The horror! The horror!

Writing a book is an undertaking far more horrific than I’d ever imagined. Not only must the writer come up with several tens of thousands of words, not all of them the same, but he or she must arrange them in an order that makes some kind of sense to the first-time reader.

—Armando Iannucci, “On writing a book”, Facts and Fancies

M and S pants

Radio 4 is, for many of us deskbound homeworkers, not so much something you listen to as something you hear: a human voice in the background to stave off cabin fever. The guest on today’s (repeated) Desert Island Discs is Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks and Spencer and, so he claims, the only white elder of the Wagogo “tribe” of central Tanzania. He’s a little hazy on the details of that country’s birth, however. “My family and I left Africa in ’60, ’61 when Tanganyika, as it was, became independent Tanzania.”

Not quite. As those who love to flatter TV adverts with parody might say (cue soothing music and sumptuous visuals), “This is not just fact...” — or rather, this is just not fact. For the record, Tanganyika became independent in 1961 as Tanganyika. The island off its eastern seaboard, Zanzibar, gained independence two years later, and only in April 1964 did the two form a brand-new nation, the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, shortly afterwards renamed the United Republic of Tanzania.

So he plays a recording of some Wagogo traditional music and, without a hint of embarrassment or a flicker of irony, follows it up with a piece of hokum performed by a Lithuanian-born American Jew with burnt cork on his face. Yes, pop-pickers, it’s Al Jolson with “Mammy”. Rose remembers his parents “literally falling about laughing” when he would sing them this song as a young child in 1950s Africa.

What’s the one record he’ll cherish above all others? It’s a pop-style rendition by “crossover singer” Phillippa Giordana of “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. Or as Kirsty Young calls it, “Costa Diva”. Plenty of them hanging around the high-street coffee shops and the Spanish seaside resorts, I expect.

Breakfast was not the best time to hear Kirsty Young flirt and slobber nauseatingly over this tedious plutocrat — “you’re very dashing, and you’re very urbane ... you’d be a bloody good catch for someone, Stuart!” Yes, the underwear rail at Marky’s will never be the same again for Kirsty.

Campbell’s Weather Compendium

Marge Simpson: If I write a book, will they tell me when it comes out?
Author: Well, they should.
Marge Simpson: Then I’ll do it!

Apologies for my truly lamentable neglect of this so-called blog recently. Part of the reason is that, after a delayed start, everyone here at the Campbell Fun Fact-ory has been working flat out to bring you the next fact-packed non-fiction page-turner, yes indeed. Both discretion and superstition have sealed my lips hitherto, but given that it has now appeared on Amazon and whatnot, it seems in order to fess up. Slightly embarrassingly, and I swear this wasn’t my idea, it’s called Campbell’s Weather Compendium.

And now I really must get on.

Whatever happened to the radio interview

Hey, I’m not going to be on the radio! The excellent Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth contacted me the other day to ask if I could say anything interesting about the way transliterations from languages such as Chinese might affect place name changes. After some serious thought I had to admit defeat. The only decent example I could think of that really fitted the bill was Beijing/Pekin(g), where the centuries-old English form comes to us through French, being replaced by the Hanyu Pinyin phonetic romanisation. Different ways of transliterating Russian have produced intriguingly inconsistent spellings of Russian names in English but I can’t think of any place names that have changed through that. If they’d asked about personal names I think we might have been on more fruitful ground, but hey.

Now doubtless someone will chip in with a huge list of good examples.

Score: Radio 4, nul points

Trailer for Radio 4’s Book of the Week, Chopin, Prince of the Romantics: “Throughout Europe the rise of the middle class led to the piano being turned into a kind of household altar at which culture was worshipped. And where there was a piano, there were scores of Chopin’s music.”

Except that neither the actor doing the reading, nor presumably the producer or the recording engineer or the tea-lady or the overqualified Polish cleaner mopping the floor, had ever heard of the word “score” in this context. Scores of something means lots of it, right? So, er, “where there was a piano, there were scores of Chopin’s music.”

Whatever happened to the Persian Gulf?

It appears that the thought-provoking non-fiction smasharoo Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? is read in all the best radio production offices, and when they think geographical name-changes, they think Campbell. It seems I am going to be on the BBC World Service discussion programme World Have Your Say between about 6 and7pm tonight. Which is to say in less than an hour. Sorry you missed it!

“Nigerois”?

In response to my musings on the English word Nigerien, meaning “of or from Niger”, a friend suggests “Nigerois”. This would indeed be less confusing than Nigerien, and is fairly well attested on the Web, though not in any dictionary I can find apart from Merriam Webster Online.

A blogger “siphoning off a few thoughts” has a nice take-down of what s/he calls this “tricky English fake word of the day” here. “Nigerois is tricky because not only do we not refer to people as they refer to themselves [Nigérien], we went to the trouble of creating a word that sounds to an English speaker as if it were French.” A very good point: the tendency to deliberately foreignise English words, sometimes in order to show off an over-confident and sadly incomplete linguistic awareness, can lead to some grotesque results.

Two pet hates of mine are “Galician”, when pronounced with an affected lisp to seem more Spanish, and even worse the nonsense word “Andalucian” (again with the lisp that paradoxically isn’t even characteristic of the Spanish of that area). The adjective Galician (in Spanish, gallego, in Galician, galego), referring to Galicia in northwest Spain, is pronounced “ga-LISS-ian”; to add the lisp is like missing off the s in Parisian — “pa-REE-an” — in order to show off the fact you know the s is silent in French in the word Paris (“pa-REE”), although the French word is of course parisien.¹ Meanwhile we have a perfectly good English word for the region known in Spanish as Andalucía: it’s Andalusia (“anda-LOOSE-ia”²), and the adjective is Andalusian (“anda-LOOSE-ian”). But as so often, a little learning is a dangerous thing. The Spanish adjective is andaluz (“anda-LOOTH”). The ridiculous invention “Andalucian”, or even “Andalucían” (“anda-looth-EE-an”), is neither English nor Spanish, but gets hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.

It makes you think. Maybe there is a role for properly-compiled dictionaries after all? Maybe we can’t always rely on muddling through with Google, the lexicographical equivalent of “ask the audience”.

¹ And in the same vein we might add Munich, when pronounced with an affected German-style fricative “ch”, forgetting the fact that in German it’s not Munich anyway but (as you know, gentle reader) München.
²I gather it comes out in US English as “anda-LOOZH-a”. Yuck.