Susie Dent - What Made the Crocodile Cry?: 101 Questions about the English Language

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Susie Dent

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6 DP

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ISBN 978019957415-5

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I love words and I love Susie Dent, so it seems right that Im here writing the foreword for Susies new book. Susie and I have known each other a long time, having been thrown into dictionary corner on Countdown together and it has been one of my favourite things to do since the very beginning. I have marvelled over the years at Susies erudition and envied it.

I always wanted to be one of those people at parties who had the answer to random questions that crop up about the origin of words and phrases and often fantasised about slinging out perfectly formed, witty answers to peoples questions, garnering admiration wherever I went. Alas, it was never like that. Like everyone else, I turned a blank questioning face to the enquiry, and wished that there was a little book I could keep at home, study it before I went out and impress wherever I went. And now there is such a book. Hurrah!

But many of you may not be as sad as me. You might be the sort of person whos just interested in words and phrases and doesnt feel the need to impress others with the length and breadth of your knowledge.

You will get as much, if not more pleasure, out of this book, because you wont feel the need to learn it off by heart like me. Ive decided that in order to gain maximum advantage, I will learn some of the more obscure origins and then engineer it so other people ask questions about them and I can casually answer them.

So if you ever wanted to know why we have a whip round or if youre a housewife or a hussy,... or both even, this is the book for you.

For me, its the bees knees, oh crikey yes. What serendipity, Im going to put my bikini on and get mullered. Happy reading folks.

Jo Brand

Curiosity famously killed the cat: an expression that comes high on the list of the most frequently posed questions about the origins of English. Not bad going for an idiom that in one form or another dates back to the sixteenth century.

But then so many characteristics of our language exert as much fascination today as they did hundreds of years ago. While usage, grammar, and spelling are the sources of our biggest bugbears, our greatest curiosity has always been individual words and expressionstheir origins, their changes over time, their strangeness or beauty. But usage, grammar, and spelling can also intrigue. The questions English invites will never dry up simply because it is constantly evolving. Not for a single second in its 1,500-year history has English stood still, a fact that is as compelling to some as it is frustrating to others. Wherever you stand, whether you long for a linguistic golden age now passed or embrace todays new words with relish, the passion that English arouses is as strong as ever.

This book doesnt set out to answer the top 101 questions from a particular poll: certainly some of the standards are therejust what is a white elephant, why was Larry so happy, and who was Bob uncle to? (And what, while were at it, is the point of that last Oxford comma?), but I have also included many of the riddles and curiosities that I didnt know existed before setting out, but which I then found irresistible. Why is it that only women get hysterical? Why isnt there a synonym for a thesaurus? Have there always been so many words in English for being drunk? And just who were flipping Ada and bloody Nora?

Questions about English are far from new. With the arrival of the printing press, those who needed to standardize a chaotic but wonderfully rich oral language must have deliberated long and hard over meanings and spellings. Shakespeare, coiner of so many words himself, will have pondered the stories behind the idioms and expressions he inherited. And with the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066, Britons had to make hundreds of vocabulary choices as French began to hold sway over the incumbent Anglo-Saxon. Language, and particularly English, has never been a given. It has always been a choice, and a democratic one at that.

Some questions, of course, simply cant be answered. Those imponderables that I have included are there because, for me, their mystery seems itself to be in some way significant. We shall never know why cutting the mustard is a good thing (p. 10), but the journey of mustard as slang is a near-perfect example of how the literal can jump the fence into all sorts of figurative terrains. If a geek used to bite the heads off live chickens, what did the original nerd do when it left the pages of Dr Seusss imagination? Word detection is as open-ended as the objects of its study: some day we may discover the truth, but for now all the fun is in the educated guessing.

In the sixteenth century it was care or worry which proverbially killed the cat. Curiosity turned up some three hundred years later. But while an eagerness to know may have done for our feline companions ever since, it has clearly kept our language alive. As long as we puzzle over English, we nurture it, and the story behind the next new word or phrase will be just around the corner. A billion and one questions would never be enough to do it justice.

Susie Dent
October 2009