Horne - Wordwatching: One Mans Quest for Linguistic Immortality

Alex Horne loves words. He loves playing with words, mucking about with them, building them up and breaking them down like Lego.

With less than two months before he hit his TKday his ten-thousandth day on earth, Alex set himself an impossible challenge. He will create a new word.

But, as Alex discovers, gaining entry into the official lexicon and smuggling a homemade word into the pages of a dictionary takes more than just a gentle word in the ear of the editor. Evidence is require.

From covert word-dropping on Countdown to wilfully misinforming schoolchildren, Alex tries it all in his quest for dictionary-based immortality. Does he succeed? Are you already using one of Alexs words without realising it?

Wordwatching is an epic and ridiculous story of one mans struggle to break into the dictionary. You wont regret spending your hard-earned honk on this hugely entertaining book.

Horne is an engagingly smart man, a sort of Dave Gorman of the intellect. The Scotsman

A hilarious story of a mans adventures into the world of words. Funny, if slightly out there. The Sun

This is a hilarious tale of an ingenious plan to bamboozle the experts The Good Book Guide

A safe place to invest your comedy honk Time Out

Alex Horne co-created, writes and co-hosts the BBC4 comedy quiz We Need Answers. He is widely renowned among critics, comics and audiences as a thoughtful and original stand-up, writer and solo performer and has many TV and radio credits under his belt. Alexs first book Birdwatchingwatching was published by Virgin Books. www.alexhorne.com.

Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum.

Once released, the word flies irrevocably.

Sometimes it seems as if a new word has about as much chance of developing into a permanent addition to our vocabulary as a single sperm has of fertilizing an egg and developing into a fully grown human.

I love words.

Its difficult to write that sentence without sounding chillingly pretentious or worryingly trite. But I dont mean that I love using long, complicated or zany words; I dont love reading obscure modern poetry and I dont mind when someone uses an apostrophe in the wrong place.

Its certainly not a reciprocal love either. Words dont come particularly easily to me. My brain doesnt lob up the perfect adverb for my tongue to volley home as Stephen Frys seems to. I wouldnt have known that I suffer from onomatomania had a more learned friend not told me so. Ive used Microsofts thesaurus function twice already and Ive barely started. What I mean is I love playing with words, mucking about with them, building them up and breaking them down like Lego.

My first word was mama, which is not a particularly inventive choice. All across the world babies of every race say mama, dada and occasionally papa before anything more interesting; they (well, we) are apparently pre-programmed to utter these soft repetitive sounds first, and its thought by some that adults (well, we) took words like mummy and daddy from our offspring, rather than the other way round; we turned their primal noises into words. It was a baby who invented the word mum.

But I like to think that my mama was rather more of a conscious choice as its from my mum that Ive gained my love of words. She is a wordwatcher. Its a subtler hobby than birdwatching as no binoculars betray the pursuit, rather it is the odd spoonerism here and the odd anagram there that gives her away as a worder. She collects teapots too, but thats a side-project, a diversion, not an obsession. My older brother was shown birds by my dad and he still follows them today. I was shown words by my mum. Theyre now my passion.

It all started when, instead of books about spies or wizards, she got me reading joke books. Traditionally these are perched somewhere near a toilet to lighten the tedium of our daily ablutions, or tucked away on a shelf next to the dictionaries and thesauri for reference when writing a speech or settling an argument. But my joke books were stacked up next to my bed and I read them one by one, from cover to cover.

Unfortunately my mum didnt pass on her remarkable memory so I could never remember more than a few jokes at a time. My mind, I worry, is like my mobile phone it can only store so many messages at once, then, when its full, I have to delete some information before starting again. As I read these books, I jotted down my favourite jokes so I could unfurl them later, at family events. In fact, I found that I could always remember punchlines, even if the set-ups deserted me. So Christmas for me was all about the crackers. I prided myself on knowing the solution to every joke equation. I rarely failed. The satisfying logic of the set-up and punchline made sense to me.

When Id read and scribbled on every joke book she could find me, my mum got me on to harder stuff. While my brothers wolfed down stories by Roald Dahl, J. R. R. Tolkien and Gerald Durrell, I read and re-read a slim blue book called