I want to share a horror story with you.
Many years ago, May 1999, my wife and I were invited to the home of her colleague. On arrival, the wives went off to make ooh and ahh noises about the stupidly expensive flowers we’d brought.
I was left with the husband, who I had never before met.
My conversational opening gambit was: “Will Man U beat Bayern without Roy Keane in next week’s Champions League Final?” Midfielder Keane was suspended, as was Paul Scholes. It was serious stuff.
The chap looked at me askance. He’d never heard of Roy Keane. And Scholes were sandals weren’t they? He believed Manchester United wore red “uniforms”, but his football knowledge ended there.
I broke into a cold sweat. How was I to make small talk with a man who didn’t speak the universal language of football? By the time our wives came back 15 hours later (it felt) he was showing me his coin collection.
I’d been holding a 1930s five-lire piece for 10 minutes of quiet panic, with the only semi-intelligent thing I had found to say being: “It’s very round”.
After we left I imagine the numismatist told his wife: “Don’t invite them again, that bore knew nothing about Italian inter-war era coinage.”
English is full of words which denote who is in, or not in, the club: whatever that club may be.
I remember being puzzled in the 1970s by references to U and non-U. You rarely hear the term these days. It had something to do with whether you said “pudding” or “dessert”.
We all use codes. Any numismatist (not me, obviously) can identify an exergue. A plumber knows where grey water goes. An architect can place a corbel. An ophthalmologist is interested in your sclera. A chef might 86 it.
In my world, you’re looking at a newspaper page with column widths measured in picas and font sizes in points. The words might have been kerned (space adjusted between letter arrangements like AW).
There will be ligatures, where letter combinations such as ffi (as in difficult) become one unit. Personally I don’t mind ligatures in body text, but argue they don’t belong in headlines.
I enjoy learning the codes of specialists, though I’ll probably never use the words. I endlessly ask: “what does that mean, what does this mean”, when I encounter someone possessing a vocabulary that is a mystery to me, or I hadn’t known even existed.
It is like getting a glimpse of someone else’s version of the language.
Word of the week
Aeonian (adjective)
Never coming to an end; eternal. EG: “The chap complained to his wife: ‘That was awful. I was stuck, for what seemed an aeonian amount of time, with a dull-eyed half-wit who tried to talk to me about footwear’.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
