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Literally* the problem of the birds and the bees. I was asked the other day about why different kinds of birds can’t mate. And it’s a question that seems to divide people. Some people seem to think the answer is really obvious and others seem to think that they probably can.

This seems to all stem from a strange feeling that people have that birds might be a species rather than a class. So some people think that you can kind of go: cats, dogs, birds in a list and that this would be a sensible list. But it’s not really true. You would be able to go: cats, dogs, chickens. These are all animals or species of animals, but the first list contains a class. So you should go, mammals, birds.

In fact birds are more diverse a class than mammals and yet we wouldn’t think of cats and dogs mating (although I once met a person who thought that cats are female dogs but they were stupid). Compare a hummingbird to an emu would you think they could mate? (Although a lot of people think that emus and ostrich are closer to mammals than other birds they are still closer to dinosaurs than mammals actually.

*There was a story during the first world war of a village that wanted to show that it had more food and supplies than it actually had so that they enemy wouldn’t want to attack it. But all they really had was one cow so they painted the cow a different pattern every day. The first time I heard somebody talking about this story was when they were talking about a painting of this incident. And this they had to say was a painting of a person literally painting a cow. It’s a great example of somebody using literally correctly, because literally has become now an autoantoym which means that it means the opposite of itself. Other examples are dust. To dust can mean to remove particles from something and can also mean to add particles to something (first like cleaning, second like cooking). Literally means in actuality something and also can mean figuratively something. So you can use literally to say explain how when you translated something into English you translated it word for word, “he translated it from the Latin literally”. Or you can use literally to make a metaphor stronger, like “he was literally ready to explode”. The second meaning came about by accident and shouldn’t really be acceptable as far as I’m concerned.

There are more here: http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html

I was talking to a taxi driver the other day and he was telling me that he was going through a rough patch at home.

I like to get into conversations with taxi drivers about them rather than their political beliefs and so on. I think it’s kind of interesting to talk to them about what makes them tick because frankly it must be kind of boring being a taxi driver. And there are the main thing that everyone likes talking about is – themselves. So I imagine that it gives them some fun and is an interesting diversion in their day. Of course it might be that every other punter is doing the same. Or it might be that underneath their brusque exterior they are essentially very shy people and that is why they chose a job where they spend no time with anyone but also hopelessly close to them?

So anyway for whatever reason I do it I tend to talk to taxi drivers about their personal lives, and you get some very interesting stories. And this guy, Paul was his name, was going through a rough patch at home. He had done something he said, he didn’t want to say what it was, but he had done something a few years ago and his wife had never really forgiven him. And then his wife in retribution had cheated on him, which – he told me – had stretched things to breaking point. There had been a lot of rowing and shouting and this, he said, had been their way of things for the last few years. But a few months ago they had been on best behaviour as they had been called into the school of their child and had been told about how their child’s behaviour had been getting worse for the last two years and had suddenly got so bad that they had been called in. So, he said, he wasn’t now sure what it was that had caused it to happen but he thought it might have been because they were all dressed up to meet the headmaster, and had been on best behaviour themselves, but after the meeting they had sat in the car in the carpark and had a conversation.

The conversation, he said, had started because he had said to her, “You know how we’re always saying that we’re staying together for the kid? I’m starting to think that it might not be doing him much good”.

And ever since the conversation things had started to get better. Because while they still argued, there was more chance of a conversation now then their had been. Things still weren’t great though he said.

At this point I made a suggestion, it was just a little suggestion, but one that I’d been thinking about for a while. I suggested to him that he swap sides of the bed with his wife. I mean there’s no reason why you have one side or another, people just start on one side or the other and then stick with it forever. And really, in the end, you’re just getting stuck in a rut. And even though it seems such a small thing it does three things simultaneously. It literally gives you a new perspective, it moves you out of your comfort zone and if you argue with the idea then you know that there’s no hope. What I mean by the last point is that there is no real reason not to try it, it might help it might not. But the person who suggests it is at least trying to make things better, the person who says no has no leg to stand on if they aren’t even willing to change sides of the bed to save their relationship then the relationship is probably doomed.

He said he was going to try it.

I’ve always believed that nobody in the world goes into a pub and orders a “pint of lager”, but on soaps people do this all of the time. Surely the next question that the publican would have is “which lager would you like? We have several on”. In soap operas I can sort of understand it because they don’t want to be mentioning a brand all of the time. But I don’t see why they don’t do what Coronation Street does and invent a brewery that way people can simply order the imaginary beer from that place and not sound really silly.

The only time that I had seen people do something similar was when they would order a lager top (a ridiculous drink in my opinion which is simply beer with lemonade in the top). I have been told by some people that it is very refreshing drink, which may be true but I can’t imagine it, personally I find lager a refreshing alternative to bitter on a Summers day so I can’t see how making it even sweeter and fizzier is going to help the poor drink. But I do understand why if you’re ordering a lager top you are effectively planning on ruining the taste of whatever beer you’re ordering so you may as well have the cheapest one that there is, hence “lager top”, although I have increasingly heard “Fosters top” being used which presumably is because the lemonade doesn’t have enough sugar in it.

On a slight aside, I can understand the lager top thing being refreshing really, I know that other people have different tastes than me – so that’s fine. The thing that annoys me about them is that certain people seem to think that putting a small amount of lemonade in the top of their beer renders them alcohol free. I mean it will reduce the alcohol level slightly but only by the inch of beer that they didn’t put in. This is a big annoyance for me, and for a time when I would ask people why they were drinking a lager top and they told me that it was because they were driving I’d suggest to them that they should simply have an inch less than a pint in their beer – but somehow they felt that the dilutive effects were much stronger than they possibly could be. I think that the entire practice probably came from another horrible invention the lime top. This came from the Mexican beer trend of having lime in the neck of your beer (a very good thing) and applying it to regular beer by putting an inch of lime cordial in your pint of beer (a very bad thing).

But back to the main point of not ordering a specific beer. A few weeks ago I actually saw somebody do just this. They said, “a pint of lager please”. And I almost spilled my pint! The waitress (for it was a pub with waitress service – oh yes) started reeling off names, he said, “whatever’s cheapest luv”. Which reminded me of an ordering I’d seen years and years before (this time somebody I knew) which went, “Which beer do you serve which has the most alcohol in it? I’ll have that one”. Which is sort of the same but hadn’t triggered the concept in my mind because they didn’t use the magic phrase “a pint of lager please”.

There is an element of this conversation which revolves around the idea of beer as a “getting drunk delivery system”. Some people in certain situations just want to get drunk. They don’t care how they do it. But I’m not sure that’s what’s going on here. Because in that case they’d know what they were doing and sit outside with a can of Special Brew. Here they know they are in a pub and they know they want a lager but they haven’t ever even bothered to learn what they like.

I wonder particularly if it is something about beverages which is the thing, or rather a thing that bugs me. Because it also bugs me when people say, “a tin of pop” or a “can of drink” surely you know what kind of drink you want. But on the other hand I will ask for a pack of crisps. Because sometimes you know you want a packet of crisps but you don’t know which ones you want.

I have always explained this discrepancy by simply referring to the sheer number of crisps available and the fact that in pubs while they might have all the beers out on display for you to read out their names, the crisps are often hidden away.

It probably shouldn’t annoy me, but it does. Because I want to believe that people drink beer because it’s a nice drink, not just to get pissed. And if they don’t even care which of the beers they are drinking then its certainly not going to help.

There is a new trend in the English Language and that is to verbify words. Verbifying words is the concept of taking a noun like mouse (like a computer mouse) and then describing the concept of using the mouse like this “I just had a quick mouse around the screen”. It may have existed for a long time, but certainly in modern times it has become much more popular because of the rapid invention of new things. We all tend to know what the new thing is called (unless we’re still referring to all of them as thingy still) but sometimes its more difficult to know how to describe using the thing itself. Another example is “Video” to mean the Video Cassette Recorder. Or “Video” to mean record things on the Video Cassette Recorder.

The extra fun part about “Verbify” is that it is self referential. “Verbify” is a “Verbified” version of the noun “Verb”.

Verbify does have a rather ancient opposite though, something that we’ve all being doing for ages probably without remembering the name for it. A gerund* is when you take a verb and then turn it into a noun. Eg. “I am going to sing”, and then in the next sentence, “Everyone hated Alex’s singing”. In the second sentence the thing that people are doing is “hating” so what I’m doing has become a gerund.

But despite being opposites they can be used together, hence “Verbifying” is a gerund version of “Verbify”.

*I first came across a gerund when learning Latin at school**

**Yeah I know – weird huh***

***I would have been a judge but I didn’t have the Latin.

I have a guilt half-life. It’s quite useful because dealing with guilt is one of the most important things I have to do on a daily basis.

I feel guilty for everything. As Woody Allen once said, “if one guy is starving someplace, it puts a crimp on my evening”. Basically the reason I get out of bed in the morning is because I feel that I would be letting people down if I didn’t.

So what is this guilt half-life? Well basically every time I do something stupid I feel guilty about it but it gets a score (in my head) of how bad it was. But sometimes its difficult to tell exactly what that score is at the time. I feel bad at the time but the only real way to tell exactly how bad I feel about it is to see how long it takes to fall through the different levels of telling people how stupid I’ve been.

Basically, I like telling stories more than I mind feeling embarrassed about how the stories make me look. So when I do something stupid a bit of me knows that sooner or later I’ll be telling people about what I did. Each story makes the following progression.

1 – Tell Katherine, she often gets to hear it when it’s still very raw
2 – Close friends
3 – Family
4 – Friends in general in the pub
5 – The readers on this blog

So when it finally hits the blog that’s a sign that I no longer feel embarrassed about what I did. Not really. And that’s almost always the moment to retire the story from being retold. Everyone’s heard it once, and if they haven’t I guess they could always look it up. But the main thing is that if you’re telling the story in public you’ve got to have the fight between “embarrassment at finishing the story” and the “need to get another laugh” to give it the emotional punch you want. It definitely makes it funnier, which is why when it gets to the blog it’s probably over for the guilt and the story itself.

American English is a difficult beast. Oscar Wilde said America and England are two different countries separated by a common language. But sometimes it seems that there really is less in common between our languages than we think. In fact I was just writing about some of those differences the other day.

Unlike many other British authors of the moment I choose not to point and laugh at our American cousins. The Americans do seem to be the one group that it is socially acceptable to be xenophobic about. But i did discover an interesting thing about Americans as a group which might sound like it was me taking the mickey a little bit. But I’m not it’s just interesting that’s all.

I don’t know if you’ve installed any software recently. But if you have then you’ll probably have had to choose the language that you want the software installed in. And recently, in the last few years there has been a change. In the old days you would get either English or a choice between American or British English (usually you would get the choice if the software included a dictionary of some kind).

But now in situations where it would before only offered English or another language we only get the American English choice. And this is because, it turns out, a number of American people don’t think that are speaking English. They think they are speaking American.

Recently while at a Vietnamese restaurant, I ordered noodles instead of rice with the dish that I wanted. The weird thing about this is that I didn’t know that I was ordering the wrong thing. The menu gave me no guidance. And in a restaurant which I often go they have the same dish and there I have ordered noodles and never been corrected. But when I was in this restaurant the waitresses gave me a look that told me I was crazy – it’s a look I’ve experienced before. And she suggested that I tried the rice with it because it would go much better. I continued with my order for two reasons. First because I’ve never been a massive fan of rice and second because I’ve had the combo of this dish and noodles before and I’ve very much enjoyed it.

But I could tell that in this particular case which my misbehavior had been truly revealed. I had clearly been a snob and not taken the food advice that I was given which is something I rarely do. My favorite thing is to go into a restaurant and ask them what they would recommend. And usually it is fantastic. So why different. It is because I had become used to what I wanted. But the same could be leveled at the person telling me off.

I was trying to think during the meal of the local cultural equivalent of what I had done and I can only imagine it is like ordering roast beef and bread, or something of that ilk. Maybe ordering Chicken and Yorkshire pudding although it’s becoming more acceptable these days. Something that would be so outrageous that the waitress in a country pub would tell me off.

But it led me to a thought which I think is one of the most interesting things in British cooking (although there are many things which are terrible) the most important good thing is that chefs here seem to be more willing to experiment against the grain – against the combinations that people have become comfortable with – than in most other countries. And perhaps this is because they have had no national reputation for so long that they have been forced into cooking a wide variety of imports. But the creative spark of cooking genius which does appear in Britain seems to take these bits and pieces and turn them to their advantage. And perhaps it is the way in which Britain has been accused of having no style that it really excels because what fantastic British food seems to me to be about is an ability to embrace the best of everything and put it next to something you wouldn’t expect would be fantastic but is. Because British chefs have more room than most to be able to say, “I’ve tried this, and you know what? It actually worked”.

…but I am to learn that one at least one of the big shifts in English language of the last twenty years the emoticon (smiley 🙂 has a specific inventor. His name is Scott Fahlman and he invented 🙂 and 😦 to point out which posts were jokes and which ones weren’t on a server, and this was back in 1982. Some people do talk about a guy called Kevin Mackenzie who suggested -) to be like a tongue sticking out the – is the middle of the tongue and he did that back in 1979 but most people say that it was Scott who did the business. I tend, if I do use emoticons to use 😉 the most as it seems the most friendly and also the most useful way of pointing out that something is tongue and cheek.

I went to a talk by the playwright Alan Aykbourne a few years ago [you may want to read about the whole week starting here, and in that talk he said that he despised the use of emoticons. He said that “if something was supposed to be funny then it should be funny enough to be identified as funny by the person reading it laughing at the end. They shouldn’t need a pointer at the end”. He effectively compared smileys to the laughter track on television.

He was wrong of course because, at least in my experience, they aren’t used to say “this is a joke” after a bona fide joke. They are used to say “this is a joke” after something which could be taken deadly seriously.

Now I should find out about that other shift in English Language: text speak. Oh wait I already did.

While in Verona recently I needed to open a fridge to get at some bottled water and to do that I needed to get some people to move out of the way so I said, “Mi Scusi” and a guy turned to his wife who was in the way and in a very broad Texas accent said, “I’m not sure what that guy said, but I think he wants you to move out of the way”.

Sometimes you do just have to get rid of stuff. Some people face this challenge with a kind of joyous abandon. Whereas I am one of those accumulators like a squirrel. I tend to never want to give up something that I’ve got. My friend Adrian is a thrower away of things. He just tends to want to have everything he needs not just all the stuff he used to need or just got given once. And in fact he’d probably argue quite successfully that he is not defined by the things that he owns but by the people that he loves and the opinions in his head.*

I would like to live like this in many ways. I do believe that people are more important that things but I also remember the day my model aeroplane that had one too few struts was sat on and destroyed and not only that I have the proof that it isn’t me my personality now imposing that preference on my boyhood self. I still have my diary entry from the day that it happened. It was so important to e that it was the only diary entry I made that year. So it was clearly very important even then. When I have to get rid of something I have to be of the opinion that I would be willing to set it on fire and that I would be fine with that. Otherwise I can’t deal with it. I really need to be sure that there is no chance that I’ll ever want to see it again. Because if I might and if it’s not on fire somewhere then I might have to seek it out and try and track it down. That’s the kind of thing I might do. I know, I know, but I’m a bit like that.

So maybe I should just set everything I have on fire? Maybe it would be a fresh start? The problem is that I can’t quite imagine still being me without having everything that I own. I mean I’m sure I would be, but I just can’t quite imagine it.

* I’d better check this at some point.