A Pair of Original Partici Pants.

There are many benefits to hanging out with BA graduates. Firstly, they are usually poor and slovenly, and will not judge you if you give them box wine and ready meals for dinner. Secondly, they write the best emails. Thirdly, they appreciate horrible puns. And fourth(ly?), they have a greater capacity than any other population group for talking unadulterated rubbish.
 

My friend Anna is definitely one of the forerunners in this category, which is why we spent eight happy hours last week discussing words which should be assigned new meanings. It’s an interesting thing, this, because if you put a word in the wrong context, it’s not that hard to draw your own conclusions (witness the ease with which one begins to understand A Clockwork Orange a few pages in). With enough people to join our revolution, I think it’s only a matter of time before we get to use words randomly, for whatever purpose we choose. It’s the logical conclusion to how language develops anyway; we’ll just be accelerating it. 

And if cummings could get his r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r across to generations of morons in schools, I don’t see why a little poetic licence should be a problem for the rest of us. We’ll have crayon-smacking ice-cream and witches in our hair. We’ll have gorilla cakes for tea and take road trips in a big-wheel carbuncle. We’ll invite puffers to our parties and jump penguins in the soup. It will be trifle! It will be cherry! It will be dilly! 

(And see, you probably got the gist of that, didn’t you?) 

As things stand, I’m already guilty of word abuse. I am most comfortable in English, but it was not always my first language, and sometimes – especially when I’m tired - I forget surprisingly obvious expressions. And when I want a word and can’t find it, frustration leads me just make new ones up (wangtard or holbungler, for example), or randomly inject adjectives that (to me) sound more accurate, even if I use them incorrectly. I find the DA a little soggy, for example, or I don’t like that scriptwriter; he has a greasy turn of phrase. 

But I have nothing on my sister, who is both extraordinarily imaginative and extraordinarily stubborn. She is magnificent. She doesn’t like rules, and I don’t think she really believes that conventions of meaning apply to her. Over the years, she has developed an entire language; a world of disparaging neologisms. To my sister, “good” and “bad” do not exist; the world is instead divided into “real” and “joke,” which to her seem more descriptive. Hot, milky tea is real tea. A large, snow-white bathroom is a real bathroom. Or, if you introduce her to people who annoy or offend her, she will dismiss them with one regal flick of her wrist. “Sies. Silly joke people,” she will say, and stalk off. “Joke exercise,” she will sniff as she passes the elliptical trainer.

She also has a wonderful array of randomly constructed insults at her disposal. “It’s called a vehicle! Drive it, you puff-eared Oros Man!” she will fume in traffic. LONDON IS KAKHOLE AS REMEMBERED. UGLY PASTY ZITS FOR PEOPLE, was her pithy SMS verdict from abroad. And my personal favourite is her way of raising an eyebrow at thick, dull, waxy skies and muttering darkly: “Van Gogh weather,” before shutting the door with a grunt.

But these are all intentional twists of meaning. Sometimes a word begs so hard for an alternative definition that one can’t help reinventing it. Porsche, for example. Which, as I’ve mentioned before, I spent my entire childhood believing was a kind of fowl. Or participants, as I said to the abovementioned Anna.

“Every time I read the word ‘participants’,” I complained to her, “my brain separates the syllables. I read Partici and then pants, as though Partici is some kind of Italian designer.”

“Yes, yes,” Anna encouraged. “Prada handbag, check; Gucci sunglasses, check; Partici pants, check!”

You can see why I hang out with her.

“Bolshy,” I continued, “sounds juicy, like a fruit. This melon is bolshy.”

“Yes, I see that,” Anna nodded. “Kinda squishy-like.”

“Stomach,” I added, because another of our favourite topics is lunch. “Sounds like a well. An abyss. She fell down into the stomach. Though maybe that is just mine.”

“No, no,” said Anna. “You are far too thin to have an abyss in your stomach.” Because outrageous lies form one of the cornerstones of true friendship. “But abysmal. Now that sounds medicinal, like an anti-inflammatory. And dismal. What a pill. Take two spoons of dismal and call me in the morning.” (Well, tell me you’ve never had that kind of day.)

Crimpolene sounds to me like a laxative or window cleaner; blancmange like a garment or some kind of eccentric ablution procedure. She pulled the blancmange around her shoulders and slipped into the icy night, for example. Or She shut the bathroom door and hurriedly blancmanged her sweaty feet.

Anna, on the other hand, thinks it is “stipple on walls” or “a hideous floral scrunchie”.

Pubescent sounds to me full-bodied and colourful: After the rains the sky swelled into a pubescent rainbow. Mushroom sounds like what it is, a fungus; though fungus in turn sounds like a would-be aristocrat’s name. This is my son and heir, Archibald Ignatius Fungus.

My personal favourite was Anna’s colostomy, which is “what happens when there are too many people in a train carriage and some of them have to hang out of the doors”.

“In a colostomy there isn’t…mushroom!” she sniggered. “HAHAHAHAHA!”

Peanut, she says, is a rodent. The peanut scuttled back into its hole. Pincer is to me a footman; a snooty butler in livery. With one flick of her wand the fairy godmother turned the mouse into a well-trained pincer who took up the whip and began driving the coach.

For that matter, I think Cinderella and Chlamydia should be interchangeable, as should dollop and buttock: Put a buttock of cream on my apple pie, will you? And Princess Chlamydia had a hot set of dollops. She wound up with cinderella after one too many encounters with a pincer.

Nostril sounds to Anna like a wise old man. Tell Uncle Nostril what’s wrong, for instance. Or She approached the wizened Nostril with the reverence of a -

“Of a pumpkin,” I interrupted. “A religious novice. I aspire to be a monk, but I am at present still a pumpkin.”

Well, it was downhill from there; the stories started flowing like custard through cake.

“There is one for mushroom!” I cried. “It’s a dirty beard on a pervert, full of last week’s chicken.”

“Armadillo!” Anna countered. “A fruit. A pink one. Watermelon-and-armadillo salad!”

“Which you can enjoy with Pimms and a dash of candied demon!” I whooped. “Yes!”

“Treble!” came the next. “A pudding, or a coward. Just look at that gibbering treble.”

“Transkei: an embroidered hanky!”

“Gripe: a small grave!”

“Bales: a swollen stomach from eating too many fatty foods. He had such bad bales that we had to bury him in a gripe.”

“But he was dug up by a persimmon!” howled Anna. “The endangered mountain lion!”

“Which was tracked through the bush by a brave and gallant Towel!” I said. “A junior army officer!”

“Yes,” Anna nodded eagerly. “Poor thing, the training module is very bulbous.”

“A weaker man would have broken out in endorsements,” I marvelled.

“Or turned a bit hilary.”

“Drowned in a blog.”

We fell into a companionable silence.

“Percolator,” I said eventually. “What do you think that means?”

“Dunno,” she said.

“I think it’s the weirdo who stares at strangers on public transport,” I mused. “Just look at that percolator giving me the dribbly eye.”

“Indeed,” agreed Anna. “What a mushroom there is on him.”

She paused.

“I wouldn’t want to be next to him in a colostomy – would you?”