Kitabı oku: «By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English»

2

Making a Beeline

MENAI

Later, as I got into my car, I looked out at the sheep, thousands of sheep, and ruminated about their accents. Five sheep for every person in the county, so they say. The face of my Gaerwen shepherd had been unmoving as he said it, no sign of a wink or a smile. Had he been joking? The notion wasn’t totally absurd. Why shouldn’t sheep have accents? If farmers can distinguish their breeds by the way they look, why not by the way they sound? I wonder if Karl von Frisch ever studied sheep?

Probably not. Bees were his thing. And fish. But mainly bees. I still have the copy of a Scientific American article he wrote in 1962: ‘Dialects in the Language of the Bees’. It led me to his book, written a few years before, translated into English as The Dancing Bees. Von Frisch was director of the Zoological Institute at Munich University, and in the 1920s he began a lifelong series of experiments into the way bees communicate with each other. It got him a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine.

Observers of nature know that when a single forager bee finds a good source of nectar, within an hour or so dozens, maybe hundreds, of bees will have found their way to the place. Evidently, the pioneer bee has returned to the hive and ‘told’ the others about the location of the food. But how? Von Frisch and his colleagues discovered that the information was being conveyed through a pattern of repeated body movements which he called ‘dancing’.

It was taking a while to get out of the sheep-market car park. I had to negotiate my way through a slow reversing dance of Range Rovers and sheep trailers, as they manoeuvred to offload their noisy contents into the sheep pens. A bee floated indecisively across my windscreen, plainly not on a von Frisch mission.

How had he worked it out? The researchers’ method was to put a small dish of sugar water some distance from the hive. The dish might not be discovered for several days, but as soon as one bee found it, and returned to the hive, others soon emerged and made their way to exactly the place where the dish was. It seemed to be precision navigating.

The first time I read about this research, I remember thinking: how on earth could you keep track of a single bee within a hive? But there was a simple solution. The researchers marked the pioneer forager with a coloured dot while it was feeding, so that they could track its movements when it returned. The hive had glass walls so that they could see what was happening inside. And there they saw the dance – a ‘round’ dance, with the bee turning in circles alternately to the left and the right.

The behaviour has now been observed by hundreds of researchers. It’s been filmed, and – these days – computer-analysed. The dance is evidently saying, ‘Hey, everyone, come and see what I’ve found, not far away!’ If the nectar source is especially rich, the dance language is especially lively. ‘Hey, you really have to see this!’

I finally got out of the sheep-market, and followed the little back road around to the junction with the A5 at the edge of Gaerwen, near where the Lit – tle Chef used to be. It’s a quiet road now. The new dual-carriageway A55 across Anglesey took most of the traffic away, and the café went with it. But there are enough points of interest along the A5 to keep the tourists coming. Llanfairpwll is just a couple of miles away, on the edge of the Menai Straits that separate Anglesey from the Welsh mainland. I always have a linguistic compulsion to avoid the bypass and drive along its main street, just to take in the long name outside the railway station.

Things have changed in Llanfairpwll. During the later decades of the last century you would see navy cadets (of both sexes) walking around the village. They were from the Royal Navy shore-based training school on the edge of the Menai Straits. The name of the school, inherited from a famous training vessel of the past, was on the front of their caps. It said simply Indefatigable. The school closed in 1995, and with it went an era of risqué jokes.

These days Llanfairpwll has another magnet as well as the name: Pringle’s knitwear store – though its racks of souvenir mugs, books, and teatowels have added fresh nuances to the definition of ‘knitting’. Several tourist buses were lined up outside, and their contents were dancing to and fro at the entrance, excitedly pointing out things in the shop to one another. ‘Hey, you really have to see this!’

A busload of Japanese tourists was posing for a photograph in front of the long name on the shop and trying to pronounce it. The one at the railway station has a pseudo-phonetic transcription underneath it, which I suppose helps.

One of the buses was having some difficulty negotiating the turn into the car park, so a small traffic jam built up. While I waited for it to clear, I looked across at the buzzing forecourt. Just inside the door of the shop there is one of those signposts which gives distances and directions to major cities. It tells you that it is 6,879 miles to Buenos Aires that way (past Aberystwyth and keep going) and 5,923 miles to Tokyo this way (via Benllech). It is also 9,898 miles from Llanfairpwll to the South Pole.

I expect when the tourists get back home they will tell their friends about where they have been, and more will come.

That seems to be what happened to von Frisch’s bees. When the forager did its round dance, the nearby bees got the message, detected the scent of the kind of flower on the forager’s body, and flew off to look for it. When they found it, they too returned to the hive and did a similar dance. And so it went on, with more and more bees making the visit, until most of the nectar had been drained from the source. Late arrivals at the flower then found little to feed on, so when they returned to the hive they had, quite literally, nothing to make a buzz and dance about. Their dancing movements were slow or they stopped altogether. ‘Don’t bother going!’ And the other bees, noting the inactivity, stayed put – until the next excited forager arrived with news of a fresh source of nectar.

There was no danger of the Pringle’s source being totally drained. Indeed, as I waited for the traffic to clear, I could see a delivery van unloading fresh supplies. Nectar yesterday, nectar tomorrow, and always nectar today.

The round dance is enough to indicate the source if it’s fairly near to the hive – von Frisch thought within about 275 feet or so – but if it’s a lot further away, such as a mile or more, something more precise is needed. That’s when the bees do the ‘tail-wagging’ dance. Inside the hive, the forager runs a short distance in a straight line, wagging its abdomen from side to side, then returns in a semi-circle to the starting point. It repeats the run, and comes back in a semi-circle on the opposite side. Then it does the whole cycle again – and again…

It’s the tempo of the dance that signals the distance from the source. For instance, in one experiment, a feeding dish was placed a thousand feet away, and the bee that discovered it performed fifteen complete cycles of the dance in thirty seconds. When the dish was placed two thousand feet away, the number dropped to eleven. The further away, the fewer the cycles.

And how do they work out the direction of the food? That’s shown by the straight-line part of the dance. If the dance is done on the platform in front of a hive, in the light of day, the orientation of the bee’s body along the line with respect to the sun is enough to point other bees directly towards the goal. Inside the hive, where it’s dark, the bee’s sense of gravity allows it to make an upwards movement against the honeycomb wall. It’s as if the bee draws a straight vertical line on the wall. If it then runs straight up the line, this tells the others that the food is in the same direction as the sun. If the food is, say, forty degrees to the left of the sun, the run points forty degrees to the left of this line.

It’s an amazingly sophisticated system, with modifications built in to allow for the sun’s movement across the sky. And it works. When other bees fly out, they know that the nectar source is, say, about half a mile away at a bearing of forty degrees left, and – from the excitement of the dance – how much nectar is likely to be there. And that’s the source they go for, ignoring everything else on the way. In one series of experiments, von Frisch placed other food dishes between the hive and the nectar source that the pioneer forager had found. The other bees flew straight over them, making a beeline, as it were, only for the source they’d been told about.

The bus that had been causing all the trouble finally made it into its parking bay, but my little traffic jam stayed put. A tractor was trying to follow it in, and that was now blocking the road. What on earth was a farmer doing at Pringle’s at this time of day? As it slewed around, I could see it was pulling a trailer with two sheep in it. Now that’s what I call service. Out of the field, into the Gaerwen auction, and onto a Pringle’s shelf, all in one afternoon.

I could hear the sound of the sheep above the noise of the traffic. Were there Welsh-English bleatlects? I fantasized about an article: ‘Dialects in the Language of the Sheep’. Von Frisch’s first experiments had used black Austrian honeybees. He then carried out some further experiments using Italian honeybees. The Italians restricted their round dances to distances of only thirty feet. For intermediate distances they performed a ‘sickle-shaped’ dance, which the Austrians did not do. Then, for distances over 120 feet they did the tail-wagging dance, but rather more slowly than the Austrians.

As a result, when the Austrian and Italian bees were placed in the same hive, the wagging dance of the Italians made the Austrians search for the feeding place too far away. And vice versa. They seemed to understand each other, but not exactly. Just like the dialects of human language, really, von Frisch thought.

If he’d studied the buzzing, he might have said accents too. I wonder if the sound of the buzz alters in proportion to the excitement?

The bee-dancing hypothesis was received with considerable scepticism at first. Later observations showed that the time it took for bees to arrive at the source was usually longer than von Frisch had predicted. Maybe it was all a mixture of chance, sight, and scent after all? But in 2005 a research team made more precise measurements to show that von Frisch’s dancing theory was right.

They used a method called harmonic radar – a system first used to track the location of avalanche victims. A tiny transponder was attached to a bee, and this returned radar signals enabling its flight path to be plotted. The team was able to demonstrate that the waggle dance was enough to enable most of the bees to reach the vicinity of the food. But they then needed sight and odour to pinpoint the final destination.

That was why von Frisch’s bees took longer than expected to reach the food. The dance got them to the railway station, as it were, but they had to find the right platform for themselves.

The busload of Japanese tourists had found their way onto the station platform and had lined up under the name sign. They were having trouble working out how to stand in front of it without obscuring the letters. The photographer was having trouble too, getting everybody into his shot. He backed away, momentarily forgetting that the railway line was right behind him. An eruption of Japanese – which, roughly translated, said, ‘Excuse our temerity in troubling you, Hiro, but you are about to fall onto a railway track and there is a train coming’– kept him safe.

After the train had passed he solved his problem by taking the photograph from the opposite platform. And his subjects solved theirs by having some of their party sit down on the ground in front of the name sign. It looked as if the letters were sprouting out of their heads.

Suddenly the jam cleared, and I drove on, leaving the sheep and Japanese behind. The road out of Llanfairpwll runs alongside the Menai Straits, and if you pull into a lay-by there is a splendid view of the two bridges – Thomas Telford’s fine Menai Suspension Bridge to the north, and the later Britannia Bridge, originally built by Robert Stephenson, a mile and a half to the south.

The suspension bridge was opened on 30 January 1826. It was one of the highest bridges of its day, because the Admiralty insisted that there should be room beneath it to allow the passage of sailing ships. It’s a hundred-foot drop to the water below. It carried the A5 from London to Holyhead – the first British road instituted by an Act of Parliament. The Irish Act of Union had been passed in 1801. Once the link was completed, Irish MPs would be able to make the journey down to the Houses of Parliament in two days instead of four.

Before the bridge there were only ferries – six main services, running at different points along the Straits, each under the control of a local landowner. A highly competitive business it was, I suppose much like the local taxi businesses in the area today. Apart from the time involved, and the danger from the strong currents, it could be expensive. Who pays the ferryman? You did – and sometimes twice! Some boatmen would charge you when you got onto the boat, and then charge you again before they let you off.

The ferry owners were totally against the project, but they were overruled by London, and work started on the bridge in 1819. Limestone was quarried at Penmon a few miles north, and carried down by boat. The ironwork was made at a Shrewsbury foundry. To prevent rust, it was immersed in warm linseed oil.

Lewis Carroll had a different idea. In Chapter 8 of Through the Looking Glass he has the White Knight come up with a unique preservation scheme. The Knight has been singing a song to Alice about the life-story told to him by ‘an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate’. Then, quite out of the blue, he reflects:

I heard him then, for I had just

Completed my design

To keep the Menai Bridge from rust

By boiling it in wine.

A-sitting. That use of a-goes back to the Middle Ages. It is historically a form of on, which came to be used to emphasize the duration of an action, and especially its repeated character. If you were ‘a-shouting’, as Casca says the people do at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, you would be engaged in that activity for longer than if you were just ‘shouting’. You would be shouting over and over.

Why does Carroll use it here? Sitting isn’t a verb which needs an a- prefix. It is already expressing a continuous duration. The aged man wasn’t sitting repeatedly on his gate. So you wouldn’t expect to find an a-used.

What happened was that poets started to use the prefix to make up the ‘te-tum-te-tum’ rhythm of a line. It was a bit cheeky, really, but the nuance added by a- was so slight that it hardly made any difference. And it was an easy ‘fix’.

The stratagem was a boon to anyone making up simple rhymes:

Bye, baby bunting. Daddy’s gone hunting.

Doesn’t work.

Bye, baby bunting. Daddy’s gone a-hunting.

Works.

So, ‘A-hunting we will go…’, ‘Here we come a-wassailing…’– and ‘an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate’.

That day in June 2005, as I passed by, they were preserving the bridge again, but totally ignoring Carroll’s advice, for there was no wine in sight. They were three months into the painstaking task of stripping off the old paint down to the bare metal and repainting. It would take them several months to finish, and in the meantime one side of the bridge was covered with scaffolding. Only one lane of the bridge was open. In the morning it took the traffic across from Anglesey to the mainland, and then at 2 p.m. the flow reversed. Hard luck if you arrived at the Anglesey side at one minute past two. You had to find another way – or wait a day, of course.

Fortunately, there is another way. Just a few years after Telford’s bridge was opened, plans were drawn up by Robert Stephenson for a bridge to carry the London–Holyhead railway across the Straits. To take the weight of a train, he designed a bridge consisting of two rectangular wrought-iron tubes, ten feet apart, one of which enclosed the up-line and the other the down-line. A protective wooden roof was added, covered with hessian and coated with tar, along the whole length of the bridge. There was a gap of a couple of feet between the roof and the top of the tubes.

The tubes were 150 feet above the water, supported by five tall masonry towers, again using Penmon limestone. Each tower was surmounted by a stone structure, which gave the bridge a distinctive fort-like silhouette. Four limestone lions, about thirteen feet in height, guarded the bridge, two at each end. They were carved by John Thomas, who had previously worked at the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

Would the tubes take the weight of a train? To be on the safe side, Stephenson allowed for suspension chains in his design, and put slots into the top of the arches above the bridge. But it proved to be an unnecessary precaution. A model of the bridge was built and tested, and the tubular construction went ahead without chains. The bridge was opened on 5 March 1850, and trains passed comfortably to and fro for 120 years. The slots now look rather ominous as you approach them – like pairs of beady eyes.

I remember travelling by steam train through the bridge in the 1950s, to and from Holyhead. If the window of your compartment was open – and as a child you tried to make sure it was – you would soon be covered with wonderful smoke and ash, and your ears would ring with the whistle of the engine as it entered the tunnel and the deafening noise of the train in the confined space.

Then, on the evening of Saturday, 23 May 1970, the bridge burned down. A group of local teenagers had gone into the tunnel on the Caernarfonshire side to see what it was like, and lit some paper for illumination a few yards inside. They dropped it accidentally, and other rubbish alongside the track caught fire. The mixture of wood, hessian, and tar, and the draught tunnel formed by the roof space, did the rest.

The problem for the fire brigade was that the entrance to the tubes was difficult to access – they had to negotiate three-quarters of a mile of rough track. There were no pressure water supplies in the area, and the nearest static water was the Menai Straits, 450 yards away down a one-in-three gradient.

By the time they got some water onto it, the fire had taken hold. One of the red-hot girders even snapped in half when water was sprayed upon it. It was a raging inferno inside the roof space – though curiously, because of the enclosed nature of the bridge, for some time no fire could be seen from the outside. But once it broke through, the line of flames extending across the Straits was as spectacular as it was horrific. You can see a video clip, and an interview with one of the teenagers, at a BBC Wales website.

One estimate of the damage was over £1 million, but as the bridge cost over £600,000 to build in 1850, that was surely a low guess. The railway was out of action for four years. Irish ferries to and from Holyhead had to be diverted to Morecambe. The economy of the area took years to recover.

A new single-track railway bridge was back in action in 1974, supported by arches, and they put a road on top of it in 1980. It’s now the main link between Anglesey and the mainland, carrying the A55. Three of the imposing towers are still there, and the road passes underneath them, right on top of the railway line.

You can’t see the lions from the road, but they’re still there too, beside the railway. You can visit the two on the Anglesey side if you take a path by the Carreg Bran Hotel. A small section of the original tubular bridge is also displayed on the Bangor side. You can see it from the train.

I was planning to head south into mid-Wales, where I had my next appointment with Welsh accents, so I took the Britannia Bridge out of Anglesey, and turned towards Caernarfon past the thousand-acre Vaynol estate. The Old Hall there dates back to Elizabethan times, and maybe earlier. These days they hold major cultural events in the park. Local boy Bryn Terfel started a glittering annual music festival there in 2000, and regularly performs there. They say that when he’s singing you can hear him in Cardiff. Only when the wind’s in the right direction, mind.

If you look carefully at the wall near the entrance, you can still see the faded image of a piece of anonymous biblical graffiti text, whose original white-paint impact has long been erased. I photographed it when it first appeared. It reads: ALL SHALL BE WELL!

All was well, and it was a fine sunny day when I stopped to eat a sandwich at the top of a hill overlooking the Straits. A lovely view back across Anglesey, and plenty of opportunity to observe bees – and wasps – out in force, and especially interested in my sandwich.

Dylan Thomas got it right about wasps. In his short story ‘Conversation about Christmas’ he tells a small boy about his childhood Christmas presents. Some of them were books, he says, ‘that told me everything about the wasp, except why’.

A bee meandered into view. It must have been the general impression of bees flying directly to their food or to the hive which led to the emergence of that phrase, making a beeline. In fact, radar – or for that matter, common observation – shows that there’s nothing particularly straight about the flight-path at all. Bees wobble about a lot. Nor do they have the sense of urgency or rapid movement that is usually intended when someone is said to ‘make a beeline’ for something.

The earliest recorded usage of the phrase is 1830, but it must still have felt very new a decade later. When Edgar Allen Poe used it in one of his short stories, ‘The Gold Bug’, published in 1843, he felt he had to explain it. His character Legrand describes how he worked out where some pirate treasure was hidden. What he did, he says, was draw ‘a bee-line, or, in other words, a straight line’ from one point to another. That’s a sure indication that a usage is recent. People don’t bother explaining the sense of a word if it’s well established.

It’s hardly ever possible to say when a word first comes into a language. Who knows when king was first used, or eggshell, or inconsequential? Or by hook and by crook?

Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.

One such moment was in New York in 1907 at a publishing trade

association dinner. Huebsch had just published a successful book by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, called Are You a Bromide? (A bromide was Burgess’s word for a dull, conventional person.) Free copies were given out to those present, printed – as was the association’s custom – in a special jacket.

Burgess was there, and he didn’t like the jacket. He felt it was much too conventional. A much better idea, he thought, was the practice of contemporary lurid novels, which always had a delicious damsel posing on the front cover. So he decided to draw one. He sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets, and labelled her ‘Miss Belinda Blurb’.

The name caught on. Any excessive testimonial for a book, on front or back covers, was soon being called a blurb. In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, he defined his own term:

1 A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.

2 Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.

Blurbs have been with us ever since.

Actually, blurb was quite fortunate. Most of the words we make up on the spur of the moment never catch on. It doesn’t matter even if you’re gifted and famous. Shakespeare is the first recorded user of about two thousand words, but nearly half of them fell out of use sooner or later. From his list, we continue to use abhorred, abstemious, accessible, and accommodation; but nobody uses adoptious, aidance, allayment, or annexment any more.

Why did abstemious stay and adoptious go? One of the great mysteries of language change is why people decide to use one word and not another.

Sometimes you can sense the nature of the choices available. For instance, frequency is recorded in English from 1553. A century later, frequentness appeared. This is something which happens quite a lot. A word with a good Anglo-Saxon ending (such as –ness) is put into competition with an already existing word with a foreign ending (the Latin/French –ency, in this case). Which won? Today the dictionaries all include frequency and only occasionally even bother to mention frequentness.

Perhaps it was the shorter length of frequency which made it appeal. Or the desire to sound educated. Or the fact that it was recognized in the leading dictionaries. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much that people preferred frequency as that they disliked frequentness. Maybe it was the slightly awkward pronunciation, as they tried to get their tongues around the –ntn – sequence in the middle. Maybe they didn’t like the sound of the two n’s.

But frequentness didn’t totally disappear. If you listen out in everyday conversation, you will quite often find the Anglo-Saxon constructions being used in place of the expected forms. I have heard immenseness, immediateness, and delicateness as well as frequentness. None of them is a recommended dictionary form. The dates of their earliest and latest recorded uses, according to the OED, are:

immenseness: 1610–1798

frequentness: 1664–1862

delicateness: 1530–1873

immediateness: 1633–1882

They should be dead; but they live on.

It’s an interesting exercise to explore the use of suffixes, trying them out to see the different meanings and effects they convey. I tried it once with a school group. The idea was to see how many suffixes could attach to a noun like bee. Modern dictionaries usually don’t give any. I found bee-like in one, and that was all.

Within minutes they had concocted a story about an imaginary beedom (from kingdom), in which a queen bee (your beeness) had offered beehood (from knighthood) to a brave worker who had saved the hive from attack. They went on to form a beeocracy. Outsiders who criticized their way of life were displaying beeism and considered beeist. The heroic worker was eventually beeified. And so it went on. It was like the unwritten script for an animal cartoon – the stuff of Antz.

The students weren’t the first to think up beedom. The OED editors had already found an instance of it in 1868. They also found one use of beeishness in 1674. Beedom turns up several times in the writing of the missionary poet John Bradburne. It is the sort of word that gets repeatedly invented.

I wonder if von Frisch was ever stung? An occupational hazard of an entomologist, I imagine. And if I ever had the chance to do some detailed work on the languages and dialects of animals, I think I’d prefer sheep to bees, having been stung more than once.

Of course, all this talk of language and dialects is metaphorical when applied to animals. Von Frisch knew this very well. We can hardly compare the infinite possibilities of expression and comprehension mediated through human language to the limited set of instinctive reactions that we find in a bee, whose brain, he pointed out, is the size of a grass seed. And we would find huge limitations of communication, similarly, if we were to investigate the communicative patterns of larger-brained animals, such as we find in gull cries, thrush songs, ape calls – or sheep bleats.

We do keep underestimating the ability of animals to learn facets of language, though. For a long time, it was thought there were certain properties of language that animals could never learn, and this may still be true. Maybe the defining characteristic of humanity is indeed being ‘Homo loquens’, the speaking animal. But animal researchers have been steadily chipping away at the idea that there is a major evolutionary gap between humans and other species.

Some animals may not be able to speak, write, or sign in the way humans can; but they can do more than we might expect. Chimps can be taught manual signs. Parrots imitate a remarkable range of vocal sounds. Dogs recognize subtle tones of voice. There was even news, in 2006, of a species of African monkey that varied the sequence of calls in order to express different meanings – much as we vary word order in English. And in the same year a research team in California reported that they had taught some starlings to tell the difference between the song equivalent of simple sentences and those containing a song into which another bit of song had been inserted – in effect, a subordinate clause.

Actually, 2006 was quite a year, because in August there was a report suggesting that cows have regional accents too. Apparently some Somerset dairy farmers had noticed that cows have different moos, depending on which herd they come from. Mooolects. Maybe bleatlects aren’t such a fantastic idea after all.

A huge flock of starlings flew towards me and then turned back at the last minute, as if they were wanting to keep out of Gwynedd. Maybe starlingese syntax is different there. Or maybe they understand more about human dialects than we give them credit for. If so, any especially sensitive starlings would steer well clear of the town I was about to pass through, Caernarfon.

There is an English four-letter taboo word beginning with the letter c which is so sensitive still, in the minds of many, that if I were to print it in full in this book I would cause unknown quantities of upset and complaint. So, not being in the business of upsetting readers, I will rely on folk memory to supply the missing word. And in case there are any who do not know what I am talking about, I will provide a clue in a couple of paragraphs’ time.

In Caernarfon, this same word is used among some sections of the population as an amiable form of address. Much as you might hear ‘Hello, mate’ as a friendly greeting, so in the streets of Caernarfon you can hear an affable ‘Hello, c—.’ Anywhere else in the UK, such a greeting would earn you a black eye at least. But not here.

Book publishers are able to eliminate such words at an early stage, if they want to. But what do you do with the Internet? The search engines had a real problem when they first tried to devise filters which would identify pages containing offensive words or images. They thought that all they had to do was have a piece of software search through a page, and if it found a string of letters which added up to a potentially sensitive word, they would block access to it.

The only thing was, the software didn’t make a distinction between the string of letters when it was a separate word and the string when it was part of a word. So, the search engine having decided that sex was a ‘bad word’, the residents of Sussex and Essex found they were unable to access many web pages relating to their counties. Not to mention the good citizens of Scunthorpe.

Software is a bit more advanced these days, but it still lacks the kind of linguistic sophistication which is needed to ensure that basic blunders are avoided. A couple of years ago, there was an Internet news page that reported a street stabbing in Chicago. The automatically-generated ads down the side of the screen said ‘Buy your knives here’ and ‘Get cheap knives here’. The dumb software had spotted the word knife and assumed that this was what needed to be plugged. It wasn’t clever enough to analyse the content of the page and see that, if there were to be any ads at all, they should be about personal protection.

Publications go to extraordinary lengths sometimes to protect their readers from the shock of encountering a taboo word. Even dictionaries. In the 1940s, Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the first to pay full and detailed attention to all four-letter words, was banned by some libraries and placed on the reserved shelves by others. If you were interested in slang and asked to see it, the librarian would look you up and down as if you were a pervert.

Modern dictionaries generally include all taboo words, marking them with a stylistic label such as ‘taboo’ or ‘offensive’. But even these sometimes back away from a full frontal presentation. I have a dictionary, published not very long ago, where the last word on the right-hand page to be given a definition is fuck. This should therefore appear as the guide-word (or ‘running head’) at the top right-hand corner of the page. But it doesn’t. Instead we see its alphabetical predecessor, fuchsia.

As I drove through Caernarfon, past the castle, I stopped at a zebra crossing to let a young man cross. He had just stepped onto the crossing when a car coming from the opposite direction zipped past in front of him, giving him a bit of a fright. He shouted after the miscreant. It was the c-word again, but not at all affable this time.