It all started when, in my usual wordy way, I used the word “olfactory” on the family WhatsApp group. I loathe, detest, abhor, hate and dislike (sorry) the stench of popcorn and my crosspatch comment was to the effect that I was going to dock a star from the show I’d just seen for olfactory reasons. It set both my sons off in a welter of silly puns. Lucas, in particular, has inherited punophilia (is that a word?) from his maternal grandfather and has been addicted to Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue for so long that he can trot them out almost as fast as they can.
Fast forward a few weeks to Boxing Day, when we had a family party in Felix’s house and Lucas gave Felix and me each a copy of The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary, first published in 2016. We opened our presents at about 1pm and screamed, or in my case wept, with laughter for the rest of the day as we read them out to each other. It was one of the cheeriest Christmases for years.
It’s a spoof dictionary of course, laid out in alphabetical order with faux-soulful pencil drawings by Graeme Garden and Jon Naismith. The definitions (“Germination: A very unhealthy country” or “Fly tipping: gratuities to insects”) are by past and present members of the I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue team: Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer, and Ian Pattinson along with Garden and Naismith.
Since Christmas I have read it from cover to cover, sitting at my desk at home allowing myself stints of 20 minutes a day. And I have laughed until I rattle. “Hoedown: Agricultural Strike” and “Apres midi d’une faune: You’ve been on the phone since lunch”.
If I can manage to stop guffawing long enough to think about this seriously, I admire the talents of these five men enormously because you really need to understand a language to be able to pull it about like this (“Prehensile: An island formerly occupied by chickens”). I wonder if they laugh at each other when they’re coining them? I rather suspect they do. I also wonder whether you can pun to this extent in other languages? I doubt it. English has a much larger lexicon than most other comparable European languages because it has drawn its vocabulary from so many sources over thousands of years. So there’s a lot there to play with.
Not that any of that matters. The jokes are the thing. January has a reputation for being a blue, gloomy, depressing, miserable, cold, unhappy, anticlimactic (not sorry) month. It won’t be if you buy and read this book. Promise. Even writing this piece has reduced me to fits of giggles.
PS “Macadam: A Scottish brothel keeper” “Frog-spawn: Blue movies for the French” “Definite: Street slang for hard of hearing”
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
