt a Scottish accent, but not after, you know, not before having studied all the great scholars on Macbeth. And he said, so how would you play Albert? And Finney's answer was, I'd learn the fucking lines and walk on. It's just brilliant. So I can recommend that one for sure. Thank you. Well, in a way, Purple People,

I think Susie's book, Word Perfect, gives you Susie, if you want to read Susie between podcasts. And in a way, the Oxford book of theatrical anecdotes gives you me, if you want to read me between podcasts. But we will be back in a week's time with more Purple fun. I think we ought to look at our words of the year and maybe play some holiday games, some word games next week. Anyway, if you want to be in touch with us, you can tweet us or email us at purple at something else dot com. And do please spread the word, recommend us to friends, you know, put like, like, like, whatever you can. We're very grateful. We'd love that. Something Right with Purple. This is Something Else production

produced by Lawrence Bassett. Additional production from Harriet Wells, Steve Ackerman, Ella McLeod, Jay Beale, and still arguing over the purple one in the Quality Street tin, Gully. No peck sniffy.