The old curmudgeon Dr Johnson started it, with his quips about lexicographers (Lexicographer: … a harmless drudge that busies himself in … detailing the signification of words) and the average Scotsman’s diet (Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people).

The equally cynical but witty Ambrose Bierce continued Doctor J’s tradition with the wonderful Devil’s Dictionary.

But probably the quirkiest of the dictionaries of alternative definitions is The Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. The book attempts to give meaning to words which hitherto were nothing more than place names, e.g., Mavis Enderby (a tiny village in Lincolnshire) which is defined as “the almost-completely-forgotten girlfriend from your distant past for whom your wife has a completely irrational jealousy and hatred”. One of my favourites is the listing for Spittal of Glenshee, which, according to Adams and Lloyd is “that which has to be cleaned off castle doors in the morning after a bagpipe-playing contest or vampire attack”. Cross-references to other words, and qualifications such as ‘archaic’ give DMOL the look and feel of an authentic dictionary.

We can all play the Liff game, though, and the book could have been ten times as long as it is, but for all that it’s a cracking read. So put down that collected works of Shakespeare and go and read this instead.

Those of a more serious disposition, however, will, during the above, have been shouting at their computers (much as one yells at those ill-informed Who Wants To Be A Millionaire contestants who persist in getting the basic hundred-quid questions wrong despite both phoning a friend and asking the audience). Our more discerning readers will have been screaming ‘But place names already have meanings!’ And it is true, many places are redolent with meaning and history. What you need, then, is Andrew M. Currie‘s Dictionary of British Place Names. Unfortunately, neither Mavis Enderby nor the Spittoon of Glenshee appear in Currie’s otherwise excellent little book. On the other hand, to pick a random example, the Northamptonshire town of Kettering does:

Kettering: Probably the settlement of ‘Cytra’s people’. Cytra (Old English personal name); ingas (Old English) ‘people of’. The name of this town northeast of Northampton was recorded as Cateringe in the Domesday Book.

Oh. And there was I thinking Kettering was something that happened at posh people’s soirees. I stand corrected. Clearly, Douglas Adams has got to me at last.

Regular readers of this blog (an endangered species, if ever there was one) have probably already figured this out, but for anyone who hasn’t, apparently I have no taste.

I have had to give up any claims to having even a smidgen of taste after reading Simon Garfield’s book, Just My Type. I was going to say it’s an excellent book, full of interesting anecdotes and stories about typographers and typefaces through the ages. But then I got to the last chapter, about what are supposedly the worst fonts in the world. And there I was, laughing away at the blatant examples of other people’s inappropriate uses of unsuitable fonts, when I came across a certain Brush Script…which I just happened to have used for my self-published slim vol, A Modicum of Daftitude.

In my defence, the book is a humorous anthology of some of my past output, so I was in fact using Brush Script, if you like, with irony. Oh, hang on though:

…if, in the twenty-first century, you ever even momentarily considered using Brush Script on any document at all, even in an ironic way, then you should immediately relinquish all claims to taste.

Hmm. That’s from the book itself; my bold, as they say. My bad too, it would seem.

Oh well, anyway, go read the book for yourself–even if it is only ninety-nine per cent excellent.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds of the World, by Mike Stockman, arrived just over a week ago: one of Shana’s surprise presents after my mentioning that I’m clueless when it comes to identifying the various pooches that pass our house on their morning walkies every day.

I am now much more knowledgeable about dogs. I can also recommend the book to anyone who’d like to invent better excuses for their misdemeanours. One example should suffice: imagine you’re late home from the local hostelry one evening and have, owing to your mullered state, managed to stagger through several hawthorn hedges while heading home via what you thought was the shortest way but which actually entailed ploughing through everyone’s muddy back garden en route to your house. You’d look a bit of a mess, wouldn’t you? Now just think how much more convincing you’d sound if, on finally reaching your destination, you called, ‘Sorry I’m late dear, but I just got savaged by a grand basset griffon venden!’ (It’s a dog of French origins, so be sure to give it plenty of the old Gallic accent.) How impressive would that be, huh?

Re. the above advice: whatever you do, don’t substitute a breed with an intrinsically funny name, e.g., the Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever. You’ll simply find yourself getting laughed at. And frankly, you’d deserve it.

As you will know if you read this blog Shana recently celebrated her Golden Jubilee. I thought she had described it as a millstone, but then I realised she’d called it a milestone. Aw heck, same diff.

Anyhoo, with a fitting sense of irony, not to mention upside-downiness, with a bit of back-to-frontology thrown in, Shana had the birthday but I got the present. Yes, Shana has spent some of her birthday money on buying me a book: 75 Years of the Times Crossword. It has a foreword by Inspector Morse’s father, Colin Dexter. And as well as loads of interesting anecdotes there are lots of fiendish Times crossword puzzles from the 1930s right up to 2005.

Tough as some of those crosswords may be, though, even if it takes me a decade to finish them all, this will still not be the book that has taken me the longest to read. That honour goes to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Twist took me approximately 35 years to read. (Yes, thirty-five years to read one book, although I did read a few others during that time.) I started Oliver Twist in about 1980, because one afternoon a week in English class was given over to everyone just getting their heads down and reading a book; something of a easy skive for the English teacher, now I think about it. My copy of Twist then belonged to my aunt and was one of those wonderful-smelling Olive classics with the faux leather bookjacket. Twist never really captured my imagination at the time and I read only the first few chapters. To this day I’ve never seen the film.

Recently, Shana acquired a few books from her mother, including the very same Olive classic edition of OT and last year I finally read it from start to finish. It’s not bad, but I much preferred Dik Browne’s Hagar the Horrible omnibus.

Leafing through a copy of Ralph Dutton’s The Victorian Home recently, I was intrigued to find a description of the rowdy and often violent behaviour of young aristocrats in early-Victorian London. Today we might call them ‘Hooray Henrys’, but in the 1830s their antics were known as ‘Tom and Jerryism’.

Until now, I had connected the names Tom and Jerry only with the cartoon cat and mouse. Certainly, the phrase doesn’t seem to be included in Geoffrey Pearson’s excellent Hooliganism: a history of respectable fears (Macmillan, 1983); the word ‘hooliganism’ itself, according to Pearson, didn’t appear in the language until as late as 1898.

Shana finally found more about where the original Tom and Jerry came from. Pierce Egan, a London journalist, wrote extensively about boxing, horseracing and the people who were big fans of these sports. In 1821 he began to publish a monthly journal, Life in London, illustrated by the successful satirist George Cruikshank. The first copy of Life in London had a somewhat cumbersome alternative title: the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis. (Blimey! Sod trying to order that at the newsagent’s. Er, never mind, I’ll just have the Woman’s Weekly instead, thanks.)

Life in London was a huge hit, spawning many imitations and even a French translation. Egan finally closed down the journal in 1928, but not before at least six plays were based on his characters. One of these was exported to America, launching the ‘Tom and Jerry’ craze there. The rest, as great cliché writers always say, is history.

And Tom and Jerry live on in the names of the two main characters in 1970s sitcom The Good Life, who were, of course Tom Good and Jerry Leadbetter. When Shana read that last bit, we both went “D’oh!” Shana, just for the record, being more au fait with the phraseology of social networking trends, also threw in a quick ‘facepalm’.