Emma SoamesKitchen Table Lingo is where it belonged. This is the first manifestation of a new concept, the English Project. Opening in 2012 in a purpose-built visitor centre in Winchester – home of King Alfred and Latin-speaking schoolboys – the English Project promises to give focus and a physical home to the importance, the liveliness and the awesome adaptability of the English language, as well as its history.
is where it belonged. This is the first manifestation of a new concept, the English Project. Opening in 2012 in a purpose-built visitor centre in Winchester – home of King Alfred and Latin-speaking schoolboys – the English Project promises to give focus and a physical home to the importance, the liveliness and the awesome adaptability of the English language, as well as its history.
The project is starting online now at www.englishproject.co.uk. You can submit new words that are in use in your family or workplace to the Kitchen Table Lingo section of their website: if the word passes the KTL test - it doesn't exist in a dictionary and more than three people use it regularly - it then gets published on the website, along with its provenance. There are some brilliant new words: the floordrobe (the Hodges family) describes where teenagers store their clothes and disrevelled (the Brodies) is one's appearance on the morning after a heavy night out after a jollop (the Alexander family). My favourite is snotfairs, a name given by academics to meetings called by students to complain about their grades.
I very much hope that the English Project will also do something to help the verbally impoverished British young, some of whom are the cause of so much misery. I strongly believe that one of the main causes of the mindless violence that has invaded our streets, is the deep poverty of language among some of the most deprived. It is little surprise that when a teenager suffers from an inability to use words other than the f-word, a knife becomes the only way to win an argument. Their inability to express themselves leads in a nano-second to anger and then the step to violence is but a tiny one.
A recent government report authored by Conservative MP John Bercow discovered that in some areas of the country up to half of all children arrive at school with serious speech difficulties – either from mental health problems or from the sheer impoverishment of a babyhood spent dumped in front of the TV with almost no conversation with their parents.
It is only too easy to believe his conclusion that youngsters face “multiple risks’’ later in life if their communication problems are not addressed. I am sure that many Saga readers talk to and listen to their grandchildren as a matter of course. It is really massively important.
I am thrilled by the arrival as fashion icon of the red bikini and intensely grateful to Helen Mirren for proving that two-piece swimmies do not need to go on a funeral pyre on a woman’s 60th birthday. Last winter I decided that the time had finally come to throw away my beloved bikinis. I spent hours trying on swimsuits to cover the parts that no longer look quite as fit as I feel. However, I couldn’t resist also trying on an incredibly glamorous red bikini (by the marvellous label, Jets, if you’re interested). It didn’t look at all bad so I sneaked it in to the “I’ll take it” pile. Well, all I can tell you is that red bikinis are where it’s at – and not just for older women. The only times I have not worn it poolside is when it is on my daughter’s back.
Helen Mirren has done for the red bikini what Ursula Andress achieved for the white version nearly 50 years ago. And we can go on getting our stomachs brown. What joy!
I have just finished reading the utterly delightful The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Bloomsbury, £12.99). Its genesis provides a salutary lesson to aspiring authors. It is the first novel from Mary Ann Shaffer, a former bookshop assistant from California who, after many false dawns, finally sat down in retirement to write it. Her agent Liza Dawson told me, “A neighbour of hers put her in touch. I immediately took her on – the book was very special.” She and Shaffer, 73, worked on the book for a year and there was great joy when the novel was auctioned in 13 countries – going for a six-figure sum to Bloomsbury in the UK.
But sadly, before the book was published this summer Mary Ann Shaffer was struck down with cancer and died. She saw the proofs but was not around to be fêted as “the new Mary Wesley”.
So learn from this. If you have a book in you, stop faffing around and get writing.
This article was first published in the September 2008 edition of Saga Magazine