WE WANT FUN AND YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT [429]

I may be restating this for myself, but I use the phrase “dancing with the gatekeepers” because I dreamed that I recorded an album titled “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers”, singing “all they have are words” over and over again. My first article in 2016 defined “dancing with the gatekeepers” as “taking delight in the challenges life gives you, and having fun with those that think they have all the answers.”

I love that I wrote “have fun with”, rather than “make fun of”. Understanding Donald Trump’s assault on language, and on the general concept of “understanding”, in previous articles here was a more fun use of my time than simply insulting the man, despite having also called him “a man that makes gold look cheap, while looking and sounding like a drag queen version of his younger self”. All I have are words, and all he has are words, but Trump’s words are becoming more incendiary, and with his current run for President being described as an “openly authoritarian campaign”, those words can no longer be ignored, as much as I wish I could.

That has been the lesson of 2023 for me. I have ignored talking about anything remotely related to politics because it is not fun. Government infighting, culture wars, literal wars, ideological struggles, squabbles over the words used to identify ourselves, describing everything as “woke” – a word I haven’t discussed because it sounds more like a dog bark than a dog whistle, an easier word to throw than “political correctness” – and whether artificial intelligence could make everything meaningless anyway. Nothing works, nothing lasts, and nothing matters.

But all we have are words. That is the first lesson of 2024.

If words are incendiary, words can defuse them.

If words are cheap, then there’s enough to go around.

If words are meaningless, give them meaning, and avoid boiling the nature of meaning down to “because I said so”.

Ongoing wars, impending elections and competing agendas mean there is a lot at stake in 2024, and I can only be resilient amidst this precarity by remembering this world is also mine. If I ever record that album, I will sing “all they have are words” only then to say “all we have are words”. We are all in this together, so try to make fun with one another.

For me, the meaning of “dancing with the gatekeepers” remains the same – I think I just needed the reminder to have fun.

SAY THE WORD AND YOU’LL BE FREE [5]

For some weeks now, I have been obsessed by the “Polygon” puzzle, in the appropriately named “MindGames” section of The Times newspaper. The aim is simple enough – create as many words as possible from a ring of seven to nine letters, while always including a further letter in the centre of the ring.

This is simple enough, but the rules The Times impose on the puzzle drive me to distraction. Your words must be of a minimum length (usually three or four letters), and must be listed in the Oxford Concise English Dictionary. They must also not be capitalised words or proper nouns, plurals, comparatives or superlatives, adverbs ending in -ly, or be a conjugated verb – I can say I “hate” these rules, but I can’t say I “hated” them. Even worse, your results are given a rating. For example, if you find twelve words, that could be “average,” with 17 listed as “good,” 22 as “very good,” and 28 as “excellent.”

I know I have enough of a vocabulary to make myself understood, and nothing is more important to me than being understood, but these rules are enough to sow some doubt. If my final score breaks through the “average” level into “good,” that is a cause for celebration. On the other hand, there is an enormous difference between how many words you know, and the number you would actually use yourself.

Trying a test on the site testyourvocab.com, part of an American-Brazilian research project, reveals I have a vocabulary approximated at 32,200 words, within the adult average of 20,000-35,000 words. However, with the test asking how much fictional literature I read, and my answering “not much” (well, not when compared to non-fiction anyway), the message is that those who try to learn the meaning of one new word every day might be better served by reading a Stephen King novel instead, where the style and context of the language used is just as important.

Learning a new language exposes how many words are actually needed to be “fluent”. Basic English, developed in the 1930s as an aid for teaching English as a second language, has a beginner’s vocabulary of only 850 words, before expanding to a general list of 2,000 words (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Basic_English_combined_wordlist). Looking at this list, I can only see what I am not likely to use – “chauffeur,” “cognac,” “suchlike,” and what the hell is an “overshoe,” apart from the bottom of a trouser leg?

The only lessons to take from this exercise is to always have the right tools to say what you want to say, read as much as you can, and stop doing word puzzles in newspapers.

[In case anyone started the puzzle at the beginning of this article, here are the results. There are no ratings for how well you do, and the only rules I am imposing are a minimum of four letters, with no proper nouns: ceil, ceric, cering, cicely, cine, circle, cire, clergy, cleric, cline, cling, clinger, clingy, crine, cringe, cringle, crying, cycle, cycler, cycling, cynic, genic, glyceric, glycine, lice, lyric, nice, nicely, nicer, recycling, relic, rice.]